Cloze today is rolling out a new application aimed at business professionals. It promises a smarter view of your contacts by allowing you to automatically track email messages, phone calls, meetings, notes, social updates and more in a single application on iPhone, iPad and the web. The idea is to offer individuals whose business requires them to maintain relationships an easy way to receive reminders to reach out to those most important to them, before those relationships fade.
The company, as you may recall, had earlier introduced an email management app that worked to sort emails for you, based on the priority of your relationship with the email senders. That app was targeted more at consumers, however.
According to Cloze co-founder Alex Coté, what the company learned over the past couple of years since the original app’s debut was that competing with consumer-facing mobile email apps shouldn’t be its core focus.
“Relationship management was a category that we set out from the beginning to work on,” he says. “It’s something that [Cloze co-founder Dan Foody] and I had, which is why we raised money to solve this problem. Information is really spread all over the place – on emails, on social media, in CRM systems, in phone calls, in notes…how do you get it all together,” he asks.
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With the relaunch of Cloze, the app is moving away from being an email client of sorts, and instead is meant to function more as a tool that lets you track your contacts and your interactions in a variety of ways.
It automatically pulls in information from your email accounts, calendar, social media, phone call logs and notes – including those stored on Evernote, as well as documents exchanged and interactions on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Now a freemium application, the free version limits users to three email accounts, and essentially offers the basic “relationship prioritization” functionality of Cloze’s prior version.
But paying users will have access to a host of other features, too, including phone-call logging, unlimited email account support, contextual meeting info and updates, document tracking, Evernote integration, business card scanning, stay-in-touch and follow-up reminders, search and filtering features and more.
Cloze also offers an “Agenda” view where you can see all your meetings, reminders, follow-ups and alerts in one place, and it shoots out a daily briefing email to keep you on top of your upcoming day and to alert you to things you may have missed from the day before.
The company has been testing the premium version for several months with a number of testers, and says that early feedback has been promising. Its users, who include professionals like real estate agents, independent lawyers, wealth managers and other small business owners, were quickly converting from the free to paid version during trials. The company has around 300,000 users who have been using the free version of Cloze, but isn’t offering data on paid users at this point since the app is only becoming available to the public today.
Starting now, Cloze users can subscribe to the premium features in the new app for $19.99 per user per month or $159.99 per user per year – pricing which decidedly moves Cloze out of the consumer space.
Cloze has only raised $1.2 million in seed funding to date, having relied on its other business, a tool for team sharing called Circulate.it, for revenue. That service starts at $9 per month and goes up to $99 per month on the high end, where the company works with several bigger clients including banks and PR firms, for example.
Explains Coté, the company eventually sees the two products coming together a bit more, as Circulate.it could serve as a way to introduce Cloze into the larger enterprise. In fact, Cloze is already thinking about a “team” version of the new Cloze service that would be aimed at bigger businesses and include things like Salesforce integration, he says.
Cloze is available now on iTunes.