Rules AMA: automate routine tasks

I see there’s a new UI in rules. What’s new in this update?

Need A Newsletter Workflow Solution

One of the types of emails many of us get a ton of is “Newsletters.”  Front does a great job with tags and rules triaging important emails.  I am looking for tips on how to best handle these newsletter emails.

When I used Outlook, I had a rule that would route newsletter emails to a folder for later reading.  Obviously, with Front, we don’t have folders anymore.  The rule-driven workflow I would like as an alternative would be to Tag incoming newsletters, based on sender, then ‘Snooze’ them for a week.  If I don’t read them and manually archive / delete them within a week, I want to purge every message with the ‘Newsletter’ tag that’s > 1wk old.

Regarding CSAT, our customers send in purchcase orders to Front. It would be cumbersome to send out a survey on every thread. Can we set up rules on how to apply survey rules to non-PO threads and randomly apply to a % of PO threads?

Can these rules also be used for Chat?

When a draft is created, can it be a linked conversation?

Is there a good rule/feature for if a agent is overwhelmed by round robin and needs to unassign cases?

If you’re brand new to rules, some great start rules we suggest that will help make your work much easier are:

1. Tagging:
You can automatically tag your conversations based on the content of messages, sender, and more. We even have a feature called rules sets that allows you to manage all of these different rules in one rule to save you time clicking into multiple rules to manage them. Here’s an example of a rule using a rule set:

You would build the first rule, and if it’s compatible as a rule set, you’ll see the rule set option at the top right of the screen, which you can click to convert your rule into the table format above.

 

2. Assigning:

One of the best features of Front is that you can work with your team seamlessly, and to help you do that, you can automate assigning conversations so that you’re not spending the time manually doing this action for your team. Here’s a common rule that will load-balance (makes sure all teammates are capped at how many they can get assigned) the assignments to your teammates:

In the example above, I’m showing the assignments being load balanced out to a teammate group, but you can also choose the list of exact teammates you want to include – teammate groups just makes it much easier to manage the group as a whole. 

3. Reply time goal (or SLA):
Front has built-in features to help your team reply to your customers as quickly as possible, which you can set up with as an SLA rule:

You can see that the rule can have the official SLA breach time, as well as a warning ahead of time to help you handle the breach before it happens, and various actions you can take when those times hit.

Unfortunately, we don’t support randomized CSAT surveys this way. If you’d like to ensure that customers don’t receive too many CSAT requests, you can set this up with dynamic variables using the “last time CSAT was sent” custom field on contacts. Using the Update conversation custom field [last time CSAT was sent] rule action, you can record when you last sent a CSAT survey on the contact itself. You can then use that condition in rules to make sure you don’t send a survey to the same contact within a certain period of time.

Front rules can be used for any chat channel you have, be it our native Front chat or other integrations. They will work exactly the same. Note that certain conditions might not make a lot of sense. “CC contains sales@front.com” won’t work because there is no “cc” in chat for instance.

This is not available in Front at this time, but we welcome your suggestions! Please submit your idea to https://community.front.com/ideas.

We recommend setting assignment limits for each teammate so no one gets overwhelmed. You can do this by selecting the Load Balancing tab in each workspace’s rule settings. If all teammates are at their limit, assignment rules will pause. Once any teammate is below their limit again, the assignment rule will resume. 

Learn more here: https://help.front.com/en/articles/2121 

Yes, you can replicate this workflow in Front, using tags as a folder (only works with individual workspace). You’d build an individual rule that adds the tag, like Newsletter, and also removes the Inbox tag. The Inbox tag is what determines whether the email shows up in your inbox, so once it’s removed, it’ll only show when you look in the tag, thus functioning as a folder. 

Note that I’ve skipped in my rule the conditions for determining which emails to capture, so you’d fill that in based on the sender, email address, body/subject content, etc.

For the second part of your workflow where you want to snooze and automatically purge/archive – you can’t snooze with a rule but you can auto-archive with a second rule that runs sequentially after the rule above: