Clara understands your inner circle

Today we’re releasing a new feature that helps Clara work more seamlessly with your key partners, colleagues, and relationships: Pre-approved contacts. With pre-approved contacts, Clara understands who you work with most frequently and acts on your behalf accordingly.

How does it work?

You can add either an individual person’s email address, or all the email addresses from a domain (like @claralabs.com) to your pre-approved contacts.

There are two levels of access: initiate meeting and schedule directly.

• Initiate Meeting: People on this list can loop in your Clara, and have Clara schedule a meeting for you with anybody else.
• Schedule Directly: People on this list can reach out directly to your Clara and schedule a meeting with you. No emails in your inbox!

As a default, anyone on your custom Google Apps domain has Initiate Meeting access to your Clara. In all other cases, Clara will ask for your explicit permission before moving forward with the meeting. Here are a few examples of this feature in action:

Vignette 1: Working with an external recruiting (or PR) firm

John’s startup recently partnered with recruiting firm “Synergy Talent” to introduce him to new engineering candidates. Ralph, his account manager at Synergy, started sending him a barrage of emails with new candidates to interview. Since John uses Clara, Ralph from Synergy can get those candidate interviews scheduled through Clara directly, without needing John’s sign-off on every candidate. All John did was tell his Clara:

Hey Clara, ralph@synergy-talent.com can initiate meetings on my behalf, no need to ask me for permission each time.

Vignette 2: Your most important clients

Kaden is a Clara user, and a lawyer at a mid-sized law firm. On any given week, he’s working with 30 active clients. Kaden values the relationship and wants to answer their questions quickly, but is in meetings most of the day. For his 3 most important clients, he’d like to be extra accommodating. So when they email Clara at midnight hoping to schedule a call for early the next morning, Clara will go ahead and make it happen. All Kaden had to do was tell Clara:

Hey Clara, alyssa@example-customer.com, frank@second-example.com, and elyss@important-customer.com can reach out to you directly to schedule meetings with me, no need to ask me for permission each time — they’re important customers of mine.

Vignette 3: The quick intro within your team

Jennifer is an investment partner at Agency Fund, and uses Clara. Her colleague Alex was introduced to a potential investment and wants to set an introductory call with Jennifer ASAP. Jennifer is really busy; the time it would take her to respond could delay the call, and cause them to miss the deal. Because anyone on her company’s domain can initiate a meeting with Clara on Jennifer’s behalf, Alex loops in Clara and has the call scheduled for later that day.

Feedback

We’re always excited to hear feedback on Clara and generally get more information about your workflow, your problems, and ideas: just send us a quick note at feedback@claralabs.com.

Stay tuned for a number of feature launches just like this one over the coming months! If you’d like to try Clara, you can start a free fourteen day trial today!