July split cleanly in two.
SMBcrm shipped 54 product updates, and most of them landed on one of two sides. On one side, the parts your customers touch: the portal they log into, the forms they fill out, the courses they take, the pages search engines and AI crawlers read. On the other, the automation layer, which spent the month learning to react to your own team instead of only to contacts.
Here is what mattered most in July, plus the smaller updates worth scanning.
The Client Portal Became One Product
For a long time the client-facing side of SMBcrm was a set of related screens rather than a single place. July rebuilt it.
Unified Client Portal for Courses and Communities brings the dashboard, courses, communities, billing, shared files, affiliates, and account settings into one experience on shared architecture. The dashboard now surfaces courses in progress, Continue Watching, community activity, billing, and files, and it loads in about 0.4 seconds and becomes interactive roughly a second sooner than before. Eligible public course and community pages are also search-friendly now, with crawlable URLs and page metadata, while private and gated content stays protected.
Communities Gets a Faster Client Portal Experience is the other half of that work. Members move between discussions and courses without leaving the portal, resume from the exact lesson they stopped on, and keep their progress when they switch. The discussion feed was redesigned around comments, replies, and attachments in line, six reactions, unified search across posts, comments, and members, and profile popovers that do not pull anyone off the page.
Three smaller updates fill in the gaps around it. Client Portal File Share Notifications tells a contact the moment an admin shares a file with them, on the web portal and the white-label mobile app, with the contact controlling those preferences themselves. Client Portal File Upload Notifications runs the same loop in reverse, notifying your staff in app when a contact uploads to Shared Documents. And Control Google Sign-In on Client Portal Pages lets admins show or hide the Google Sign-In button on login and sign-up, which matters if your privacy or data-handling policy says it should not be there.
If you sell courses, run a community, or share documents with clients, the Client Portal is worth logging into as a customer this month.
You Can Now Build an AI Agent by Describing It
Super Agents Beta is the headline AI launch. Agent Studio now offers two ways to build an agent: the visual Flow Agents builder, and Super Agents, where you describe what you want in plain English and skip drawing the workflow entirely. Prompts like “follow up with leads who haven’t replied in 3 days” or “tag new contacts as VIP when their deal value is over $10k” are the starting point.
The guardrails stay under your control. You pick from 420+ CRM skills and switch each one on or off per agent, attach a knowledge base so answers come from content you approved, set the triggers that make the agent run, and toggle web search and image generation individually. Agents have to be published before they can run at all, so nothing operates until you deliberately turn it on. Super Agents lives in Agent Studio, which is available on every plan and billed pay-per-use at model token rates, so there is no tier to unlock. Full details are on the Super Agents page.
The rest of July’s AI work went into tools that already existed. Prompt Optimizer Now Supports Conversations AI generates customer scenarios with personas and expected behaviors, sends real messages to your agent, waits for its actual replies, and scores each transcript so you can see what failed before a customer does. Conversation AI Channel Management, currently behind a Labs flag, removes the Primary Bot requirement and lets you assign bots per channel, account or number, and contact tag, with the more specific assignment winning. Targeted Edits in AI Builder scopes an instruction to specific actions and triggers rather than the whole workflow, which makes bulk copy and pipeline-stage changes safe to ask for. Email AI Suggests Countdown Timers for Campaigns spots deadline-driven content and offers a live timer during template creation. And Ask AI Attachments Arrive in the SMBcrm Mobile App lets you attach a screenshot, PDF, CSV, or Media Library file from your phone and ask about it instead of retyping what it says.
Workflows Started Watching Your Team, Not Just Your Customers
Automation has always reacted to what contacts do. In July it learned to react to what your people do.
Three updates work together here. User Replied Workflow Trigger fires when a team member replies to a contact on a supported channel, so you can tag, assign, or notify off a human response. Wait Steps Can Pause Until a Team Member Replies adds User Replied as a wait condition with an optional timeout, which is the missing piece for response-time tracking: continue immediately when someone answers, escalate when nobody does. Goal Action Now Supports User Replies closes the loop by letting a scheduled sequence stop the moment a real person picks the conversation up.
