Product updates

Front Chat has a new look and feel that’s optimized for synchronous communication, so your team can easily respond to website chat visitors in real time.

You can now make subject, body, and header condition keywords case-sensitive. For example, if you’d like to extract country codes for Australia and India, you could set up the rule condition to be case sensitive for “AU” and “IN”.

You can now create and manage apps directly in Front with the new Developers page! The Developers page is available in your company settings (you must be an admin to view). View and manage all your apps in one placeWhether you're creating a Core API integration, a plugin, or a new channel type, the Developers page will be your one-stop shop for managing all the integrations you are developing or have published in the past. Read the full details in the Create, manage, and publish apps topic. Obtain OAuth or API token credentials without requiring assistance from Front SupportYou no longer have to contact Front Support to obtain OAuth credentials for your apps. You can now obtain your client ID, secret, and specify redirect URLs directly in Front for new apps. Note that existing OAuth credentials will continue to work, but will not appear in the app list.The new Developers page also lets you manage API tokens, which used to live under the Plugins & API section of the settings (removed by this update). Any existing API tokens have been migrated to the new page. Plugin integrations have been migrated to the new app experienceAll the plugins you have developed have been migrated to the new app experience. You should see them under the list of apps on your Developers page. The Plugins & API page has been removed by this update.In the new app experience, you create an app and then add plugins as a feature of that app.To learn how to add new plugin features to your apps, refer to the Create, manage, and publish apps topic. Channel integrations will be migrated soonWithin the next few months, we will add the ability to add channel types to apps. For now, continue developing channel integrations using the existing process, which requires you to contact our team to request a new channel type.

Quickly find relevant messages with filtering and hone in on high-priority topics. Filter team inboxes by assignee or tags directly in your conversation list. To learn more, check out this help center article.

Users can now choose between light mode, dark mode, or system, which syncs with your computer OS-level appearance settings. Update your preference under Theme in your Personal Preferences. For more details, check out this help center article.

The Front desktop app is now available for all to download from the Mac App Store! IT teams can now easily distribute the Front app effectively across their organizations.

Composing and responding to customer messages just got a whole lot faster! If you type /template in the Front composer, it’ll automatically pull up all your message templates so you can quickly insert the one you need. For example, type /template to search and insert a message template, or create a new one if you don't already have templates. You can also type /schedule to search and insert a scheduling link, or create a new one if you don't already have scheduling links. Learn more in our Help Center. 

Use AI to make the content of attachments easily accessible and searchable with UpBrains AI. The UpBrains AI integration reads and extracts the content of image and PDF attachments in a Front inbox and inserts the content of the attachments as comments in the conversation thread.Learn more: Front Integrations page: UpBrains AI integration Help Center article: How to enable and use the UpBrains AI integration

Bugpilot automatically collects the information support agents need to understand what happened on a user’s screen, such as screenshots, screen recordings, steps to reproduce, user info, and console logsThe integration enables faster access to offer support by providing options to capture a screenshot and or start a screen recording directly from Front.Learn more: Front Integrations page: Bugpilot integration Help Center article: How to enable and use the Bugpilot integration

It has been a long-standing pain point that sharing conversation message links leads to teammates receiving “you don’t have access” notifications. Front launched a new default behavior for conversation and message links that will instantly grant access to any Front user within your company who clicks the link.This only applies to net-new conversation and message links created from December 2022 onwards. For more details, check out this help center article.

In order to simplify search queries in Front, we’ve decluttered search suggestions and filters. This is the first of several search improvements to come! Today’s updates include: Visual updates so that modifiers appear as labels Removal of the duplicate current query search line Removal of suggestions that were also recent searches New tag suggestion dropdown

To help users more intuitively understand the different types of contacts inside Front, we have rolled out a naming change to Front contacts! Don’t worry, nothing has changed functionally. The previous “Company contacts” are now called “Shared contacts” to reflect their shared nature The previous “Other contacts” are now “Auto-created contacts” to better indicate what they are. “Private contacts” remain the same.

To help users stay on top of their meeting commitments, we're enhancing the Front calendar system notifications to be persistent. Users will see the same notification as before, except now they'll need to click to dismiss the event reminder.Different web browsers, the desktop app, and Mac and Windows users will have slightly different experiences with this feature. Be sure to check out the help center to learn how this will impact you.

We’ve added a new template to our rules library to make it easy to create a rule set for tagging. If you use many similar rules to add tags based on keywords, this template is for you.You can learn more about our rules library and templates here.

We’ve added a pre-chat form to Front Chat so you can request up to 3 different pieces of information from a website visitor before initiating a chat session. This enables you to automatically qualify or route visitors to the right team member. For example, you could ask for the number of employees to determine how large of an opportunity the account may be. Or you could ask if the website visitor has a question about pricing, support, or something else, and then automatically assign that message to the right team or teammate based on the answer. The pre-chat form gets the right message to the right teammate faster, and lets them focus on the customer, not information gathering.

Say goodbye to stale CRM data and hello to improved routing and customer context. Front can now sync with Microsoft Dynamics at the account level. It’s easier than ever to streamline account-based routing and reduce context switching with your CRM’s data accessible and automatically updated in Front. We’ve expanded our Salesforce and HubSpot syncs as well to include contacts. Your routing rules and personalized communications can thank us later. Learn more in our help center. 

In order to simplify how search queries within Front, we are removing the quick filters search dropdown menu — which included “unread,” “snoozed,” “my mentions,” and “attachment” filters. But don’t fret; these search filters still exist! Users can find these filters and more via search suggestions and the advanced filter dropdown to create more specific search criteria for better search results.

Rule sets simplify managing your list of rules. Instead of crowding your rule list with duplicate rules, you can use a single rule powered by a simple table. Your rule structure stays the same while all the different values for each condition are managed in an easy-to-use table. When the rule set is triggered, each row of the table is evaluated one after another as if they were separate rules.You can learn more about rule sets and how to best use them here.

When users @mention a teammate in a comment, this activity will now apply to both the “New comment is added” and “Teammate is mentioned” rule triggers.

When a message is associated with an account, but the email domain is not recognized, you can set up a rule to detect message subject or content and convert it to an account, while also assigning it to the account manager. This makes it easier to see all relevant conversations under that account. For example, if you work at a marketing agency that works with external partners to support clients, your conversations will come from those partners but could be about any number of different clients. With this feature, you can match the right conversation to the right account, and then assign that to the correct teammate, based on the client’s company name in the message.  

The new pre-chat form helps qualify and route website visitors to the right teammate. Kickstart faster service when you customize fields to collect baseline information upfront like company size or recognize keywords like “pricing.” Learn more in our help center article.