Front updates frontapp.com

New

Our new required tagging rule gives you peace of mind as you scale; knowing messages are consistently being tagged leads to more reliable and accurate reporting. By requiring tagging, you can:

• Ensure every escalated message is tagged accordingly to identify the volume and type of inbound messages needing additional help
• Require specific “product issue” tags before a message can be archived to uncover what parts of the product need more attention
• When messages require multiple tags, make sure every one is applied - for instance, hot lead 🔥 + the specific product line it’s associated with

Improvement

Because GIFs!! They add joy, boost morale — and let's be real, GIFs are an expected part of some communications these days. This update will allow for the use of GIFs in comments and the composer.

New

Want to see volumes, response times, and whether you are meeting your SLAs for a particular Account or set of Accounts? You can now filter any report by Accounts. In addition, you can compare metrics across Accounts in the Customer Experience report. To make these comparisons more useful, more metrics (e.g. SLA breaches, New conversations, Active conversations) are now also available on both the Contacts and Accounts tables.

New

You can now add comments using a rule action. This is super helpful to give tips at specific times in your automated processes ("Warning, you need to confirm identity in chat conversations", "This message seems to be about billing, you can contact Finance about that", etc), or to log when a specific event happened ("SLA breached at that point", "Conversation assigned").

The comment is posted by a fake teammate with the name of the rule. It can trigger other rules, and you can even @mention people in it!

New

We've released API support for creating, updating, and deleting message templates and folders. This allows you to sync or import message templates across systems 🎉.

New

As of today, you can now build your own Link integrations like our existing ones with Jira/Asana/Trello/Github! In the past, those integrations were only possible for our team to build internally. Now, developers can build a Link integration on top of our public APIs and publish it to our entire customer base.

And to give you a preview of what's to come: In the next few months, the Links API will be used by our partners at Linear and our own integrations team to build an all-new Monday.com integration.

To learn more about Links in general feel free to check out the help article here.

Improvement

You asked, we answered — and turned off auto-formatting for bullets. A new setting has been implemented within the bulleted lists menu in Composer to turn auto-formatting off.

Improvement

All delayed rules (rules using unreplied after, unassigned after, or time since trigger) can now trigger other delayed or regular rules or vice-versa. What does this mean for you? All rules should now trigger each other in a consistent manner, rules will be more intuitive and predictable, and more completely automated workflows are enabled.

New

Our new suite of account-level functionality allows you to deeply understand customer relationships without leaving your inbox, easily create workflows based on your customer data, and get actionable insights for each account.  

Here’s what’s new:

• View conversation history across all contacts in an account directly from an open conversation, so you always have a clear picture of the whole customer relationship
• Integrate your CRM or other system of record to Front, so you have easy access to critical information like their account owner(s), customer segment, and any SLAs in place — without context switching.
• Build workflows using your customer data, so you can automatically route conversations into the right hands and prioritize messages from high-value accounts with ease (available on Prime & Enterprise only)
• Quantify and track your team’s performance against metrics defined for specific accounts within Front Analytics (available on Enterprise only - coming in late September) 

By viewing all customer information at the account level right from Front, your team can more efficiently and effectively provide tailor-made service at scale.

Improvement

Excellent customer experience happens rapidly, meaning there's no time to waste on misalignments. Now, when you're commenting on a message, you can highlight text within a message and an “Add comment” action will appear upon highlighting, so you can start a thread directly on the area of concern or question.

While there was an older version of this available in Front for the past few months, this is a new and improved iteration of the feature:

• Jump to comment from the message highlight
• Multiple people can highlight then comment on the same snippet of a message
• See where there are overlapping comments in the message body

Among others. This will be available as "read-only" on mobile, so you can view all contextual comments.