Front Chatbots are a powerful tool to ensure your team is focused on answering the most important conversations. Chatbots can help you gather information about a customer’s inquiry. From there, the chatbot can either directly resolve the inquiry, or can pass it along to an agent to handle.

Take a Front Academy course here to learn more about leveraging chatbots to achieve your goals.

Have questions? Ask them in our AMA in Front Community!

Collecting information about a chat visitor’s request

Use chatbots to collect more information about a topic, product, or issue your chat visitors are reaching out on before your team hops into the chat. You can also collect contact details using the chatbot.

Deflecting commonly asked questions from your team

Chatbots are a great tool for directly responding to commonly asked questions to ensure your team can remain focused on those complex issues that require a human touch.

Qualifying sales leads

Use chatbots to collect contact and account information to qualify leads passing through your website. 

You must have Front company admin access OR the default workspace admin role to create and edit chatbots.

You will need to have a Front Chat channel set up in order to use Chatbots. Instructions for configuring a Front Chat channel can be found here.

Step 1

Click the gear icon on the top right of Front and into the Company settings tab.

Step 2

Click Channels on the left menu.

Step 3

Within Channels, click the Chatbots tab.

Step 4

From here, you can create a new chatbot by clicking the Create a chatbot button on the top right.

Step 5

Set a name for your chatbot and select the Front Chat channel that will be connected to this chatbot. You can also optionally provide a description for the chatbot.

Step 6

After clicking Continue, you can now build your chatbot flow in the visual bot flow builder. Click on the blue “+” button within any arrow linking chatbot steps to add a new step to your flow. 

Step 7

To save changes to your chatbot, click the Save button on the bottom right corner.

Step 8

Once you’re finished configuring your chatbot flow, toggle on the Chatbot is inactive setting in the top right corner. Once active, the chatbot will be visible in the chat widget on your website.

There are two different categories of step types you can use in your chatbot flow.

• Visitor-facing steps: Visitor-facing steps allow you to send messages / collect information from your chat visitor, and will be interactions that are visible in the chat window on your website.

• Internal action steps: Internal action steps affect the structure of your chatbot flow (i.e., any paths that are created) and will also impact any attributes on the conversation that’s created in Front once the chatbot flow ends (i.e., tags).

Settings page

For each chatbot, you can adjust the following settings:

• Chatbot name: Customize the name which will be used internally to label your chatbot. This name will not display in the chat widget on your website. 

• Channel: Select which Front Chat channel the chatbot will be associated with. You can only have one chatbot per Front Chat channel at this time.

• Chatbot display name and avatar: Customize the name and avatar for the chatbot your customers see in the chat widget.

  • By default, the chatbot name will be displayed as your team name (configured in Front Chat channel settings) + “bot”, and your chatbot avatar will be the default chatbot icon. 

  • We highly recommend choosing the default display option to make it clear to your chat visitors that they’re interacting with a chatbot, not a live human agent. Certain local regulations may require disclosure when your chat visitors are conversing with bots.

• Chatbot description (optional): Enter a description for the chatbot.

After a chat visitor reaches the “End of Path” step for any given path in your chatbot flow, a chat conversation will automatically be created within the default inbox configured for your Front Chat channel. The conversation will contain a transcript of the chatbot conversation, and will contain any tags you configured for that chatbot path.

If you’ve configured the chatbot to automatically archive the conversation at the end of the chatbot path, the conversation will be created with “Archived” status and your team will not be notified or need to respond. In the chat widget, the conversation will end and your chat visitor will be prompted to start a new conversation. Otherwise, the conversation will be created with an “Open” status, so an agent can easily hop in and continue the chat thread.

Important to know

• Any inbox rules you have configured will apply to that conversation, with the exception of any message content-based rules such as “message body contains…” This is because the chatbot transcript is not treated as a normal message within Front.

• A chatbot flow will never start again after a conversation has been created within Front. It will only run for new chat conversations.

• If your chatbot auto-archives the chat conversation, make sure you add the Conversation currently open condition to your assignment rule. This ensures that your inbox assignment rules won’t trigger and assign that conversation to your agents.

On your website, the chatbot flow will start when chat visitors open the chat widget. Customers will have to go through the entire flow before they can be connected to a live chat agent on your team.

No. Chatbots are only available for Front Chat at this time.

You can configure 1 chatbot for each Front Chat channel.

Yes. You can add up to 400 steps in a chatbot.

Yes you can build rules based on chat visitor responses to your chatbot questions by leveraging tags! You can add a tag anywhere in your chatbot flow (for example, right after each multiple choice option), and then you can build routing, assignment, and more rules that include that tag as a condition.

In the example below, you can configure a rule to route the conversation to either the Support or Sales inbox by leveraging the “Support” or “Sales” tag in your routing rule.

Your customer will see that the conversation has ended, and they will be asked to start a new conversation (which will restart the chatbot flow) if they have another inquiry.

See here.

Any previous Welcome Message and Pre-Chat Forms you’ve configured have been automatically migrated to the chatbot experience. You can continue to make changes to these from within the chatbot builder. 

Chatbots are available on all plans. See additional details about pricing of certain chatbot features below: