Smart QA

Front’s Smart QA (quality assurance) feature accelerates time-consuming manual QA processes with AI, giving support leaders a complete view of agent performance, without the need for manual ticket-by-ticket reviews. Configure your scorecard to automatically score the selected criteria, and display them in the plugin panel for email conversations.

Leverage Smart QA to improve team performance and ensure a consistently high-quality customer experience. AI-generated information for agent performance is provided as guidance for your own decision-making. 

Please note the following:

1. Please rely on your own assessment and analysis or that of experts for significant decisions.

2. Please inform your agents or other End Users when you are applying Smart QA to their conversations.

Check out our Front Academy course here to learn more about leveraging value from Smart QA.

The Smart QA workflow in Front is as follows:

1. Set up scorecard criteria in company preferences

2. Create a rule using the Automate reviews with Smart QA rule template

   1. Select shared inboxes

   2. Select time period to trigger rule

3. Review QA results in conversation plugin panel or analytics

AI automatically scores conversations on the following criteria:

Communication

1. Brevity

2. Conversation opening

3. Empathy

4. Friendliness

5. Grammar & spelling

6. Information gathering

7. Personalization

8. Professionalism

9. Readability

10. Tone

Solution

1. Comprehension

2. Solution offered

Proactivity

1. Adaptability

2. Demo offered

3. Upsell

Smart QA has two rating scales to score criteria, a range (1-5) and binary (0 or 1). 

On a range scale, criteria scores are normalized to a 0-1 scale as follows:

• 1 → 0

• 2 → 0.25

• 3 → 0.5

• 4 → 0.75

• 5 → 1

On a binary scale, criteria are scored either 0 or 1.

In the Smart QA analytics report, agents will have an average score for each criteria on your scorecard. N/A values are not factored into any scoring.

Example score calculation:

• When looking at the Tone score for an agent, they received a 1/5 on the first conversation and a 4/5 on a second conversation.

• The two scores are aggregated together. The formula used is: 0% (1/5) + 75% (4/5) →  (0%+75%) / 2 = 37.5% → 38% by rounding. 

• The 38% score is shown in the Tone field in the analytics report for those two conversations.

Step 1

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

Step 2

Select Preferences in the left sidebar, then click the Smart QA scorecard tab. Click Add criteria.

Step 3

You’ll see a pop-up with a list of criteria you can add to your scorecard. Select the one you’d like to add.

Step 4

Refine the criteria fields as needed, then click Save when finished. You can return to this page at any time to edit or archive the criteria.

Step 1

Click the gear icon on the top right of Front and navigate to the workspace you want to create a rule for.

Step 2

Click Rules and macros in the left menu, then click Create rule. Select the Automate reviews with Smart QA template from the rule library.

Step 3

Give your rule a name, set a time period for the trigger, select the inbox(es) this rule should apply to, and add any additional conditions as needed.

Click Create when finished.

Step 4

When QA is completed on a conversation, you’ll see the action in the conversation’s activity history.

Once Smart QA is completed on a conversation, you can access the results using the Smart QA integration in the plugin panel in the right-hand sidebar. 

If you don’t see the QA integration, see this article to review how to pin integrations to your sidebar.

In Front Analytics, admins can navigate to the Smart QA report to review team performance. Use the dropdown menu to select which criteria to include in the report, and scroll to the right to view the rest of the table.

Select an aggregate score for a teammate to view the conversations used to calculate their results for the selected timeframe.

Select a conversation to view the QA results.

Admins can manually override AI scores from both the conversation sidebar plugin and the Smart QA analytics report.

Step 1

• From the conversation: Navigate to the Smart QA plugin for any conversation with an AI score.

• From Analytics: In the Smart QA report, click the aggregate score for a criteria. In the sidebar panel, select a conversation.

In this example, we’ll click Edit from the conversation plugin.

Step 2

Select a scoring icon to adjust the criteria score. You can also add a comment or revise the description using the text box.

Click Save & mark as reviewed to save your changes.

Step 3

The admin's name will replace "Generated by AI" in the reviewer field. Updated scores will appear in the Smart QA report within 1 hour.

Click Edit to continue adjusting scores at any time.

This feature is currently only available for email channels.

Only English is supported at this time.

Yes. Both traditional statuses (Open/Snoozed/Archived) and ticket statuses (Open/Waiting/Resolved) are supported.

Only conversations in shared inboxes will be reviewed. Additionally, a conversation review requires at least one inbound and one outbound message and the conversation must be marked as Resolved or Archived. Admins can also set additional conditions during the rule setup.

Yes. You can create multiple rules per workspace to trigger the QA evaluation, so you can choose which inboxes receive a scorecard or not. If these kinds of conversations are not separated by inbox, admins can manually override scorecards for those conversations.

The only agent evaluated is the last person to send an outbound before the conversation is marked as Resolved or Archived.

Admins with analytics permissions can see all QA results in the Smart QA analytics report and the conversation plugin panel.

Agents can only see their own QA results in analytics and the plugin panel.

Smart QA provides an overview of team members' interactions with customers that you can see both at a glance alongside conversations or in aggregate via analytics. These scores help provide a standard measurement you can use to compare results over time or across teams.

An N/A score can mean:

• Smart QA didn’t detect content that meets the requirements for this criteria.

• In the analytics dashboard, N/A will show for Criteria not present on the scorecard at the time of evaluation.

AI scoring is not customizable. e.g. Be more or less harsh. However, admins can manually override AI scoring.

No. You can only create one scorecard per company. Different scorecards for different teams are not supported. However, you can add criteria that will work broadly and if it doesn’t apply for a specific conversation, it’ll be scored as N/A.

See this article for additional AI FAQs.

The Smart QA add-on is $20/seat/month and added to your invoice based on your billing cycle, available to the latest Growth plan or above.

To purchase the Smart QA add-on, navigate to your billing settings page to activate it.

The add-on will remain on your subscription and will auto-renew unless updated within the Upcoming plan at renewal tab in your billing settings. To learn more about plan changes related to add-ons, see this article.