The rest of the automation work expanded what workflows can reach:
- Associate CRM Records Automatically in Workflows finds records by field filters, uses merge fields as filter values, and applies an association label across objects.
- Email Actions for Company and Custom Object Workflows lifts the old restriction that email actions only ran in contact workflows.
- AI Studio Form Submissions Can Trigger Workflows adds a dedicated trigger for connected AI Studio forms while existing external tracking keeps running.
- Community Workflow Triggers for Group Activity adds four triggers so group activity can drive moderation, alerts, and event follow-up.
- Jira Workflow Triggers and Actions brings two triggers and eleven actions for issue lifecycle work.
- Todoist Triggers and Actions for Workflows reacts to task activity and manages tasks, projects, comments, and collaborators.
If your team measures how fast it responds, the new reply triggers in Automation are the part to look at first.
Forms, Surveys, and Quizzes Got Harder to Abandon
Save Progress for Forms, Surveys, and Quizzes is the practical one. Turn on Save exit confirmation and a respondent who closes the tab, refreshes, or wanders off gets a Resume Progress modal when they come back, styled to match the branding you already set. It applies to multi-step forms, surveys, and quizzes on desktop and mobile, and existing ones stay exactly as they are until you enable it.
Generate Submission PDFs for Forms, Surveys, and Quizzes turns each new submission into a formatted PDF with every question, response, timestamp, and contact detail, stored against the submitting contact. Improved Product Sales in Forms and Surveys puts payment setup in one panel: connect a provider, pick products, and enable price levels and variants without leaving the builder. And Forms, Surveys, and Quizzes Submission Page Updated rebuilt the submission page on a modern framework with no change to how anyone submits, which is the sort of update you only notice later.
Multi-step lead capture forms lose people between screens, so save-and-resume is the one to test first.
Your Pages Started Explaining Themselves to AI
Three updates arrived within a week of each other and point the same direction.
Manage llms.txt Files for Funnels and Websites lets you edit per-domain llms.txt content in the Edit Domain modal and serves a Markdown site map at the root of each connected domain, which is what audits like Google PageSpeed’s Agentic Browsing check look for. Auto-Generated Schema for Published Pages fills in structured data at publish time for any page that does not already have it, running in the background so publishing is not delayed and never overwriting schema you wrote yourself. Inline Schema Markup Validation in JSON View puts errors next to the exact line causing them, with plain-language explanations on hover and support for multi-schema @graph blocks.
Taken together, that is structured data and AI-readable guidance for Websites & Funnels without a developer in the loop.
Courses Got Reporting, Credentials Got Rules
Rebuilt Course Progress Analytics for Courses replaces the old reporting with a filtered dashboard covering completion rate, average progress, and time to complete, plus period-over-period comparisons, an Enrolled to Started to Completed funnel, a member-level progress table, and CSV export with email delivery for larger reports. The funnel is the part worth opening first, since it shows where learners stop.
Course Tags Improve Course Library Discovery adds language, difficulty, and topic tags that show on course cards and filter the library. On the credential side, Custom Expiration Settings for Certificates lets a certificate never expire, expire on a fixed date, or expire 3, 6, 9, 12, 24, or 36 months after issue with reminders beforehand, which is what anyone issuing compliance or licensing credentials has been working around. Layers Panel Added to Certificate and Badge Builder brings reordering, locking, and invalid-placeholder warnings to the builder, and Separate Email Templates for Welcome Badges splits enrollment welcome badges from standard badge notifications so you can write them differently.
If you sell courses or issue credentials through Memberships & Education, July gave you both better numbers and better controls.
Booking and Payments Handled More of the Awkward Cases
Services Payments Add Deposit or Full Payment Choice gives customers a Pay Deposit or Pay Full Amount option at checkout, with deposit math corrected for discounts, add-ons, and taxes. It also means Buy Now, Pay Later providers can finance the whole booking rather than just the deposit.
