Product Updates

October Improvements

What’s New‍

• Customers that have an approved A2P 10DLC campaign will automatically get SHAKEN/STIR Level A attestation.
• We updated the Call Assistant transcript UI. There is now a different colored icon for each user and an updated transcript layout, making it easier to read and scan

• If a new contact is included in an email thread within a Lead, you can add that person as a contact in one click. 

• We've added the ability to easily copy and share a lead page.

• We updated our mobile app:

• We launched a new version on Zapier that improves all actions related to Notes.
• We updated how thumbnails show for attachments and improved the spacing for Activities in the Lead Activities list.
• We changed how replies to text messages work. Now, when you reply, Close will automatically use the same phone number that sent the original SMS, as long as that number is still available.
• When you receive a voicemail and get an email notification from Close, the link in that email will now take you to the Lead with the voicemail filtered in the activity feed.
• If an email fails to send for any reason, you can now edit the email and attempt to re-send it.

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Next Lead/Contact Button

We've just released the Next Lead/Contact button!

When you open a Lead from a lead search, contact search, or Smart View, you’ll now see a button at the bottom-right corner.

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You can use that (or `j` and `k` keyboard shortcuts) to navigate the list.

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Call Assistant

We just launched a brand new AI-powered Call Assistant. When enabled, you'll gain new functionality on any calls recorded in Close.

Transcriptions

Call Assistant will automatically transcribe all of your recorded calls made through Close.

• Know exactly what was said in calls without painstaking review
• Skim the transcript, and jump to points in the conversation just by clicking on text
• Speaker labels help you understand who said what on the call

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• You can also search through any transcriptions. At the transcription level, find instances of any words being spoken, or use Lead search to find all leads that have transcriptions containing specific words or phrases.

Summaries

• Call Assistant will generate a short summary after each call based on the transcript.
• Get the gist of each conversation without having to rely on notes. Easily review you or your team’s previous interactions with a customer much faster than previously possible.

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We're celebrating with a free access period! 🎉

Close customers can enjoy free access to Call Assistant through November 8th.

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September Improvements and Bug Fix Roundup

What’s New

• We updated the Lead Page SMS editor
  

• We display the Contact name on the Opportunity card in the Pipeline report.

• We updated the look and feel of a few Lead Activities (Opportunity Status Change, Task Completed, Custom Activities, and Lead changes).

• We added a thread count badge to the Inbox items.
• We added animations to upcoming activities, and modals across the app.
• We updated SMS, Lead, Note, and History icons.

Workflow Schedule and Pausing Customization

We're launched two new customization capabilities for Workflows.

Schedules

You can now set your own Workflow communication schedule on each Workflow in Close. Simply select the days of the week you're hoping to send, along with your hourly sending window.

Note: This schedule only applies to communication steps (e.g. calls, emails, SMS). Any tasks or instant actions will process outside of this window.

Pausing

You now have more control over what pauses your Workflows. Optionally disable automated pausing when receiving incoming calls, emails, or SMS if you would rather your Workflow continue to run.

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Close ChatGPT Plugin

We developed the Close ChatGPT plugin. You can now connect ChatGPT and your Close data - which means using the power of Generative AI to write emails, provide valuable prospect insights, segment leads and contacts, and analyze reporting data.

Find out more about the best use cases in our blog article.

Meetings in Inbox

We've added a new Meetings section to your Inbox experience in Close.

This section allows you to:

• Easily see a daily view of your upcoming or past meetings.
• Navigate to future or previous days to see what's coming up or review past meetings.
• Go to the Lead directly by clicking on the meeting.

Automated Triggers + Workflows

• We've renamed Sequences to Workflows, and added the ability for you to automatically trigger your Workflows.

• Any Workflow can now have automated triggering criteria. Triggering criteria can include most fields related to the Lead and associated Contacts.

• The trigger will fire any time a lead is created or updated to match your specified filters. Leads that were already matching your specified criteria will not trigger the workflow.
• Only the primary contact on the lead will be enrolled when the trigger fires.
• By default, the Workflow creator will be set as the assigned User for any Workflow steps. Use Send As settings for more advanced sending options.
• For more details, check out our Help Center guide.

