Smart Rules use cases

Smart Rules is a multiplier for your team's productivity, enabling Front to intelligently automate countless workflows for you that would otherwise require manual work. With the help of dynamic variables within Smart Rules, you can trust that Front will do the thinking for you as your rules dynamically evaluate the different pieces of information in your conversations and action on them accordingly.

Find inspiration in a few of our most common use cases for Smart Rules described below. You will see a description of the use case, the dynamic variable you need, and the rule setup structure. For detailed step-by-step instructions on how to set up a Smart Rule, see this guide.

If you used Front before the release of Smart Rules, you were likely one of the teams that used hardcoded, static rules that worked only with the specific conditions you defined. For instance, you may have had a rule set up to notify a manager about an SLA breach. In the past, your rule might have said:

• When inbound message

• If conversation is in Shared inbox, and is unreplied after 4 hours

• Then notify Manager B

You would need to create a separate rule for each manager-inbox pair, then keep those rules updated when there are changes.

However, with Smart Rules, you can have one rule to notify all the manager-inbox pairs in your team by leveraging dynamic variables, and specifically custom fields within the variable. To see the Smart Rule version of the above use case, click here.

Take care of breaches immediately with a single, customized Smart Rule. In this example, the Smart Rule will be triggered when there is an SLA breach on an inbound message. On the backend, the manager is looked up, which are the dynamic variables here, and notified. This one rule can replace dozens or more hard-to-manage rules with one Smart Rule.

Dynamic variable

Custom field: The Team manager should be set as a custom field at the shared inbox level or the teammate level. Custom fields are accessible by any variable.

Rule setup

• WHEN an inbound message is received

• IF conversation is in shared inbox, and conversation is unreplied after [time frame]

• THEN notify Team Manager, and tag SLA breach

In an ideal world, handoffs are quick and seamless — though more often than not, they’re manual or unclear. We’ve got a fix: Now, you can build a Smart Rule that assigns a conversation to whoever comments “I got this!” — or whatever phrase you’d like — on the message. The dynamic variable in this case is Author. Instead of one rule per teammate, you can now have one Smart Rule that checks for the author of the comment and assigns back to them.

Dynamic variable

Rule setup

• WHEN a new comment is added from any teammate and comment contains: I got this

• IF conversation is in Support

• THEN assign to Comment author

You can now create a Smart Rule that extracts all URLs from the body of a message and immediately lists them in a comment on the conversation, so your team can quickly take action on the message.

Dynamic variable

Rule setup

• WHEN an inbound message is received

• IF conversation is Any inbox

• THEN add comment: Please find the URLs shared in the message below: [URLs]

Use Smart Rules and dynamic variables to leverage links. You can add a link to a conversation that points to a specific Jira ticket. You can have multiple conversations pointing to the same URL, which also serves to group the conversations together in one view as a tag might.

Dynamic variable

Rule

• WHEN new comment is added by any teammate and it contains: ticket-[digits]

• IF conversation is in Support

• THEN add link Jira URLs

Say your team uses IDs in your business such as order, booking, or even Front conversation IDs. You can create a Smart Rule that reads the body of an incoming message and extracts all order IDs that follow a certain pattern, then turn it into a link that gets added to the conversation. Your dynamic variable will define be the order ID pattern.

The setup for this use case is documented step-by-step in the How to build a Smart Rule guide.

1. Smart Rules: Get an introductory orientation on Smart Rules and the related resources.

2. Understanding dynamic variables: Get the breakdown on how exactly the dynamic variables, which are what enable the rule to be smart, work.

3. How to build a Smart Rule: Learn how to build a Smart Rule with step-by-step instructions and screenshots.

4. Guide to dynamic variables: Check out the glossary of all the different steps and options you can have in the dynamic variable of a Smart Rule.

This feature is available on the Scale plan or above.