Customer Operations Platform Front Unveils New Features
Front, a customer operations platform, has unveiled a range of new features that turn it into a more complete customer support platform. The company is known for its omnichannel inbox, which aggregates all customer conversations in a single view, including emails, chat conversations, SMS, and social media messages.
The Power of AI
By bringing these features under one roof, Front can use artificial intelligence (AI) to generate smarter automatic responses, allowing teams to focus on what’s important. According to Front co-founder and CEO Mathilde Collin, customer service teams face a "carrot-and-stick situation." The stick is the pressure from the market to do more with a fixed budget, or even less. But the carrot is all the technological advances around AI that promise to make their team more productive than ever.
The Future of Customer Support
Collin believes that instead of saying that AI will destroy jobs and customer support jobs will disappear, it’s going to bring productivity improvements that will free up time to focus on more complex situations. Customer service used to be a job of repetitive questions and answers, what Collin calls "transactional conversations" – one question, one answer. With AI, it will become table stakes to get instant answers to these questions. And your team will only be working on the most complex cases.
Current Challenges in Customer Support
According to Collin, customer service teams currently spend 90% of their time completing transactional tasks. Thanks to AI, this could become the opposite – with customer service teams spending 90% of their time on complex tasks. When you think about legacy platforms like Zendesk or Freshdesk, they were designed for high-volume transactional service where collaboration just isn’t as important to answer tickets. But that simply won’t be good enough. You’ll need tools that bring all your customer-facing teams under one roof.
An Integrated Knowledge Base
Front is launching an integrated knowledge base in Front. Customers can browse and search for information just like in any customer support knowledge base. But that’s not the reason Front is adding a knowledge base. There is value in going wide when you’re an enterprise SaaS company right now, as it means that your customers can replace more specialized products – especially in a year when big companies are reviewing SaaS budgets to find some contracts that they can cancel.
Benefits of the Knowledge Base
Front’s CEO Mathilde Collin says that there is value in going wide and expanding into new areas. "We’re not just building a knowledge base, we’re building an ecosystem of tools that help customer support teams succeed." The integrated knowledge base will allow customers to access relevant information quickly and easily, reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks.
Future Plans for Front
Front is committed to continuing its mission of providing innovative solutions to customer support teams. With the new features unveiled recently, it’s clear that the company is dedicated to using AI to improve productivity and efficiency in customer service. As Collin puts it, "We’re just getting started, and we’re excited to see where this journey takes us."
Conclusion
Front’s new features and commitment to innovation make it an exciting player in the customer operations platform space. With its focus on AI and automation, Front is well-positioned to help customer support teams succeed in a rapidly changing landscape.
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Related Topics
- AI
- Customer Support
- Front
- Knowledge Base
- Omnichannel Inbox
