In case you missed it, here’s a recap of all the exciting new features from the last few months 🚢 Subscribe to product updates and announcements so you don’t miss a thing!
🇫🇷 Front Chat now supports French
Front Chat (including AI Answers) is now available in French 🇫🇷
You can set a chat widget to be in French in your chat settings and all text will be automatically translated into French. With this update, chatbots now also support French so the full experience will be consistent.
Additionally, the French version of AI Answers is now in open beta. AI Answers instantly resolves chat inquiries with responses written by AI, sourced from your knowledge base. This lets your team save time on simple issues and deliver faster resolutions to customers.
Learn more about Front Chat and AI Answers.
📚 Power suggested replies with an internal knowledge base
You can now select an internal Front knowledge base as the source for suggested replies.
With suggested replies, your team can:
- Let AI craft the right response to save time on repetitive inquiries.
- Quickly validate the suggested draft with easy access to the article AI used as a source.
- Maintain oversight on customer communication by allowing your team to review, edit, and personalize messages before they’re sent.
Learn more about suggested replies, now in open beta.
✏️ Use AI summaries as a dynamic variable
Now you can use a conversation’s AI Summary as a dynamic variable in your rules and macros! This is helpful if you want to send an AI Summary to an external application. Learn about using dynamic variables with macros here and AI Summarize here.
📥 Convert an individual inbox to a shared inbox or vice versa
Admins can now transform a shared inbox into an individual one and vice versa. This transfer is very handy when someone mistakenly creates their individual inbox in a workspace, or when a teammate leaves a company and you want to make their conversations available to all. Learn more.
Agents can now set their availability status to "busy" when they step away from the computer. This ensures that conversations are only assigned when agents are available and ready to respond, and prevents existing conversations from being unassigned. Learn more.
Now you can send attachments, including images, PDFs, GIFs, and more in chat! Whether you need to share screenshots, product images, or detailed documents––your customers can get all the information they need right in the chat conversation. Learn more.
🔗 Build rules with Connector data
Seamlessly integrate third-party data such as reservation statuses, shipment delivery dates, and more into your rules. This update allows you to create streamlined workflows where your teammates can perform actions in external systems—like canceling an order with a comment—without needing to switch between applications. Learn more.
📜 Use Connector data in message templates
Now you can use third party data in your message templates! Compose messages faster with order statuses, shipment ETAs, and reservation dates, all without manually copying data from your third-party systems.
- To configure how your third-party data is used in Front, learn how to set up Connectors here
- Already set up with Connectors? Learn how to start using your third-party data in message templates here
📮 Set data retention policies by inbox
Now you can enforce different data retention policies for specific inboxes. If you have both company-level and inbox-level data retention set up, the more specific inbox-level one will apply.
🔨 Build macros with dynamic variables
You can now build macros with dynamic variables! Dynamic variables adjust to the context of the conversation, enabling you to branch your macro flows or take actions accordingly.
Highway enables shippers, freight brokers, and logistics service providers to verify carrier identity to reduce fraud and streamline the digital booking process. Front seamlessly integrates with Highway to surface relevant information about carriers and eliminate fraud in the inbox. Together, Front and Highway reduce fraud and increase broker productivity.
💬 Catch up quickly with automated conversation summaries
AI Summarize can now auto-generate summaries in shared inboxes after four email messages, so your team can stay in sync more easily.
Learn more about AI Summarize in this course or this article and see how to turn on auto-summaries and other AI features here.
👋 Branch chatbots by visitor data
Now you can branch your chatbot flows based on visitor attributes (such as location, language, and more) to tailor chatbot messages to your visitors. Learn more.
You can now download the history of all your chatbot conversations. Just head to the Chatbots report in analytics and click “Export Chatbot history.” Learn more.
🧠 Use external knowledge sources in AI Answers
Now you can use content from external sources (such as an external knowledge base or your website) to train AI Answers in Front Chat to answer customer inquiries.
