Use Resolve to support your customers

Resolve is a channel that specializes in self-serve support. Embed Resolve into your web pages or Front help centers to provide customers support using information from a connected AI agent, collect information in a flow before escalating to a teammate, or connect directly to a teammate for live support without using automation or AI. 

Depending on how to configure Resolve, you can:

• Provide instant answers to common customer questions using content from your knowledge base. 

• Improve the speed and rate of resolutions without a human involved.

• Provide customers a chat-like experience that starts with AI and can escalate to your team for real-time or async support. When a teammate replies, customers receive an email notification to take them back to the Resolve ticket. 

• Connect customers directly to your team via live chat to focus on human interaction.

• Minimize repetitive tasks a teammate needs to do for complex cases.

• To manage Resolve channels, you must be a Front company admin or have permissions to manage shared inboxes and AI settings.

• To use Resolve with an Autopilot AI agent, you must have access to the Autopilot add-on. We recommend creating a dedicated Autopilot agent for your Resolve channel so it can be fine-tuned for self-serve support. We also recommend creating a separate shared inbox for Resolve.

When customers access Resolve from your website or a Front-hosted web page, they can chat with AI to answer simple questions or complete common requests via Playbooks such as checking status updates, confirming reservation details, etc.

Customers can also use the icons at the top of the widget to start new conversations, or view any previous conversations that were escalated to a teammate.

If your Resolve channel is embedded full screen in a Front help center, visitors can review and submit requests to your company all in one place in a portal experience.

When customers receive a reply from a teammate, they’ll receive a notification email to view the response and reply. Customers can reply to notification emails, and the replies will be automatically added to the conversation in Front.

Conversations can be shared by clicking the share icon and entering an email address. Once shared, only messages within that specific conversation will be visible to the recipient. To remove access, click the trash icon to the right of their email address.

After a user has been invited, they will receive an invitation email with instructions to join the conversation.

When the Show teammate online status toggle is enabled, customers can see when your teammates are online.

Users can view any previous conversations in the conversation list. An AI-generated summary of each conversation will be displayed in the panel, and users can click a conversation to view the full thread.

If using an AI agent: If customers ask to speak with a human, a Playbook escalation occurs, the AI agent's own instructions call for escalation, AI is unable to answer the customer’s questions, or a Playbook encounters a technical error, they can submit their email address and Resolve will automatically create a follow up ticket with a summary of the conversation so far.

Customers will receive a notification email with a 6-digit code during the verification process. Once verified, customers only need to re-verify once every 7 days. If auto-verification is enabled, customers who are already signed in to your app can be recognized automatically and may not need to complete the email verification step.

For escalated conversations, users can add attachments by clicking the paper clip icon in the composer.

When a customer starts an interaction, a conversation is created in the shared inbox. Until Resolve hands the conversation off to a human teammate, the conversation won’t be available for interaction, including replying, and inbox rules won’t apply. Once the handoff occurs, the conversation will follow any assignment or routing rules configured for the inbox.

When chatting with an anonymous chat visitor, Front will auto-generate a name using a random color and animal string. e.g. Purple panda. Once a customer is verified and Front identifies them as a contact, the customer will display as the sender.

If using an AI agent, it can reply directly to the customer, add internal comments, and use other Front features just like any other conversation.

The following events will trigger an escalation:

1. Customer asks for a human teammate or escalation

2. Customer expressed dissatisfaction

3. Instructions defined for AI agent

4. Playbook defines handoff, including when Playbook encounters a technical error

Step 1

Click the gear icon, navigate to workspace settings, then select Channels in the left sidebar.

Step 2

Select Resolve from the channel list, then click Connect channel.

Step 3

Enter a name for your channel, then select the inbox you want conversations to route to. We highly recommend creating a brand new inbox. If you plan to use your Resolve channel with AI features, we recommend checking the box for the Enable Front AI setting.

Step 4

Click Create to finish creating your new channel. You’ll automatically be navigated to your channel settings to continue the configuration. Each tab is described below.

Use the Build tab in channel settings to manage how visitors get support, reply time indicators, email notifications, and more.

Choose how you want your customers to get support when interacting with your Resolve channel.

• Autopilot: Select this option if you want an Autopilot AI agent to handle customer questions. For the best results, configure it with both knowledge sources and Playbooks.

  • Knowledge sources: Used to answer FAQ-type questions. e.g., How to change a reservation time.

  • Playbooks: Used to define what to do in specific scenarios. e.g., Escalate to an agent when the customer requests a refund.

• Structured flows: Select this option if you want customers to interact with a chatbot or fill out a form. Customers go through a guided flow to resolve an issue, or get escalated to a human. See this article to learn more.

• Human support only: Select this option if you want customers to directly connect to human teammates for support. This is your standard chat support experience.

When toggled on, customers will see when your teammates are online when they open the Resolve experience.

For Autopilot or structured flows: When toggled on, customers will see a notice explaining they will be notified by email so they don’t have to wait for a response in the widget.

Use the Set reply expectations setting to configure the message customers see after they trigger an escalation. This lets customers know when they can expect a reply from a human during business hours and offline hours.

• Toggled off: Customers will see a general “We will reply as soon as we can” message.

• Toggled on:

  • During business hours: Select the reply time you’d like customers to see.

  • After hours: Displays the next business hours start time

When toggled on, customers can see the custom ticket status applied to their conversation.

When toggled on, teammates will see escalated conversations as an email thread instead of chat bubbles.

