This year, delivering exceptional customer support was redefined by AI. Combining the efficiency of AI-powered deflection and assistance with the expertise and empathy of humans will be the hallmark for top-performing service teams going forward.
It was also a redefining year for Front as we delivered 100+ new features laser-focused on helping service teams deliver top-tier customer experiences at every touchpoint. From AI to automation, integrations to tickets, Front customers had a front-row seat to customer support innovation.
We’re already looking ahead to the future, supplied with insights from customer support leaders on their predictions for 2025: what’s next with AI, top metrics they’re focusing on, and rising customer expectations.
Read on to learn more about:
Innovation recap: Some of the 100+ new product features now available to all Front customers
Ecosystem expansion: Ways we deepened our commitment to our collaborators in the modern support tech stack
Future forward: Predictions for 2025 from 100+ service leaders
New AI-powered features for collaborative, top-tier support
This year, we focused on making the entire support journey more intuitive and efficient for customers and agents alike, from first touch to final resolution. Hundreds of Front customers have already incorporated these new features into their workflows to take service quality to the next level:
Modern, easy-to-use ticketing to track, organize, and resolve complex customer requests at scale
Powerful AI features to scale self-service support and boost agent efficiency
Low-code Connector integrations to eliminate app-switching and automate workflows
With these new capabilities, our customers have leveraged Front in new ways to deliver exceptional service.
Turn customer self-service into success with AI
Effective customer support starts means getting a complete answer – fast. Front’s new AI-powered deflection tools are designed to resolve inquiries in an instant.
With AI Answers, customers resolve inquiries on Front Chat with fast, accurate answers sourced from your help center and website, saving time for both your customers and team.
Customers achieving the highest resolution rates have one thing in common: comprehensive, up-to-date content for their AI to source from. For a jump-start, AI Compose for Knowledge Base enables you to create full help center articles from just bullet points instead of starting from scratch.
Access complete context at your fingertips
For more complex inquiries that get escalated to your team, context is key. AI helps agents get up to speed quickly on the issue so they can take the right actions to solve the customer problem:
AI Tagging: Automatically tag messages by topic or sentiment for quick context.
AI Summarize: Catch up on any conversation without reading through an endless thread.
Similar conversations: View related conversations at a glance to jumpstart the solution.
With low-code Connector integrations, you can pull in third-party data like shipment and order statuses to provide contextual information to agents without switching apps. Plus, you can get started right away with our pre-built Connectors with Jira, Highway, and Tai with just a few clicks.
Elevate agent productivity with AI and automation
After gathering the right context, it’s time for the agent to move to resolution. Powerful new automation features make resolving issues even easier.
Front’s new intuitive ticketing helps you deliver support at scale across every issue from simple to complex. Unlike legacy help desk systems where it’s all or nothing, tickets can be enabled for workflows where they’re needed, and turned off where they’re not. With ticketing in Front, your team can easily:
Resolve high volumes of complex requests
Collaborate with your team to solve issues faster
Give your customers visibility into requests with a convenient customer portal (coming soon)
Since most tickets take multiple actions to resolve (e.g. tag and route conversations), we made it easier for agents to do more in a single click with macros. Connectors go beyond fetching external data: when paired with rules and macros, they also can automatically update other systems in your tech stack from Front. For example, customers are using these powerful automation tools to enable their agents to update Salesforce records, auto-create Jira issues, and update Linear statuses.
Once agents are ready to respond, AI helps turn routine support interactions into moments of customer delight:
Suggested replies: Auto-draft replies based on your knowledge base content
Internal AI Answers: Ask your knowledge base questions directly from your inbox
AI Compose: Instantly draft high-quality responses or refine tone and grammar
Harness the power of insights to shape your customer support
Delivering best-in-class support requires a deep understanding of your team’s performance. Front Insights provide a holistic view of your support metrics, so you can plan ahead and unblock bottlenecks.
In your Live dashboard, you can get real-time visibility into open ticket volumes to ensure fast resolution and jump in when needed.