Edit Paid and Unpaid Service Bookings removes the cancel-and-rebook dance: change services, add-ons, staff, or coupons on an existing appointment and let the order and payment records follow. Redeem Gift Cards in Offline Payment Flows applies a gift card balance when your team records a payment, charges a card, or creates a subscription, though future-dated subscriptions are not supported yet.
Rentals picked up two notification channels: SMS Notifications Now Available for Rentals and WhatsApp Notifications for Rental Calendars both cover unconfirmed, booked, canceled, rescheduled, reminder, and follow-up events, with separate templates for the contact and the business and a test send before you switch anything on.
Two scheduling updates round it out. Buffer Time Now Appears in Day and Week Calendars draws the transition time around appointments instead of applying it invisibly, and Expanded Permissions for Scheduling Modules extends the Meetings permission model across Services and Rentals, so admins control setup, appointments, categories, resources, and settings the same way in all three.
The Builders Got a Round of Polish
Buttons can move now. Button Hover Animations in the Page Builder adds 21 effects grouped into six categories including scale, rotation, movement, and background, with live previews, sidebar controls, and safer behavior on touch devices, and Button Hover Animations for Websites and Funnels covers the same effects from the Animation tab in the Websites & Funnels builder. No custom CSS in either.
Entrance Animations for Page Layout Blocks extends entrance animations from individual elements to sections, rows, and columns, sequencing them by layout hierarchy as visitors scroll so you are not hand-timing reveals. Refreshed Store Builder Placeholder Images swaps in cleaner illustration placeholders when no product or collection is connected, and Dashboards and Reports Get a More Consistent UI aligns headers, navigation, panels, and every widget type across reporting screens without touching your data.
Other July Updates Worth Scanning
Advertising. Opportunity Score for Meta Campaigns in Ad Manager scores campaign readiness on the Review screen before you publish and links straight to the settings that need attention. Custom Values in Ad Manager Ad Copy reuses saved business details like service areas, offers, and support emails in Meta, Google, and LinkedIn copy, with a resolved preview before publishing. Both are useful if you run repeatable campaigns from Advertising.
Social and reputation. Threads Comment Management in Social Planner brings Threads comments into the same inbox as your other channels, and Post Sync Beta for LinkedIn and TikTok imports published posts and videos with engagement refreshed every 24 hours, so your publishing history and your calendar finally match. On Reputation, Set Default Senders for Review Requests locks in which number and email address review requests come from across manual sends, campaigns, and workflows, and Smarter Drip Campaigns with Review Date Range Targeting swaps fixed review age for an exact date range, shows how many reviews match before you launch, and blocks empty campaigns.
API access. PIT Token Limit Increased to 20 per Account raises the old limit of 5, which means fewer services sharing one token.
Templates. Three drops this month: new website, ad, and workflow templates on the 5th, another marketing set covering LinkedIn campaigns and lead follow-up on the 11th, and a third batch spanning several industries on the 25th.
What to Try First
If you only have time for a few July updates, start here:
- Log into your own Client Portal the way a customer does and walk the new dashboard, Courses, and Communities. It is the biggest visible change of the month.
- Build one Super Agent from a plain-English prompt with a deliberately narrow skill list, then test it before you publish it.
- If response time matters to your team, pair the User Replied trigger with a wait step and a timeout to build a real escalation path.
- If you run any form longer than one screen, turn on Save exit confirmation and watch what happens to completions.
- If you care about showing up in AI answers, add
llms.txtto your domain and switch on auto-generate schema.
Where June was about fewer reasons to leave the platform, July was about the two ends of it. The portal your customers log into is now one product instead of several related screens, and the automation running behind it can tell the difference between a teammate replying and nobody replying at all. If you sell to people who sign in, this was a bigger month than the update count suggests.
Ready to Put July’s Updates to Work?
SMBcrm brings CRM, automation, AI, booking, payments, conversations, and customer follow-up into one small business platform.
