Get messages into the right hands instantly with machine learning

A shared inbox can be a real life-saver, especially for teams who need to divvy up emails to many teammates, like customer success or support.

That’s why teams love Front — they can easily, automatically route messages with Front’s rules, based on almost anything you can think of:

• In a round-robin, to distribute to every teammate evenly

• Based on a keyword or phrase in a message

• By time of day the message is received

• By sender

• And more

But what about even more advanced routing, for things like language, topic, urgency, or message sentiment?

This is where we brain-blast… into machine learning! By integrating MonkeyLearn into your Front inbox, you can go even deeper to automatically triage and route incoming messages.

Why use message routing in Front?

There are many reasons your team might be using Front to organize customer messages:

• Support teams can route messages to a teammate with specific product expertise. For example, if a customer asks about refunds, you can automatically send the message to the person with the permission to perform refunds. That way they get a quality response, faster.

• Sales teams can identify high-quality leads by identifying topics and keywords, and route them directly to a sales person. Quick responses to incoming sales requests are proven to boost conversion rates. Plus, without the need for triaging every single lead, your team can work more efficiently overall.

• Product teams need to route feature requests or bugs to the correct product manager or engineer. For example, if feedback comes in for a new reporting dashboard, MonkeyLearn can tag the conversation and automatically deliver it to the product manager who’s working on that feature. Automatically connecting the customer to product team brings down barriers between your team and your customers.

• Global teams need to route messages in different languages to the person who can understand and reply to the customer in the right language. Send French language questions to your French team and Spanish language questions to your Spanish team, without the need for separate email addresses for every regional team or the need for someone to manually triage.

• All teams can benefit from using sentiment analysis to identify more urgent tickets and escalate them to the right team quickly. By using automation to set priorities, you can ensure your team is always working on the most urgent message, every time.

👍 Why machine learning routing in Front rules

From making it easier for customers to get help, to making your overall team more productive, let’s dive into the biggest benefits our customers have seen from setting up machine learning email routing in Front using MonkeyLearn:

Reduce customer effort

It’s easy for customers to get in touch with you. Instead of getting transferred from team to team to get a reply, their question will get in the hands of someone who can help, right away. High effort experiences are one of the leading causes of customer disloyalty, so making it as easy as possible for customers to get in touch with the right person builds a positive relationship.

Reply faster

It’s a no-brainer: faster replies build happier customers. Machine learning routing reduces the time that customers have to wait for a response by removing the manual triage. Think of it like an emergency room in a hospital. Instead of patients waiting to talk to a nurse and then a doctor, machine learning directs the patient to the right room and specialist instantly. That means people responsible for customer care can spend more time caring — rather than organizing.

Increase accountability

Ever play hot potato with a customer email? Machine learning routing keeps everyone accountable. The message goes directly to the team who can answer it — no questions asked.

Improve efficiency

Machine learning routing increases the productivity of your entire team. Everyone knows what they need to work on automatically. Since you’re not spending time triaging messages and reading messages you don’t need to answer, you have more time to focus on your work.

Reduce gaps

No one likes dropping the ball on customer messages. With machine learning routing, every message is assigned to the right person or team, so nothing falls through the cracks.

🛠 How to route messages with machine learning

You might be thinking, “That all sounds pretty great. But I don’t know how to set this up…”

Never fear! We’ve got your back, Jack. It’s pretty simple. You’ll need Front, MonkeyLearn, and Zapier to get started.

• 1. In Front, create the tags you want to add. These might be for subject matter, language, sentiment, or any other category you’re looking to tag.

• 2. In Zapier, create a Zap to automatically tag and route incoming emails in Front based on their text content. Learn how to set this up with our step by step instructions. If you’re using a public classifier, like our ready-built language classifier, it will take less than an hour to set up. If you need to train a custom classifier for specific situations, add another 60 minutes for the training setup.

If you get stuck anywhere along the way, just get in touch at [email protected]! We’ll automatically route your email to our VIP line and give you the quickest help we can ;)

Finally, we’re building a direct integration between Front and MonkeyLearn that will bring the power of machine learning into your Front inbox. Since you’ve read all the way through, we’d like to invite you to be among the first customers to experience it! Request access at [email protected]. Happy routing!

This article is a guest post by MonkeyLearn CEO Raúl Garreta.