Select the email address customers see when they receive notification emails from Resolve. By default, hello@front.com is selected. We highly recommend selecting one of your own email addresses in this setting. For the best experience, we recommend using an address on a notification-oriented domain (for example, notifications@yourcompany.com) rather than a personal inbox. Customer replies to notification emails aren’t supported and won’t be added to the associated conversation. Additionally, when a user is invited to a conversation, they will not receive notifications until they have been authenticated.

Add conversation starters for your most common requests or questions to make it easier for customers to get started. 

Set up outbound chat messages on your website to boost engagement and help customers quickly start conversations with your team.

When adding proactive messages, you can configure the message customers see, the website URL they see it on, and who you want to display the message to. Rich text is supported.

Use the Customize tab in channel settings to personalize the look and feel of your Resolve experience. You’ll see some of your changes in the preview on the right.

Select the color scheme for the page/widget, enter hex codes for the accent colors Front will use to create a theme, upload logos, and select how you want the text area to look.

Edit the public-facing welcome message, and decide whether you want to display a compliance disclaimer or Front branding. 

See our developer documentation to learn more about the Personalization setting to automatically collect basic and custom events. e.g. current URL path, locale, browser type, etc.

Select whether you’d like customers to hear a notification sound when they receive new messages.

Use the Deploy tab in channel settings to access the information needed to embed Resolve into your web pages.

💡 Tip 1: We recommend visiting the Front-hosted page URL to test the Resolve experience before going live with customers. 

💡 Tip 2: If you need more control over how you embed Resolve into your web pages, use the Resolve SDK available on our Developer Portal.

To deploy Resolve as a standalone, full-page experience, copy the URL and embed it in your web pages. 

• When you ask Resolve questions using the URL, you can test how Autopilot handles questions and review the conversations created in your Front inboxes. 

• The built-in Preview feature on the right-hand side in channel settings doesn’t currently support back-and-forth conversations with AI. However, this is on the roadmap for a future release.

• Once you’re confident in the Resolve experience, you can link it into the pages where you want customers to receive support.

To embed Resolve as a widget in your web pages, click the Sidebar widget or Floating widget settings to view and copy the widget code snippet. Paste this code into your website editor.

Widgets must be embedded on https websites. Local file:// environments are not supported.

The following table provides information about the initialization attributes you can add to the script. If you need further control over the widget, use the Resolve SDK as described in our Developer Portal.

To add the sidebar widget to a Front help center, click Manage Help centers, then navigate to the Settings tab under Site management. Toggle on the Embeddable widget setting, select Resolve, then select the Resolve channel you’ve configured. Click Save to finish.

See this article to learn how to embed a Resolve channel as a full page in your Front help center. This allows customers to submit requests and view existing ones in a portal-like experience.

Auto-verification allows you to connect the widget to your existing login system so customers who are already signed in to your app are automatically recognized when they open the widget. If the customer is already logged in, Resolve can verify their identity using a secure token, so no additional email verification step is required in the widget experience.

When auto-verification is enabled, your server signs each user’s identity with a secret key so Resolve can verify that they are who they claim to be.

See this article to learn more about Resolve analytics.

Use the Routing tab to change the default inbox you previously selected, or create rules to automate additional workflows for your channel. See this article to learn more about inbox settings.

Use the Settings tab to configure additional channel settings:

• Internal label for the channel

• Undo send timing

• All teammates can reply

• Assign conversations on first reply

• Close conversations

No. You only need access to the Autopilot add-on if you want to use the Resolve channel with an Autopilot AI agent.

Only English is officially supported at this time. While it is possible to use this feature with other languages, unexpected results may occur. In general, Front AI will respond to a single inbound message in the same language. However if multiple languages are used at any point in the conversation messages there's no guarantee that it'll make the language choice a human would. Our AI vendors support 40+ common languages.

Each message has a 25 MB limit. You can send and receive the following file types: .csv, .gif, .jpg, .json, .mov, .mp3, .mp4, .pdf, .png, .txt, .wav, .xlsx, .xml

If you’d like to use the AI functionality available in Resolve, you must purchase the Autopilot add-on and create and configure a new Resolve channel in your workspace settings. You can easily migrate from Front Chat, as Resolve includes the same online indicators and flexible time goal (SLA) settings. However, migrating directly from AI Answers is not currently supported.

Conversations handled by Resolve move through inbox statuses on their own, so no manual triage is needed.

• While Autopilot is handling a conversation, the conversation moves to Waiting

  • While Autopilot is actively generating a response, the conversation will be be in the Open status

• Once the conversation is resolved, it moves to the Resolved status

• If the conversation is escalated to a human, the conversation moves back to Open

Yes. You can configure guardrails in AI agent instructions so that sensitive or complex topics are automatically escalated to a human teammate.

No. You can only connect a single AI agent to your Resolve channel at this time. 

No. You can only select an Autopilot AI agent to your Resolve channel at this time.

Not through the settings at this time. However, developers can pass custom code snippets through the widget embed code for use in Playbooks today. Broader support for using page context directly in the settings is planned for a future update.

Only connect customer-facing content sources to Resolve, and keep internal documentation separate. We recommend using curated or approved collections to ensure only appropriate content is used in customer responses.

See this article for additional AI FAQs.

Resolve is available on all plans. For the latest Starter plan, you must have Resolve set as your company's channel type.

Connecting an Autopilot AI agent to a Resolve channel requires the Autopilot add-on. See the Autopilot article for more information for AI agent pricing.