Resolve customer issues behind-the-scenes with comments

So much of customer communication starts from behind the scenes.

You get an email from a customer. He wants to know if he can use his new bike on gravel, not just pavement. You’re not sure which model he has — the gravel or the road bike — so you look up his invoice number. But he purchased over 2 years ago, and you’ve never seen that number before…you’ll need to ask around.

You fire off a few Slack messages to teammates, which requires you to switch tabs and lose context. And you forward the email to your manager to try to get an answer. After a healthy amount of sleuthing, you’ve got it! Well done, Sherlock.

These are the moments when comments in Front save the day. Comments let you @mention teammates on emails to chat about them internally. Because when more people are in the loop, more people understand customer needs — and your team-to-customer relationship is stronger than ever.

We’ve added 4 new ways your team can collaborate internally with Front. So when you’re communicating with customers, it’s easy to get the answers you need and get back to them faster.

Streamline team communication by starting an internal discussion with a team inbox

Want to plan a team outing or share an exciting announcement? Or maybe you’ve been eyeing analytics and have a fun SLA challenge for the team. Now, you can have internal discussions with entire team inboxes! Just type in the name of the team inbox — like Support Team — into the To field, and you’re good to go. You can even move an existing discussion to a team inbox as a heads up that you’re assigning that task or discussion to the entire team.

Pin important comments for easy reference later on

As more and more people are included in comments, it can be hard to catch up. To highlight important moments in a conversation, you can now pin crucial comments so that when new people are added, or you refer back to that conversation later, the critical comments are clear at a glance. Pinned comments can be seen in the conversation summary by clicking the information button next to the subject line, where a recap of the conversation and all pinned comments are found.

Get context at a glance with conversation previews in comments

Need to reference another conversation in a comment? Now you can post a comment with a conversation ID and a preview image will show up in the comments. You’ll see a brief summary of the conversation, including the subject, sender, or participants, and a blurb of the most recent activity. This makes it easy for people to have a quick scan of related conversations without leaving the current one.

Customer communication is a team sport — and collaborating quickly in comments and internal discussions helps your team win. Use these 4 new features to provide more context for your team, work together on bigger issues, and customize comments to a more sophisticated workflow as you scale.

Enrich your comments with a more sophisticated comment composer

Some messages require more in-depth formatting. Bold, highlights, new paragraphs — the works. We’ve built a new comment composer that allows you to fully customize comments. Here’s what you can do with the new composer:

• A floating toolbar appears when a user highlights text, making it easy to apply formatting

• Formatting like bold or italics is shown in the text within the composer instead of only appearing after the comment is sent

• In the expanded composer mode, the Enter key creates a newline instead of sending the comment

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Ready to try these new features and give team collaboration a boost?

Here’s a checklist of tips and tricks your team can try this week:

• Move an important conversation or thread to a team inbox, or start a net new discussion directly with a team inbox. Learn more.

• Post a conversation id or summery in a comment to see a full preview of it, which makes referencing similar or relevant conversations a breeze. Learn more.

• Pin an important comment so that when someone new joins the thread, they can scroll and see the most important comments. Learn more.

• Expand the comment composer to customize and format your comments the way you like. Coming this July!