Front's rule library

Front's rules engine allows you to automate your team’s workflows and increase your team's efficiency in Front. Looking to explore options for your team’s workflow, or do you have a rule in mind, but are unsure where to start? Front’s rule templates are categorized and built with the most common and critical use cases in mind.

After selecting a template, you can add or remove any triggers, conditions, or actions to customize it to your team’s unique processes.

Step 1

To navigate to the rule library, click the gear icon on the top right of Front and into the Company settings tab. Go to the Rules and macros section and click Create rule.  

Step 2

You'll see a pop-up with a list of rule templates. Search the library, scroll down the list, or use the category filters to browse rules related to specific rule actions and outcomes.

Step 3

Once you find a rule that fits your needs, hover over the template and click Create, and we’ll create a pre-filled rule for you.

Step 4

Add a name for your rule, and edit the rule to fit your team’s needs. You can further customize your rule with additional triggers, conditions, and actions.

Step 5

Click Create to finish. To discard the rule draft, click Cancel.

Use these rules to label your conversations to give your team internal context, enable analytics reporting, and to power additional rules.

Automatically tag your conversations by topic or sentiment using AI Tagging. Train AI to automatically categorize your emails to make them easier to organize, search, and report on.

Example: Apply an "Negative" tag every time AI detects the message expresses strong dissatisfaction, frustration, or criticism. Teammates can use the detected sentiment to provide additional support and improve customer satisfaction.

Check out this article to learn more about AI Tagging.

Automatically tag conversations arriving in your inboxes. Tagging rules ensure all your conversations are labeled to help power your team’s workflows. 

Example: Apply an “Urgent” tag every time the message subject or body contains the word “urgent”. Teammates can quickly scan the conversation list and prioritize these messages.

Require teammates to tag conversations before they can archive or move a conversation. Required tagging rules guarantee 100% of conversations are appropriately tagged. 

Example: When archiving or moving a conversation, teammates must choose from a list of tags to identify common customer issues. Teammates can choose from options such as Invoices, Feature Requests, Bugs, etc.

Check out this article to learn more about required tagging and use cases.

Use these rules to keep teammates focused by automatically moving conversations to the right place, and archiving ones that don’t require action.

Move new conversations to different inboxes based on message content. This ensures messages are routed to the right teams based on what the customer needs help with.

Example: When the message body or subject containing the word “invoice” arrives in the Support inbox, move the conversation to the Billing inbox. Teammates in the Billing team have specialized knowledge that allows them to quickly assist.

Check out this article to see additional routing/triaging examples.

Assign conversations to distribute work across teammates. Assign to one specific teammate, or assign to teammates in a group via round-robin or load-balancing assignments. Assignments clearly designate ownership and ensure no conversations are left unattended.

Example: When messages arrive in the Sales inbox, assign them to the “Sales team” group, which includes Abigail, Brian, and Charlie.

Check out the following articles to learn more about assigning to a group:

• Common routing and triaging rules

• Load balancing rules

Assign conversations to the teammate responsible for the account or contact. The owner of the account/contact may be the best person to answer an inquiry because they have the most context or history with the contact.

Example: When messages come in from contacts at Acme, assign them to their account manager John.

Check out this article to learn more about assigning to account owners.

Move ongoing conversations to another inbox to be handled by the right team. Passing conversations between teams power escalations and cross-team collaboration.

Example: When an existing conversation is unassigned and open after 2 hours in the Tier 1 inbox, move the conversation to the Tier 2 inbox.

Check out this article to see additional routing/triaging examples.

Archive conversations to remove distractions and help your team focus. Archived conversations are hidden from the Open/Assigned/Unassigned tabs, allowing you to declutter your conversation list and remove messages that don’t need action.

Example: When the message body or subject containing the phrase “new content uploaded” arrives in the inbox, then archive the conversation.

Check out this article to see additional routing/triaging examples.

Use these rules to respond to all critical conversations faster.

Set reply time goals to improve your resolution speed and customer experience. Use reply time goals to uphold service-level agreements (SLAs) and ensure appropriate wait times for customers.

Example: When a conversation is unreplied after 2 hours, add an “SLA warning” tag to the conversation to remind teammates they need to respond soon. If the conversation is still unreplied after 4 hours, add an “SLA breach” tag and notify a manager.

Check out this article to learn more about reply time rules.

Improve your customer experience by letting them know when they can expect to hear from you. Use auto-reply rules to remind customers of your business hours, holiday schedules, and more.

Example: When a message arrives in your inbox after business hours, reply with the message template “After hours”. The “After hours” message template lets customers know you have received their message, and your team will follow up once business hours resume.

Check out this article to learn more about auto-reply rules.

Pull in additional teammates to support the assignee and help resolve the conversation. Notification rules help teammates work together and keep all the context in a single thread.

Example: When a message is unreplied after 2 hours, notify a manager.

Check out this article to learn more about notification rules.

Send data from Front to third-party integrations such as CRMs or in-house tools. Ensure data in your other tools are updated with new communications happening in Front.

Example: When a message is received in Front, log the message as an activity in Salesforce.

Check out this article for a list of supported integrations.

Use these rules to measure performance to improve your customer experience and team efficiency.

Measure customer experience by catching their feedback through Front’s out-of-the-box Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) templates, and monitor performance in Analytics. Use the results to strategically improve your service.

Example: When a message has been archived for more than 24 hours, send the “CSAT” message template and apply the “Survey sent” tag.

Check out this article to learn more about Front’s CSAT feature.

See the section above to learn about reply time goals. 

Example: During reporting, use the Tags report in Analytics to review how many conversations had warning or breach tags applied by your reply time rule.

Check out this article to learn more about Front Analytics.

See the section above to learn about tagging rules. 

Example: During reporting, use the Tags report in Analytics to review your most popular tags to identify and monitor trends.

Check out this article to learn more about Front Analytics.

See the section above to learn about third-party rules.

Example: Send information about opportunities to Salesforce, and ensure your CRM is up-to-date when running Salesforce reports.

Use these rules to send data to third-party integrations.

Automatically attach Jira issues to your conversations when the IDs are mentioned in comments or messages. Use attached Jiras to quickly view all Front conversations linked to the Jira, or as a shortcut to open the Jira and view additional details.

Example: During an outage, teammates add the Jira issue ID "PB-123" in comments for conversations related to the issue. The Jira issue automatically attaches to the conversations, and managers can use the View conversations feature to quickly scan the list.

Check out this article to learn more about Jira Connectors.

New conversation stages rules cannot be created as of Oct 2024. You can continue editing your existing conversation stages rules.

Rules are available on all plans.

* Asterisks denote features available on the Growth plan or above.

If you are on a legacy plan and don't have access to specific features, you can update to one of our latest plans in your Billing settings or contact your account manager.