We built Front to be a flexible communication hub that you can adapt to your team’s unique needs. With rules, integrations, and our API combined, the sky’s the limit. You can build your own automations to do things like moving messages to other inboxes, auto-replying, or triggering alerts. You can integrate other software into Front. You can even create custom apps and channels that live directly in your inbox.
Over the years, we’ve realized: our customers are incredibly creative. Often, you build Front workflows that we could never even have thought of on our own. That’s what prompted our first-ever Front workflow competition in 2021: Flow & Tell. Our main goal? Let’s celebrate the magic you’re creating in Front and share it with the world to see.
The rules of Flow & Tell
It’s important to note that there were so many awe-inspiring workflows submitted that judging this contest was not an easy process. There were three axes we looked at for each submission:
Efficiency: How have you increased productivity, moved faster, or saved time?
Creativity: How unique or outside-the-box is this workflow? Has anyone done it before or are you blazing a new trail?
Business value: How powerful and impactful is this workflow on your customers?
Without further ado, we’re excited to share with you the winners of our first-ever Flow & Tell competition in the chatbot and partner integration categories.
We encourage you to comment on these workflows or add your own ideas for how you would customize similar ones.
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Best chatbot: Kvik’s super-fast retail service
Kvik is a Danish kitchen and bathroom design company with more than 600 employees and 150 retail stores globally. What makes them stand out? They’re available and responsive on digital channels, too. Half their staff, across Marketing, Support, B2B, and 150+ stores, use Front as a centralized hub that allows stores to communicate with customers across all channels and give great service.
The workflow
The Kvik team built a Flow.ai chatbot integration in Front as sales and support tool. This means they’re able to respond back faster whenever a customer reaches out via chat—meaning they can secure the deal and give customers the kitchen of their dreams.
Why it’s great
One word: Speed! They newly launched this workflow, but their first success story occurred when they sold a 25.000€ kitchen to a customer who already had a meeting with competitor, Ikea. The sale was made within a single day, and the customer never even made it to the meeting with Ikea.
Kvik’s chatbot allows them to route customer chats to the closest store, so they can respond to inquiries faster than the competition and win more business.
How it works
When a customer wants to chat with a Kvik store on their website, they enter a zip code.
Flow.ai matches the nearest store with the corresponding store team in Front.
It directs the chat to Front to the right team to be handled.
Custom workflows in Front manage if the chat is transferred to email for follow up later on.
Best chatbot: Alpaca’s Facebook Messenger apartment hunt bot
BoomPay (formerly Alpaca) is a real estate company that relies on Front for support and operations. They use Front and a homegrown Facebook Messenger bot to help customers find their ideal apartment—all while keeping their custom Front plugin updated with the latest customer preferences.
The workflow
Their plugin almost completely replaced the need for a CRM. Instead, agents get all the customer data they need directly next to messages in Front. No context switching needed. And with their bot workflow, it’s simple for a human to jump in and keep a smooth, personalized experience: they can pause and restart the chatbot, see and edit the user’s apartment search preferences, and automatically suggest matching apartments for the user.
Why it’s great
The plugin simplifies the lives of their agents and developers. There is no need for agents to manually look up users or match apartments in our back-end. Their developers are also happy because they could re-use existing APIs in their back-end and simply connect it to the custom Front plugin.
How it works
They built a custom plugin that automatically pulls and pushes data from our internal back-end system based on the selected Front conversation.
When an agent opens a conversation, the plugin extracts the sender’s Facebook ID. They use the ID to match it with a user in our backend system.
The plugin then fetches the user record from their backend to display search preferences and contact data in the sidebar.
The search preferences of the user can be edited directly in the sidebar by agents without leaving Front. The plugin stores the edited record in their backend.
They can also pause and resume the chatbot when needed through a simple pause or resume button in their Front plugin, that triggers the action in their backend.
Their plugin fetches the best matching apartments from our backend and displays them in Front, directly next to their conversations.
Agents can then select apartment listings and share them with the user through the plugin. To make this happen, the plugin sends a request to their backend with selected matches. Their backend the sends the matches via the Facebook Messenger API to the user and the apartments get displayed in a classy, easy-to-browse carousel.
Best use of partner integration: DepositFix’s lifecycle-stage tags
DepositFix offers software that allows businesses to accept online payments through HubSpot forms. Their entire team uses Front to manage team emails for sales and support.
The workflow
This workflow involves Front integrations, rules, and tags. It enables their team to respond faster than ever before, meaning they close more deals and keep existing customers happy. It also allows for top notch prioritization and measurement—their team can easily see if a conversation is from a customer or prospect at-a-glance, and they get insight to understand message volume and make smart hiring decisions.
Why it’s great
Their team prioritizes sales emails so no one is blocked from using their product trial. Automatic tags allow them to surpass the step of clicking on each conversation to bring up the sidebar and see if the ticket is for sales or support. Segmentation through tags also gives them better insight into who is reaching out and why. They’ve been able to improve response times and use analytics to help influence whether they hire in sales or support.
How it works
They connected Make to Front to listen to HubSpot contacts.
Whenever a contact is created or updated in the CRM, they transfer over the lifecycle stage to the contact details in Front.
They use Front’s rules to automatically tag incoming conversations based on the contact details either as an Opportunity or Customer.
This content was originally published by Emily Hackeling on our blog.
