When to use tags, Topics, and empty inboxes

Prior to using Front you probably used folders to organize conversations in Outlook, or labels to organize in Gmail. Now that you're in Front, your team has three tools for your organizational needs: tags, Topics, and empty inboxes.

Use this article to help you choose the right approach and combination for your team's workflows.

Tags allow you to categorize and organize conversations within your inbox. One of the best part about tags is that you can gather analytics on any of these categories!

Learn more: Understanding tags

Here are some ways we recommend using tags to optimize your workflows: 

Customer type

Use tags to identify the different types of clients that contact you. We recommend using tags to identify priority clients, specific industries, or geographic location. You can then run analytics on the volume of these tags. Some popular ways to categorize and report on your customers are:

• Geographic location (LA, EMEA, Midwest)

• Company name (Front)

• VIP

Tip: Use nested tags to organize your tags. (West Coast and East Coast can nest under your USA tag just like you did with folders/labels!)

Categories

Use tags to identify the types of inquiries your team receives. This allows you to gather analytics on how often you get these types of questions, helping you make informed business decisions. Here are some ideas on the categories you can tag:

• Feature Requests

• Bugs

• FAQs

Prioritization

Use tags to alert the team when a message needs to be prioritized, based on the urgency of the message. Here are some ideas:

• At risk time goals

• Overdue time goals

• Urgent messages

• Star or Flag emoji

Tips: To draw extra attention to your prioritized emails, use highlighted tags. Use time goal rules to automatically apply an overdue tag when your time goal is exceeded.

Event

Use tags to categorize upcoming events. Here are some ideas:

• Campaigns

• Promotions

• Conferences

Actionable

Tags can be used to trigger a rule. This means that a series of events can automatically be triggered when a specific tag is added. Here are some ideas:

• Auto-reply: If you are hosting an event, you can use a Yes, No, and Maybe tag. Based on which tag is applied, an auto-reply can automatically be sent to your invitees. The rule would look something like this:

  • WHEN: Conversation tagged with Yes

  • IF: Inbox is Events

  • THEN: Reply with Attending message template

• Auto-tag certain clients: You can automatically apply tags to conversations from specific customers and allow your team to prioritize these conversations. The rule would look something like this:

  • WHEN: Inbound message is received

  • IF: From field is in domain @clientdomain.com;@otherclientdomain.com

  • THEN: Add tag Client Name and assign to teammate

Tip: You can add multiple email addresses or keywords in the If conditions by separating them with semi-colons (;).

Topics is a Front AI feature that automatically analyzes your conversations to understand why customers reach out, then labels incoming messages accordingly. Unlike tags — which are applied manually or via rules you configure — Topics are discovered and applied automatically, with no manual creation required.

Learn more: Use Topics to automatically organize conversations

Understanding contact reasons at scale

If your team receives high volumes of messages and you want to automatically create tags and apply them to conversations, Topics is the right tool. Front AI will surface the most common contact reasons from your conversation history and keep them updated as patterns evolve. You don't have to manually build and maintain Topics as you would with tags.

Topics work best in shared inboxes that receive more than 1,000 conversations per month.

Replacing manual category tagging

Once you've validated your Topics are accurate, you can stop manually tagging conversations with contact reasons. Topics are applied automatically with ~85% accuracy, freeing your team from a time-consuming manual step.

Powering rules with AI-detected intent

Use the Topic is detected rule trigger to automate routing and responses based on what a customer is asking about — without needing to define those categories yourself first. For example:

• If the "Service Cancellation Requests" Topic is applied, trigger a Connector to process the cancellation in a third-party system

• If a "Billing Question" Topic is applied in the Support inbox, assign to your billing specialist

Analytics and voice-of-the-customer insights

The Topics report in Front Analytics lets you review which issues are most common, track volume over time, and export data for use outside Front. This is useful for:

• Identifying where to build automations or update your knowledge base

• Sharing customer insights with product, operations, and marketing teams

Both tags and Topics can categorize conversations by inquiry type. Here's how to decide:

• Use Topics if you want automatic labeling, AI-discovered categories, and don't want to manually maintain tags. Best for high-volume shared inboxes.

• Use tags if you need custom categories that Topics wouldn't naturally discover, or if you need to apply labels in individual inboxes (Topics only work in shared inboxes).

• Use both: Topics for AI-discovered categories, and tags for customer-specific data like customer tier, priority level, or event type.

An empty inbox is an inbox that does not have a channel linked to it. This means that this inbox does not have emails, texts, chats, or social media accounts funneling into it automatically. This is purely an organizational space into which you can move conversations from other inboxes.

See here for steps to create a new shared inbox.

Here are some ways we recommend using empty inboxes to optimize your workflows: 

Escalations for specific teammates

Use this when teammates have specializations that they focus on, or when messages are being escalated to another team. Here are some ideas:

• Escalation tiers: Many support teams create escalation tiers to ensure that teammates can focus on the messages that are within their technical level. You can have empty inboxes for Tier 1 Support, Tier 2 Support, Tier 3 Support, etc.

• Process specialization: Some teams have individuals who are focused on specific parts of the client journey. You can create empty inboxes for these processes so that teammates know which conversations to focus on.

Inbox access

Create empty inboxes to make sure that teammates have access to only the inboxes that they need to view. For instance:

• Sensitive topics: Create an empty inbox with limited teammate access for conversations that only specific teammates should have access to, such as HR or finance questions.