How to set up a Drift inbox in Front

Drift is a powerful platform to grow your business through live chat with your website visitors and customers. Now, you can drive that communication from Front to receive chats, respond to customers, and loop in your team — all without leaving Front.

Drift can be added to Front as a channel in a shared inbox, just like email, SMS, or live chat. You must be an account admin to connect Drift. You can add Drift to your website in your Drift account settings. 

• Never miss a message from your site visitors again. Centralizing email, Drift, and other communication in Front means you're always in the right place at the right time. 

• Effortless collaboration is built right in. @Mentions and comments make it easy to share conversations and context with your teammates, so you can tackle deals together.

• Stay on top of your sales funnel by organizing with tags and assignments, so nothing slips through the cracks.

Step 1

Click the gear icon on the top right of Front and select company, workspace, or personal settings in the left sidebar, depending on the space you’re working with.

Step 2

Click Inboxes in the left menu and create a new shared inbox or individual inbox.

Step 3

Click Channels in the left menu, then click the Connect a channel button.

Step 4

Under Messaging, choose Drift from the channel menu and click Connect.

Step 5

Click Connect to Drift. In the popup, sign into your Drift account. 

Step 6

Choose the inbox that conversations will route to and click Save.

You can only connect a Drift organization to your Front instance once. If you want to add another Drift channel, it will have to be authenticating a Drift account from a different Drift organization.

When you send a message through Drift's web app, the sender in Front will always be displayed as "Drift". This is because Front has no guarantees that the sender in Drift is a Front teammate. 

Unfortunately, Drift's API does not support adding attachments, only fetching attachments from incoming messages.

It is not possible to close a conversation using Drift's API, which this integration relies on. That said, your Drift conversations will close automatically after being inactive for a time you set (default is 5 hours). 

Yes. Drift Playbooks are ways to build workflows in Drift to personalize greetings, route leads, or have bots qualify visitors as leads before handing them off to a human. All Drift conversations happening on your site will sync with Front whether they are 100% bot, bot-assisted, or human-only. You can use rules and tags to manage these automatically, or just archive bot conversations. 

In Drift, bots will automatically pause if an agent jumps in and sends a message. This is also true in Front. 

When you send a message from Front, your Drift user details are found by matching your email address in Front to one in your Drift organization. If there is no matching Drift user for the Front user sending the message, the sender is shown to the site visitor as "Bot" by default. 

No. Front’s Drift integration does not support Drift’s calendar booking functionality. Teams can use Front’s calendar scheduling links as an alternative.

If the user has provided their email address, the conversation will be sent to the customer according to Drift's Fallback feature if they have it enabled. Using the Front integration does not change this.

This feature is available on all plans.