Automate actions with custom rules

For any team, you'll often find repeatable administrative tasks that can be automated — like assigning a specific type of conversation to an in-house expert or tagging certain messages for tracking and analytics purposes. This is what Front rules are for made for! In this article, we've outlined some commonly used automations.

For a more thorough breakdown of Front rules, check out our Understanding rules article, and see the full list of rule conditions here.

Front rules allow you to automate a wide range of actions, so you can save time in the long run. Head to your Settings and between My rules, to create rules for your individual inbox, or Rules to create rules for a shared inbox. Rules are customizable and flexible so you can apply a set of actions to a specific inbox or a set of inboxes — whatever you need.

Every rule needs three things:

1. When trigger conditions determine when a rule will be applied

2. If filter conditions determine the criteria that have to be met in order for that rule to be applied

3. Then action conditions specify the set of actions that will be applied to the conversation if the rule is processed

Need some inspiration? A collection of our most popular rules and templates are in our rules library in the app!

Use this rule to move messages to another inbox based on a subject line, SLA commitments, or even a group the sender belongs to.

Note: When rules move a conversation from one workspace to another workspace, or from private inbox to a shared inbox, any tags that were on the conversation will be removed upon the move. However, if you manually move a conversation this way, the tags will be retained. Likewise, if rules move the conversations between inboxes in the same shared, tags will also be retained. Also, if a rule moves a conversation that is currently assigned to a teammate into an inbox that the assigned teammate does not have access to, then the conversation will automatically be unassigned from the teammate to respect their level of access.

Send an immediate reply to your customer so they know you’re getting back to them soon. Set up a rule to automatically reply to your customer with one of your message templates. See here for an in-depth guide in setting up auto-reply rules.

Automatically categorize your emails by adding tags based on the content, sender, and more. You can also create analytics reports based on tags.

Evenly disperse messages among a group of teammates by automating assignments with round-robin rules.

Automatically add a comment to the conversation, including mentioning teammates by typing the @ symbol and their username. You can also use Markdown to format the comment that your rule will post.

This is helpful to give internal tips at specific times in your automated processes, such as reminding teammates to confirm customer identities; pointing out conversations that should be moved to other inboxes; or highlighting certain events in a conversation's activity history. 

Here you'll find instructions for how to use a private rule to notify teammates on conversations in your individual inbox.

When working in the individual inbox, simply assigning a conversation to a teammate via a rule will not work as that teammate will not have access to the private conversation. You'll need to first notify the teammate in order to grant them access to the conversation, then it can be assigned.

Step 1

Go to Personal Settings and select Rules then Add an Individual Rule.

Step 2
Add your rule to notify a teammate on conversations in your individual inbox. Feel free to customize the triggers or add various predictive qualities as conditions for when you'd like the rule to trigger. The Then section will need to have action "Notify teammates" and select all appropriate teammates. When notified, this conversation will appear in that teammate's Assigned to Me section.

Once the teammate has been invited to your private conversation via the notification rule, they can access the conversation in theirShared with Mesection and assign the conversation to themselves manually.

To support all the benefits of tagging, Front allows you to set up rules that require certain conversations to be tagged before they can be moved or archived. This way, you can ensure all your messages are categorized correctly; enabling better workflows, automations, and analytics. Learn more about required tagging here.

A Smart Rule is a type of rule that adapts intelligently to the different messages and workflows of your team to automatically run actions that save you countless hours. What makes a Smart Rule smart is the dynamic variables that decipher information that would otherwise require a human to analyze. Learn about Smart Rules use cases here.

All Front plans can create rules using our rule library templates. 

Custom rules are available on the Growth plan or above, as well as advanced rule triggers and actions, SLA rules, and load-balancing rules. Company rules are available only on the Scale plan or above. Some legacy plans with different names may also have these features.