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August Improvements and Bug Fix Roundup

What’s New

• When editing a sequence, you can add new steps between any existing steps.

• You can now record your meeting notes directly in Close on any meeting activity

• The options for snoozing items were updated to include only the most common choices and a simpler date picker.
• Sending an SMS message to a US phone number requires an approved A2P 10DLC registration now. For more information, check out this help article.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that caused the "More" menu in templates not to show.
• Fixed an issue with the Activity Feed filter that was causing meetings not to show up when users filtered by contacts.
• When you reach your custom fields limit, you will now be shown a helpful error message.
• Fixed an issue where changing the “From” field in an email draft would clear the subject field in certain cases.

Mobile App - Calling Improvements & Reporting

We added mobile calling settings, where you can define your default calling options, along with Caller ID selection and Call Recording options.

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We also added the most popular Reports - Activity Overview, Activity Comparison, and Opportunity Funnel.

Task Steps in Sequences

You can now add task steps to your sequences. Task steps can represent a few different concepts for teams:

• Pre-communication flows (e.g. Prospect the lead prior to them receiving calls/emails/sms)
• Communication outside of Close (e.g. Connect/message on LinkedIn)
• General operations actions (e.g. Create a “new customer” task for a CSM when leads move into customer status)
• Post-sequence flows (e.g. Decide what to do with the lead if they don’t respond to a sequence)

Tasks can be required or optional

• Required - the sequence won’t progress until the task is completed
• Optional - the sequence will create the task and move to the next step immediately

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July Improvements and Bug Fix Roundup

What’s New

• You can now duplicate a pipeline.

• We made the actions toolbar more compact on smaller screens and hidden until you make a selection.

• You can now access phone settings in the mobile app via the + Add Activity button.

• The Roles & Permissions page now supports browser shortcuts.
• To provide a better reporting experience on a mobile device saved reports have been moved to the report title dropdown.

• Action buttons have been moved into the “More …” menu.

• Reporting filters are now hidden by default and horizontally scrollable on all devices.

Bug Fixes

• You can now delete a role when only inactive or invited users are assigned to it.
• We now correctly display video call links for meetings and collect Zoom cloud recordings if the user has a Zoom integration.
• We fixed an issue where event organizers were not included when your calendar was synced from Microsoft 365.
• We fixed an issue where menu bar items would be hidden from view at some screen widths on the Pipeline and Sales Funnel screens.

June Improvements and Bug Fix Roundup

What’s New

• For customers who want to integrate Custom Activities with third-party integrations, we added the ability to copy custom activity IDs.

• Invites now expire 1 week after being sent.
• There is a new limit of 300 opportunities per lead.
• The "Send Later" action has been re-designed making it easier to pick a date and time from any device.

• In the Close API we improved Lead address validation for Canadian provinces/territories. This matches our current validation for US states (“British Columbia” → “BC”).
• In Zapier we updated the following to support both plain and new HTML (rich text) notes: new note trigger, create note action, and update note action.

• Also in Zapier "New or Updated" Custom Activity triggers were superseded by the simpler "Published Activity". This will trigger only when an activity is published (saved) in your Close app. Existing Zaps using a New or Updated Custom Activity trigger will continue working as-is. In the case of a more complex trigger scenario, you can use the New Event trigger.
• We released a new version of our Zapier integration that uses OAuth authentication which replaces API keys for all new Zaps. Existing Zaps that are using API keys will continue working as-is. For more information, you can check out our Zapier help article.

Bug Fixes

• Lead and Contact SMS buttons will now be disabled if the only number on the Lead or Contact is blocked or if there are no phone numbers.

Lead Visibility Permissions

We've just introduced the ability to restrict which leads each member of your team can view in Close.

