Customer service is facing an inflection point, and the power of AI is only part of the story.
AI has dramatically increased customer expectations for both speed and quality of service. While powerful, it also poses challenges to customer trust. The nuanced, empathetic understanding and institutional knowledge living in your support team is critical to closing this gap. As agents’ roles continue to evolve, legacy help desks are being pushed to their limits.
It’s clear that businesses need to adapt how they support their customers in order to keep up with rising expectations. The best of the best — the businesses that make exceptional service a defining aspect of their brand — are doing just that. They’re shifting the paradigm from one frontline team wholly responsible for a positive customer experience to one where the entire company is united in service of the customer. They share context and understanding, addressing any customer challenge swiftly and at scale. And every conversation sparks insights that create clarity and help teams better meet and anticipate customer needs. It’s time for a new era of customer service.
Today at Frontlines, our annual virtual event celebrating what’s next in CX, we introduced a suite of new Front features that make Front the only AI-powered customer service platform that unites your team in service of your customers. That includes:
Flexible ticketing to track, organize, and resolve complex customer requests at scale
New AI tools to boost team efficiency and help agents prioritize issues
Integrations that connect critical data for powerful automations, including an out-of-the-box Jira Connector
You might also notice that the Front brand looks a little different. Along with all these new features, we’ve also updated our look and feel to usher in a new era for Front. What does that mean for Front customers like you? The icon on your desktop and phone looks different (and we hope, won’t take much getting used to). Over the coming weeks and months, you’ll see our new brand direction come to life on our website, community, blog, and more.
And with that, let’s dive into news you can use. Here’s an in-depth look at everything we announced at Frontlines, all designed to help your team provide exceptional customer service.
Meet Front ticketing: track, organize, and resolve complex requests at scale
Want the structure of ticketing without the rigidity of a legacy help desk? Our modern, intuitive ticketing solution lets you scale your support without losing the personalized service you’re known for. Combined with Front’s best-in-class collaboration tools, ticketing helps your team work together effortlessly, automate manual work, and impress customers every step of the way.
Ticketing allows you to track and manage the status of every request in your lifecycle from Open to Waiting to Resolved. And soon, you’ll be able to create custom ticket statuses that map to your specific processes for a tailor-made setup.
With ticketing in Front, it’s never been easier to:
Resolve high volumes of complex customer requests at scale
Collaborate with your team to solve issues faster and provide exceptional service
Track ticket volumes and statuses in real time with the Live Dashboard
And stay tuned for more upcoming ticketing enhancements: a customer portal where users can submit tickets and track their progress, and a new Resolution Report in analytics for out-of-the-box resolution analytics that help you optimize every step of your support workflows.
Ticketing is available on all current plans and is ready for you to start using today. Learn how to get started.
Empower agents with practical AI
Support teams in Front are already resolving customer issues faster and saving time on repetitive inquiries and tedious tasks — like manual tagging or editing tone — with the suite of AI features we launched to open beta this summer. As some of the initial hype around AI fades, this is exactly where we’re keeping our focus: supporting practical use cases for AI that drive real value for your team.
At Frontlines, we shared our latest AI innovations to help teams work faster: AI Translations to help you serve your global customer base with instant translations to your preferred language, and internal AI Answers for agents to ask your Knowledge Base questions directly from their inbox.
As we continue to build out our suite of AI tools in Front, we’re also excited to share a sneak peek at two upcoming innovations for your inbox: AI Assist and AI Prioritization.
AI Assist
With AI Assist, your teammates can see critical conversation details, resources, and suggested replies all in one place. It’s all about getting that single pane of glass to help your team respond quickly and confidently. Whether an agent is on day 1 or day 300, AI Assist will empower them to focus on their customers, letting AI take on the heavy lifting of providing the right content and context.
AI Prioritization
AI Prioritization leverages AI tagging templates to automatically prioritize your team’s work, organizing your team’s inbox by urgency. Set a reply time goal for each AI tag and let AI and automation ensure your team always stays on top of the most urgent inquiries.
AI Translations and internal AI Answers will be free to use through the end of 2024 for companies on the latest Growth plan or above, but may be moved into a paid add-on in the future. Learn how to start using these features and all of our open beta features. AI Prioritization and AI Assist will be available for customers in the coming months.
Seamlessly bring in data from Jira, Highway, and Tai to automate your workflows
When your teams can take more actions without leaving the inbox, you can deliver an even better experience for your customers. This summer we introduced our Connectors framework: a complete low-code way to integrate with your third-party systems. Connectors make it easy to reference key info about projects, shipments, orders, and more — without having to switch apps. Fewer monitors and app windows can mean fewer headaches for your team.
Today we’re introducing pre-built Connectors for quick installation in a few clicks that makes it even easier for your team to use third-party data in Front to automate your workflows. With our new pre-built Jira Connector, you can automatically create new issues in Jira without leaving Front, send comments between Front and Jira to keep both systems in sync, and get real-time Jira status updates in Front.
We’re also excited to announce our first two partner Connectors: the Highway Connector, which helps logistics companies detect fraud in their inboxes automatically, display carrier information, and more; and the Tai Connector, which helps 3PLs and freight brokers surface shipment data and update shipments from Front.
The new pre-built Connectors are ready for you to download and start using today on the latest Growth plans and above. Learn how to get started with Jira Connector, the Highway Connector, and the Tai Connector.
You asked, we listened: More new support features
Customer feedback is one of the most valuable influences on our roadmap. We’ve listened to recent feedback and have some exciting updates based on the most popular requests.
Scale your deflection strategy with Front Chat and Knowledge Base
As AI allows for more conversations to be deflected and resolved automatically, the importance of chatbots and help center content is even higher. We’ve released several new features to help you uplevel your self-service support offerings.
Native CSAT: Gather Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores directly within chat interactions, enabling customers to provide immediate feedback and making it easier to measure performance and identify areas for improvement.
Branch by hours: Dynamically branch conversations based on your team’s availability, ensuring that customers are directed appropriately depending on whether your support team is online.
Branch by visitor data: Branch conversations by user data such as their page URL, language, or device type to give you flexibility in your chatbot flow
AI Compose for articles: Build out detailed, error-free, multi-language help center content faster with AI to expand, condense, fix spelling and grammar errors, and translate articles.
Automate more with macros
With macros, your team can perform several actions at once with the click of a button. The options for codifying your business logic are endless and make it easy to ensure processes are followed and issues are resolved in a flash.
With our latest macros updates, you can:
Build macros with a required step for teammates to fill out all essential information (such as filling out all Jira issue fields before, writing a quick summary before escalating a ticket, and more)
Create macros that take action in third party systems (such as canceling an order in Shopify)
Not sure what to build? Choose from our new library of pre-built macro templates to help you get started!
Coming soon: Even more features and enhancements are headed your way
Soon, we’ll be introducing chat threads, which allow your customers to submit multiple requests simultaneously and easily access their previous chat histories. Plus, you’ll be able to pinpoint where users drop off in chat sessions, helping you fine-tune your chatbot experience.
We’re also enhancing the Knowledge Base with user article feedback, automatic content update reminders, and optional log-in requirements.
And by popular demand — we’re bringing real-time testing to our rules engine so you can QA your workflows as you build. Make sure to subscribe to Product Updates to stay in the loop on these and more exciting releases.
Ready to ditch your legacy help desk?
The future of CX is here. Front is the only AI-powered customer service platform designed to unite your team in delivering exceptional customer experiences.
At Frontlines, we revealed how our latest features can help you resolve complex requests at scale, help agents focus on what matters, and automate workflows and connect critical data.
Missed the event? Watch the full replay here.
Written by Front Team