🦜 Draft and translate articles with AI
Now you can speed up knowledge base article creation by drafting and refining content with AI. Provide bullet points or simple paragraphs and let AI create a full knowledge base article. You can also use AI to fix spelling and grammar errors, expand content sections, or make them more concise. If you host content in multiple languages, you can use AI to translate articles from one language to another.
Learn more about AI features for knowledge base.
📈 New go-to report for workload insights
Now when you navigate to analytics, you’ll land on the Workload report. This new report brings everything you need to make staffing and scheduling decisions into one place. You can track workload by inboxes over time, along with resolution and reply time, to effectively staff your team to handle the volume of conversations.
Learn more in this help center article.
📊 Live Dashboard for real-time visibility into your support operations
Stay on top of the latest across your team with the new Live Dashboard. Get real-time visibility into open conversation queues to ensure fast responses, boost efficiency, and jump in to lend a hand when needed.
With the new Live Dashboard, you can:
- Monitor key metrics in real time: Keep track of open and unassigned conversations by inbox to ensure your team is handling the volume.
- Identify bottlenecks: Spot potential slowdowns in real time to allocate resources where they're needed most.
- Track team performance: Monitor how conversations are distributed across your team to see who might need additional training or support.
This new feature is now available to all company and workspace admins on the latest Growth plan or above — just hop over to Analytics to check it out! Learn more.
With this update, we’ve also made some changes to your Analytics sidebar to make it easier to navigate: you’ll land on the brand new Workload report that brings all the insights you need to make staffing and scheduling decisions into one place. This replaces the Overview report, you can now find in the Legacy category.
3️⃣ Three new beta AI features for agent assistance
Empower your support team with the latest AI features that help agents decrease resolution time, improve accuracy, and reduce inefficiencies.
Features included:
- Suggested replies: Auto-draft replies to customer emails with AI, based on your knowledge base content.
- Similar conversations: View related conversations to quickly get historical context and jumpstart the solution.
- AI tagging: Automatically tag messages based on the topic or sentiment of the message.
These Front AI features are available to turn on now, until we reach capacity. Company admins can go to Company Settings > AI to turn them on settings. Similar conversations, suggested replies, and tag by sentiment or topic will be free to use through the end of the year, but may be moved into a paid add-on in the future.
Learn more:
🔃 Build 1-click macros for common processes
Macros allow you to create shortcuts to increase your team’s productivity, reduce training time, and ensure processes are followed. Teammates can move messages, tag conversations, notify other teammates, and more—all with a single click.
With macros, you can:
- Route conversations to the right teams
- Escalate customer inquiries to the next support tier
- Maintain consistent processes across your team
- Reduce onboarding and training time for new agents
Read more in our blog, take our Front Academy course, or visit the help center to learn how to set up macros for your admin.
🧑💻 Connectors: a low-code way to build integrations
Last fall, we released dynamic objects, which created useful shortcuts to your external systems. With Connectors, you can pull in even more third-party data to provide contextual information to agents without app switching.
With Connectors, you can:
- Flexibly bring in info about orders, shipments, bookings, and more
- Quickly access external data to build powerful workflows
Read more in our blog or check out our help center on how to get started building Connectors.
🖊️ Refine drafts with AI Compose
In addition to drafting messages, you can now use AI to refine existing drafts. Now, after starting a draft, AI Compose can:
- Expand your content or make it more concise
- Adjust the tone to be more professional, friendlier, or more empathetic
- Correct any spelling, grammar, or punctuation mistakes
- Translate your draft to and from 15 different languages to engage with your customers in their preferred language
Learn more about AI Compose:
📋 See what’s new for AI Summarize
We’ve added several enhancements to AI Summarize to provide quick context and help keep your team on the same page. Updates include:
- Summaries are now universal, ensuring teammates see the same recap
- They’ll now appear above a conversation with a short headline summary
- Summaries also now include comments, so you have the behind-the-scenes context of a conversation
- Each time a new message or comment comes in, the summary will automatically update.
Learn more about AI Summarize: