What if you could automate your relationships?
What if you could get reminders to keep in touch with the people who matter to you that were so perfectly timed that any time you send an email or a text, people said, “Oh! I was just thinking about you. I’m so glad you reached out!”
The problem is that keeping in touch with people takes intentionality, organization, and a lot of effort!
That’s where Cloze comes in. Cloze is a personal relationship manager, a type of CRM that’s designed to help you keep in touch with your personal and business relationships easily. Where it’s best, though, is combing through your entire personal and professional contact history with everyone you’ve ever talked to over email, text, and phone, and figuring out the people you most need to talk with today.
In this review of Cloze CRM, I’m going to take a look at how this personal CRM might help you automate your personal and business relationships. We’ll look at its main features, including AI-driven automatic reminders, unified contact management, and huge potential for integrations, as well as the pros and cons of the tool, pricing, and whether it might be a good fit for you.
If you’ve ever wanted to bring automation to your relationship and contact management system, and you’re wondering if Cloze can help, this review is for you.
Why Automate Your Personal Relationships
The best things in life come through relationships.
From a career and success standpoint, all businesses are “relationship business.” Business relationships can help you find opportunities, take advantage of new practices, and even help you pivot to new careers. The most wealthy people are often the most connected people.
And of course, relationships are important for our personal lives as well.
Personal relationships battle loneliness and are linked closely to health. Research has consistently shown that strong social connections contribute to our well-being, both mentally and physically. Loneliness can even lead to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, depression, and even a weakened immune system.
And yet, in the midst of our busy lives, it can be so easy to get overwhelmed and disconnected from the people who matter most to us.
That’s where automation can help.
Automation can keep you connected without the stress of trying to remember every detail.
For me, here’s what I need automation for:
- Automatic reminders. I’m really good at focusing on one thing at a time, whether a project or my overall network or a specific set of relationships. But once I’ve moved on to the next thing, it’s easy for me to drop the ball. I need reminders that ping me to connect with the right people at the right time to keep me from becoming totally isolated when I get focused on a new project.
- Complete history. I’m not very good following up on a project I talked about with potential client or remembering my latest conversation with people. I need something that can keep track of all those conversations and remind me when I’m about to reach out.
- Unified contacts. Keeping your contact list updated is hard! People change email addresses and phone numbers. I can’t tell you how many duplicate contacts I have! An automation that can keep everything organized across devices and platforms will save so much time!
- Avoid the awkward. All this comes together to give you confidence to keep in touch with the people who matter and even reach out to the people you’ve lost touch with. When you drop the ball or get busy for a season, it can be really hard to get back in touch with people. In fact, a recent study said that most people will avoid reaching back out to old friends, even if they believe that the friend would actually like to hear from them and they have the exact thing to say because they find it awkward. A good automation can be the push you need to overcome the awkward.
We’ve created some of this from scratch, with our birthday reminder automation and keep in touch automation. But what if there was a tool that did all of that and more?
Ok, so now that we know why you might want to automate your relationships, the question is will Cloze help?
What is Cloze CRM?
Cloze CRM is a relationship management tool that helps you automate your personal and professional relationships by providing automatic contact reminders based on their AI-driven algorithm, creating a complete contact history of all of your communications across years and decades, and aggregating all your contacts into a unified contact directory.
Cloze is a little different than a typical CRM like Hubspot, which is primarily for business relationships across a whole organization. This is a personal relationship manager, helping you automate your personal and business relationships across organizations, projects, and even careers.
How Cloze Works
Cloze looks at your complete contact history across email, text messages, and even tools like Slack, collecting them all in one place so you have a complete history of all of your relationships, from personal to professional.
It also creates a unified contact list, avoiding the problem of duplicates and making sure you never lose a contact. You can then export and sync contacts with our phone or Gmail so everything stays consistent across platforms.
Best of all, then, Cloze’s AI figures out who you’re closest to and creates daily, automatic reminders to reach out to the people it thinks you need to keep in touch with at the right frequency. This is probably its best feature, giving you a manageable daily checklist of five to ten people who are important to you and to reach out to.
Cloze’s AI automatically assigns all of your contacts a score.
It even has a basic email app so you can reach out to those contacts right in the app.
Finally, it keeps an eye on your inbox to make sure you’re responding to the most important messages from your most important contacts.
