Tags

Hey kwalker

Great question! So there isn't really a single best practice, as the ideal tagging strategy depends on how your team works and what you want to report or filter on. Generally the best options are to work with Tags, Rules and Statuses. These three features work together to help you get the most out of your workflow. I've attached some information below including a link to Help Center articles relevant to each topic.

Tags: Tags make it easy to track certain topics in your inboxes, set up rules to sort messages automatically, report on trends in analytics, and use as private folders to file your messages into. We also have a Front Academy course here to learn more about using tags.

Rules: You can use Front rules to automate your workflows, helping you handle repetitive tasks to save time and increase your team's efficiency in Front.

Statuses: You can Leverage rules and macros to automatically update ticket statuses to enhance your team's productivity and improve customer satisfaction. This article outlines example workflows that your team can implement using Front to automate ticketing processes.

Many teams use a combination of these, while relying on conversation assignment and reminders to track ownership and timelines. Keeping your tag structure simple and consistent also tends to make filtering and reporting easier over time. I hope this information has helped, but if you have any other questions please feel free to let us know.

Hey kwalker, one thing I'd add to Agu's answer: for tracking stage specifically (intake → docs submitted → in review → submitted to carrier → complete), custom ticket Statuses are actually a better fit than tags. Statuses are mutually exclusive per conversation, so a task can only be in one stage at a time — no risk of someone leaving an old "in review" tag on after it's moved to "submitted." You can set these up under Settings > Tickets > Statuses, and they show up as filters in Analytics too. That way tags stay reserved for things that aren't mutually exclusive, like which client or plan the task belongs to, and your stage data doesn't get muddied by stale tags.

One more thing worth planning for as you scale: if you tag by client name, that tag list grows by one every time you onboard a new retirement plan, and it can get unwieldy fast. If you're using Accounts, a custom Account field (e.g., "Client") lets you filter, report, and route by client without creating a new tag each time, and you can still pair it with a rule that auto-assigns or auto-tags based on that field. If tagging is still the right call for your team, Front's own guidance is to keep any required-tag list short and mutually exclusive (5–8 tags) — past that, compliance tends to drop off.

Hi kwalker!

For a small team managing retirement plan implementations, you could use tags for clients and the status capability. Client tags tell the team which client the inquiry is coming from, and status answers where a ticket stands in the team’s workflow.