The new Workload report provides a comprehensive view of team capacity and efficiency, helping you track conversation volumes and resolution times across inboxes. You can even show them off in your very own Support Report, building trust with your current and future customers.
New integrations for a scalable, seamless support experience
Support teams juggle multiple tools, and seamless integrations are key to maximizing their tech stack to deliver better service. This year, Front launched 21 new partner integrations including MaestroQA and Vooma, along with enhancing existing integrations such as Dialpad.
Front’s integration with MaestroQA allows customers to leverage Front data to analyze and assess agent performance, capture the voice of the customer, and uncover valuable operational insights.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Front, combining MaestroQA’s quality assurance expertise with Front’s industry leading shared inbox & intuitive workflows. Together, we’re delivering a dream set of capabilities to help our customers succeed. I can’t wait to see our Account Executives and CSMs in action to create a whole new world of possibilities with a “Better Together” value proposition.” - Jon Parisi, VP, Sales, MaestroQA
This year, Front also began partnering with Technology Services Distributors (TSDs) and their expert consultants to help support leaders provide better quality support by enhancing their tech stack with AI-powered support solutions.
"Front has been a great addition to the portfolio and the product is well positioned to modernize the ticketing and support world. AI is essential and having it built into the platform natively along with a great UI/UX makes Front a no brainer for customers. Front’s channel team has been able to, in a short time, engage with our Gurus (Agents) and have an immediate impact and we are excited for an amazing 2025 with the Front team." - Fred Stacey, CEO, Cloud Tech Gurus
From AI-powered self-service support tools to modern, flexible ticketing to deep integrations, Front’s latest innovations are reshaping the way support teams deliver excellent service at scale. These new, powerful features break down information silos, automate workflows, and enable faster resolution – and there’s much more to come.
What’s next in CX: Support leaders share their predictions
After an incredible year of innovation, we’re already looking ahead to what’s next for 2025. We recently polled more than a hundred customer support leaders like you, and it’s clear that AI and automation will play an even bigger role in support going forward. However, as this pressure to scale efficiently grows, customers still value human interaction and highly personalized support.
Here are some predictions we’re most excited about:
AI will go beyond just deflecting routine inquiries to surfacing actionable insights from customer conversations
“The industry has depended for a long time on CSAT scores, but only a small percentage of customers ever respond to CSATs, and customer interactions have a lot of qualitative factors that are hard to translate into hard data” says the head of support for a prominent online auction site. “AI could be trained to analyze these qualitative factors, which would provide a much more holistic view of the interactions a team is having with the customers.”
The bar for customer expectations keeps rising, requiring faster and more personalized service
“People expect fast help from a live human from any channel where they’re most comfortable,” says a leader in the financial services industry. “A single point of view about the customer will be critical, which means native integrations into other software platforms will be necessary to give support reps access to the data they need to serve the customer.”
AI will serve as a tool to help support teams better serve their customers rather than replace them
“Customers will have less tolerance for out-of-date resources and AI that doesn’t get them the resolutions they will need” says a manufacturing software support leader. “In order to scale, support teams will have to learn to leverage AI while still maintaining the personal connection with their customers.”
You can read more about what’s top of mind for CX leaders in our latest What’s Next in CX post.
Setting our sights to 2025
As for what’s next for Front, we’re already working on how we can meet these evolving needs in 2025. Here’s a sneak peek at just a few new tools on the roadmap:
Enhancing our omnichannel experience: We’ll launch new telephony capabilities for a more seamless, interconnected agent experience across email, text, voice, and more
More advanced, powerful AI features: AI insights and automation that give you more visibility into your data and control over AI usage
Ticketing enhancements: Enable customers to submit tickets and track their progress in a customer portal and optimize every step of your support workflows with our out-of-the-box Resolution Report.
We’re eager to see how our customers continue to deliver top-tier service with Front. Look out for our 2nd annual Gamechanger Awards in early 2025!
Written by Caroline Lu