Pretty good right? All of this combine into a truly easy, automated system that takes SO much of the work out of keeping up with your relationships.
Here are some of the other core features of Cloze that are useful:
Agenda View
The Agenda View gives you a quick overview of your daily tasks, including follow-ups, reminders, scheduled communications, birthdays and bookmarks. It’s driven by their AI algorithm, and lets you quickly and easily keep up with your most important relationship tasks each day.
Cloze CRM’s Agenda View (Names are omitted with red)
Complete Contact Management System
Cloze acts as your unified contact center, dealing with missing or duplicate entries and automatically updating contact details across linked apps. It syncs with your phone’s call logs and messaging apps, as well as your email, making sure you have a holistic view of all of your contacts.
Complete History of Your Relationship Over Email and Phone
Cloze records your interaction history with each contact—every call, email, direct message—giving you a detailed overview of each relationship so you never forget.
Template Emails
Pre-designed template emails can help you save time while also ensuring a deeply personalized response for each relationship.
AI Email Ghostwriter
For times when you struggle drafting the perfect message, Cloze’s AI Email Ghostwriter can suggest the right thing to say based on the context. (This is only on the top plan, which I’m not currently using.)
Connect Notes to Contacts with Evernote
I don’t use Evernote anymore, but if you’re an Evernote user, Cloze lets you link your meeting notes or ideas directly to your contacts within the CRM, helping you keep all relevant information tied to the right people in one easily accessible place.
Activity Around Projects View
You can also track all activities related to specific projects, including emails, calls, and tasks. This isn’t something I’ve used much, but it could make Cloze a pretty good tool for project management on top of everything else.
Team Collaboration
Cloze also works with your entire team, allowing teammates to share contacts, notes, and files.
14-Day Free Trial
Diving into Cloze is risk-free with its 14-day no-obligation free trial. This period will allow you to figure out whether it will actually help you automate your relationships.
Pros and Cons of Cloze
Cloze is certainly not a perfect tool, but for a simple relationships automation app, it’s pretty good! Here are the pros and cons of using Cloze as I see them.
Pros:
- Easy to get started. I was up and running with Cloze within a few minutes of signing up.
- Unified Contact Management: Consolidates email, phone, and text contacts across devices and platforms.
- AI Contact Scoring: Immediately identifies and prioritizes the people who are closest to you.
- Reminders: Automatic prompts to reconnect with essential people.
- Integrations: You can integrate not just with the usual email platforms and your phone, but also with other tools like Airtable, Zapier, Slack, and more!
Cons:
- Phone Setup: I had some clunkiness with the phone/text synchronization, but after I got it working, it’s been great!
- Interface Quirks: The Mac app has a few quirks, like when you open a menu you can’t click out of it, and a complete lack of an undo button. These can be pretty annoying issues. The iOS and web app seem fine though.
- Cost. To get the most of the tool. you really need the Gold plan, which isn’t cheap at $29/mo. Still, considering everything the tool can do, it’s a pretty good deal compared to other platforms.
Cost of Cloze CRM
Here’s the three pricing plans for Cloze:
- Cloze Pro, their entry-level plan, is $17 per month per user
- Business Silver is $21 per month per use and includes team collaboration and project tracking
- I recommend Cloze Business Gold, though, which is $29 per month per user, and includes text message syncing and Zapier/Make integrations.
Integrations with Cloze
Wondering how to incorporate more integrations into Cloze? Here are some ideas:
- Email Newsletter: If you use an email marketing service like MailChimp or Convertkit, you can synchronize subscriber lists with Cloze contacts making sure giving you a chance to make your email marketing even more personalized.
- WordPress Comments: What if you used Cloze to follow up with and connect with your website visitors and readers. By connecting Cloze to your WordPress account, you can turn comments into action items within Cloze while keeping a complete history of interactions with readers.
- Project Management: You could also link Cloze with project management tools such as Monday or Trello.
- Sales Pipeline: For sales teams, integrating Cloze with pipeline management software like Pipedrive or Salesforce can simplify tracking deal progress and automating follow-up reminders for key people.
Is Cloze Personal CRM Worth It?
For me, keeping in touch with people is something I struggle with. Cloze automates the entire process, making follow up easy with a complete contact history as well as timed, sustainable reminders.
It’s not for everyone, but for busy professionals who want be better at staying in relationship longer, it’s a pretty amazing tool!