Respond faster, 24/7: Five ways to optimize shifts in Front

Sometimes, customer support can feel like a game of telephone. When shifts change and issues pass to new teammates, key information is lost along the way — or even worse, conversations get stuck with teammates who aren’t online to handle them. Your team feels like they’re missing messages, and your customers are left hanging.

Front’s new Shifts solution connects your team’s schedule with your support workflow, so it’s easy for teams working in multiple shifts to deliver a smooth customer experience. Conversations only go to teammates available to handle them, and you can distribute workloads evenly to optimize your entire team’s bandwidth. It’s easy to schedule across multiple timezones, so coordinating a global team has never been simpler.

The end result? Your customers get the fastest response possible — 24/7.

🗓 Never let a message slip through the cracks (in your schedule)

Most of the time, keeping track of who’s on what shift is easy to forget. Conversations are assigned to off-duty teammates by mistake, which leaves customers with urgent issues waiting too long for a response.

With Shifts, it’s quick and easy to set up your team’s schedule, and Front takes care of the rest to help you minimize wait times for your customers. Assignment rules skip off-duty teammates automatically, so conversations won’t sit in their queues and put your response time service levels at risk.

📈 Measure performance with greater precision

Especially when your team is distributed across multiple regions, getting a clear picture of response time performance can be a challenge. These insights are key to improving your team’s efficiency over time, so attention to detail matters.

Setting specific shift hours for each teammate makes Front analytics more accurate, so you can reliably spot opportunities for improvement. Each teammate is measured against the specific hours they work in their local timezone, rather than a single set of business hours, for more precise metrics.

⚡ ️Optimize response time with load balancing

Shifts works with Front rules to get conversations into the right hands based on specific skills, clients, or other criteria. Together, they enable your team to consistently conquer the queue, even on your busiest days.

Now, load balancing rules make it easier than ever to manage high volume. With load balancing, conversations are assigned to the teammate with the most bandwidth to handle them (and are held in a queue if no one is ready). Custom conversation limits ensure messages always go to the person who can respond fastest, even if some agents are still in training.

🚀 Help new teammates ramp up faster

Shifts and load balancing help you keep your support workflows up to date with your growing team. It’s simple to add new teammates to Shifts when they come on board, and if you manage team scheduling in another tool, Shifts can be updated through the Front API for smart scheduling behind-the-scenes.

You can also set lower load balancing limits for new teammates to ensure their workload stays manageable, so your customers won’t suffer if they take longer to respond per conversation. As they get up to speed, you can increase their limit to match your more experienced agents.

🌍 Set up teams in other timezones for success

Shifts and rules work together to make sure conversations are only assigned when a given teammate’s business hours start. It’s less overwhelming for your team — and a better experience for your customers.

Instead of coming into find a queue of assigned messages from customers who have been waiting for hours for a response, your team can start fresh when their shift begins. You can even set when assignments should stop before a shift ends to make sure your team has enough time to wrap up before they go offline.

✨ Coming soon in Front

Together, Shifts and load balancing empower your team to stay on top of their work and respond to customers as quickly as possible. With accurate reporting to share with internal teams and customers, you can make informed decisions to keep giving better service.

Activate the Shifts add-on on your Front plan for $10/user in the coming weeks. Load balancing, as part of Front’s advanced rules, will be available to all customers on Pro plans. Keep an eye out for when these features are live in the app, and get in touch to see them in action!