Using chatbots with Front Chat

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).

Saved flows make it much easier to quickly build and manage your chatbot flow. If you have a series of steps used multiple times throughout your chatbot flow, consider creating a saved flow with these steps instead.

You can build your saved flow once and add it anywhere you want in your main flow. Any edits you make to your saved flow will automatically apply wherever it appears in your chatbot.

This feature is available on the Growth plan or above.

Creating a saved flow

There are two ways to create a saved flow:

1. Click the Saved flow button on the bottom left of the chatbot flow builder, then click the “+” button in the menu.

2. Select Saved flow in the “Add a new step” menu, then click the “+” button in the resulting menu.

Editing a saved flow

You can edit a saved flow by clicking on the saved flow step in your chatbot flow and selecting Edit saved flow in the right sidebar, or by clicking on the saved flow you want to edit in the Saved flows button on the bottom left corner of the chatbot builder.

Important to know

• Saved flows are currently chatbot-specific. You cannot use the same saved flow across multiple different chatbots.

• There can only be one path coming out of a saved flow. If your saved flow ends in multiple paths (for example, if you have a multiple-choice question in your saved flow), these paths will automatically merge into one path at the end of the saved flow. See screenshot below.

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. You can also select Unassign to disconnect the chatbot from a channel.

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

• 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.

Use the options in the "End of path" step to control how your chatbot hands off chat conversations to your chat agents.

Use case: Automatically route chatbot conversations to your chat agents for immediate support.

• After a chat visitor reaches the “End of path” step in your chatbot flow, a chat conversation will automatically be created within the default inbox configured for your Front Chat channel.

• The conversation will be created with an “Open” status, so an agent can easily hop in and continue the chat thread.

• The conversation will contain a transcript of the chatbot conversation, and will contain any tags you configured for that chatbot path.

Use case: Automatically archive chat conversations that were resolved by your chatbot and don't need follow up.

• After a chat visitor reaches the “End of path” step in your chatbot flow, a chat conversation will automatically be created in the default inbox configured for your Front Chat channel.

• The conversation will be created with an “Archived” status and your team will not be notified or need to respond.

• The conversation will contain a transcript of the chatbot conversation, and will contain any tags you configured for that chatbot path.

• In the chat widget, the conversation will end and your chat visitor will be prompted to start a new conversation.

Use case: Automatically transition chatbot conversations to emails for your team to follow up when you're available.

• After a chat visitor reaches the “End of path” step in your chatbot flow, an email conversation will be created in the inbox for the selected email channel in the chatbot step.

• The conversation will be created with an “Open” status, so an agent can easily hop in and reply via email. No chat conversation will be created in the default chat inbox.

• The conversation will contain a transcript of the chatbot conversation, and will contain any tags you configured for that chatbot path.

• In the chat widget, the conversation will end and your chat visitor will be prompted to start a new conversation.

• For the "Create follow-up conversation via email and end visitor chat" option, you must have a "Collect contact details" step earlier in the same branch AND set Email as a required field. Note: This functionality is not supported in Preview mode.

• Any inbox rules you have configured will apply to your chatbot conversation.

• 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.

Use the Chatbots report in Front Analytics to track your chatbot performance or export your chatbot history.

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.

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.

Yes. Customers can restart the chatbot flow by clicking the restart icon on the top right of the widget. This makes it easier for customers to restart if they accidentally clicked the wrong option or went down the wrong path in the chatbot flow.

The chatbot restart icon is only present during the chatbot flow. Once the chatbot flow ends and your customer is connected to a chat agent, this icon will no longer be accessible and your customer will not be able to use this to restart the conversation. You can designate an amount of time a visitor must wait after the chat first started to see the Start new conversation button.

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 700 steps in a chatbot.

Yes. Please contact Front's support team and send us the name(s) of the chatbot(s) you'd like to duplicate.

Once your chatbot is duplicated, you can disconnect the channel from your old chatbot in your chatbot settings, then reassign the channel to the new 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 set to route the conversation to either the Support or Sales inbox by leveraging the “Support” or “Sales” tag in your routing rule.

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:

• Saved flows: Growth plan or above

• Chatbot analytics: Growth plan or above

• Chatbot steps: See table below