• By default, all default and custom roles within Close have Lead Visibility set to `All Leads`
• For new and existing custom roles, you can now toggle this setting to be `Limited Visibility`.
• Once the role is set to Limited Visibility, you will decide which User Type custom fields on the Lead should control visibility for that role.
• Each Role can have up to three (3) fields controlling the Roles' visibility, and each Role can use a different set of fields (e.g. your Sales role can use the Sales Rep field and Success can use a Success Rep field).
• Optionally, teams can decide whether Users in the Role can see unassigned leads (e.g. leads with no one in the Lead Owner field)

A few quick additional notes about Lead Visibility:

• Users with Limited Visibility will only see data in Close that is related to Leads they're able to view. This applies to Leads, Contacts, Opportunities, and Reports tabs, as well as Search.
• Users with Limited Visibility cannot view another User's Inbox.
• Admins and any User in a role with the Manage Organization permission will also be able to see Visibility Summary on each lead in case you need to quick see who is able to view any particular lead.

For more details and a setup walkthrough, check out our help center article here.

OAuth Integration Support

Close now supports integrations using OAuth 2.0. To integrate with Close using OAuth check out our documentation here.

Developers can now:

• Create a private OAuth app for your organization
• Request to publish your app publicly for all Close users

Users can now:

• Authorize integrations built using OAuth to access your data in Close
• Revoke access for OAuth apps that have access to your data
• Authorize the new Zapier OAuth app with Close

Sequence Improvements: Lead Assignment and Send As

We've just introduced a few brand new features to help your teams scale with Sequences.

Assign User Steps

You can now automate lead assignment logic in sequences via our Assign User step.

• You can specify which field should be assigned when the step runs
• The step supports both overwriting an existing user or only assigning if the field is empty, as well as unassigning the User if desired
• Once you’ve selected your action, you can decide whether to assign a specific User or select a User at random
• When selecting a User at random, you can select All users, or one or multiple Groups based on your needs.

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Keep in mind that additional steps (e.g. emails, calls, sms) following the Assign User step are optional.

Sequence Send As

When creating Sequences, you will now be able to specify who the sender of each Sequence step should be.

‍Your options will include both static and dynamic selections:

• Enrolling User - The current experience. The step will send from the User subscribing the Contact to the Sequence.
• Specific User - The step will always send from the same User. Think “Email from the CEO as the 3rd email” sequences.
• Assigned User - The step will send from the User assigned to the Lead via a User Custom Field.

This will allow you to create a single sequence that can be used across team members more easily.

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Close iOS App - Outbound Calling

We’ve released Outbound Calling in our iOS Mobile App. Making calls through the app using your Close number is now possible.

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In Q3, we expect to support inbound calling. You can download the Close app using this link on mobile.

May Improvements and Bug Fix Roundup

What’s New

• International SMS - German phone numbers can now send & receive SMS. Additionally, SMS messages from countries we don’t support now show up in your Inbox/Activity Feed (you still cannot reply).
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• We have adjusted our date calculations so reporting on future events accounts for the entire selected period. This change mostly impacts Meetings because they are created for future days. Now all of your meetings for the week will show up, even if they are in the future.
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• You can now access Smart Views from the Leads and Contacts pages by clicking on the page title.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an issue where the “Change Phone Number” modal appeared unresponsive when you tried to change your primary phone number.

Close iOS App

The day has come, and we’ve released version one of our iOS mobile app. You can download it from the App Store and use Close while on the go.

Check out our massively improved mobile experience, better navigation, and quick access to your Inbox, Lead, Contacts, and Pipeline report.

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Later in 2023, we’re planning the following updates:

• Mobile VoIP calling
• Improved Email, SMS, and Notes editor
• Android support
• Push notifications

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April Improvements and Bug Fix Roundup

What’s New

• Lead Detail Updates - We have a new, “About” section. Merge, Delete buttons and Integration Links were moved into the dropdown menu next to the lead name.

• Lead Activity Updates - The “Done” and “Snooze” buttons have been moved above the inbox feed, fixing an issue where they could obstruct other buttons.

• Account Menu Updates - We've added a "What’s New" section to the menu, making it easier to see the latest features and improvements.

• We are blocking outbound SMSes when delivery is not possible. Phone numbers are added to the SMS blacklist if the destination is unknown, a landline or an unreachable carrier.