Transcript for "Front Product Recap: January '26 Edition": Hello, everyone. I am here. It's Helena, and I'm here to welcome you to our front product release recap for January 2026. So hello, everybody. Thank you, Caroline, for keeping the room warm while I got in here. Welcome. I am Helena. I am on Front's product education team. I may have crossed paths with you in the past, in our live office hours or, in support because I used to work on the Front support team. So, I also have Caroline here with me. She's on the product marketing team, and she's gonna be helping us out in the chat, dropping some links, sharing some more resources for us. So, we are today going to cover a ton of releases that we have had in the past three months as well as a look into the future for things that are upcoming. So, thank you for your patience, and let's get started. Alright. So, we are breaking down today's presentation into four different product categories. We've got improvements to our inbox. This is all feedback that's been straight taken form from our users. We released a really big inbox redesign last summer, and we've been continuing to get a ton of feedback about that redesign. And so we are continuously launching more things. They are all now live after we ran an open beta in our our front community. I'll share more info about that in a bit as well. Second category is smart AI replies that are gonna help your team respond faster, more consistently. And thirdly, another AI category is workflows and automations built to help you handle complexity and help you scale your operations. And, fourthly, we've got deeper integrations that will let you do more without leaving You've never been able to do as much as you can today all within Front without leaving Front, but in your other tools. So I'm excited to share more about that if you haven't already seen it. Also, as I'm talking through today's presentation, if you do have questions, please click over to the q and a feature in the webinar and submit any questions that you have about things I'm talking about. We won't have time to do a live q and a today, but we will bring these questions back to our product team and get them answered, and we're gonna post them to the community. So Caroline had just posted her first link, which was, the link to where we're gonna post all of these. We're also going to be putting up the recording from today. So if you have teammates who wanted to come, couldn't make it, you can send them this link. What I'd like for you to do, I invite you to click subscribe on that, post from Caroline, that she posted in the chat. Once you click subscribe, then you're gonna get updates about when we post the recording and when we answer the q and a. So lots of resources still to come. They're not even up there yet. So just click subscribe if you wanna get updated. Alright. And just a quick a quick plug for Front Community while you're there, clicked into that link. You'll see Front Community, amazing resource. We have live office hours there every week. You can sign up in the events tab. We've got self paced training courses. There's a product change log if you're ever curious about what are the new features. There's also a feature request portal. There's discussions with users, and the Front team, our support team's in there all day answering questions. There's even a little AI bot, on the bottom right that can answer your questions about Front instantaneously. So you don't even need to ask support. That's hooked up to our knowledge base. So check that out, a ton of resources, and we are about to jump into our actual presentation and product recap. And I just wanna say that, before we dive in, a quick reminder that I'm sharing a ton of stuff today. It's our general product direction. It's not a commitment to deliver specific exact features as they are displayed in this slide. I always have to say that before we get into it, but now we can finally go for it. Alright. So, let's start with our very first, product pillar, which is inbox clarity and speed. Let's talk about what we've changed based on your feedback. So what we released, first was, what I'll talk about first is that one click navigation. You now have your inbox, calendar, contacts, sequences, and analytics all visible on the left vertical sidebar. It's no longer hidden behind secondary clicks or other menus, so you can directly navigate through all of these product areas directly here in your navigation bar. One other resource I'd like to share with you here that's very relevant is we now have a beta group for the inbox experience. It's open to anybody that is interested in giving feedback, seeing early designs, getting early access. So we have that link, that Caroline will share in the chat as well. Once you're once you've activated your Front Community account, you can come in here and just join the group. Anyone that has an active account in Front Community can join the group. And you'll see in there, there is already if you're not already in there, there's a ton of resources and designs being shared. So if you're interested in giving further feedback and seeing more early designs, join that beta group, and you will have the chance to talk to our product team directly there. Alright. Second feature is we have a customizable sidebar where you can order the sections to your liking. So your tasks, your discussions, moving your sidebar sections up and down. So now your sidebar is curated to reflect how you work. Alright. And then also more info at a glance. This was highly, highly requested by our users to show more information without clicking on stuff. So you'll see that, we added back in workspace and inbox indicators in your conversation list. And, also, at the top of every single conversation, there's more information now that you can expand to see. So there's tags, there's objects. In the top screenshot, you'll see there's, like, a little colored inbox icon, a little mailbox icon. That reflects the color of the inbox that you've set for this inbox so you can see at a glance what this is. And, also, when you hover on it, it shows you the name of the inbox. So just giving you more access to more information, to help you triage and prioritize your work. Alright. And we've got, some things that are coming soon. This one is, we will be also extending that redesign to Front's mobile app so that the experience feels consistent. We wanna empower you to be able to work quickly on the go. So your mobile app will soon have that same cleaner layout, that streamlined navigation. And we're also going to be improving the speed and just overall performance while we're at it on the mobile app. Again, design's not final, but it's going to reflect the same experience that you do have on the desktop. Alright. Let's check out the second, pillar, which is AI quality quality AI responses. So, we listened to you. You guys gave a lot of feedback about how you thought our AI replies could be better, so we made quite a few updates. And, the first update is that you, the customers that are already maybe using Copilot or if you're on our enterprise plan, you have access to something called Copilot, which essentially is a suite of features that is meant to act as your, like, personal assistant in Front. Because we we users of Front, we're using Front pretty much all day long. We're using it a lot. So it has a lot of information that it knows about our customers, about our conversations. And so using that is kind of one of our biggest you know, one of your biggest resources when it comes to running your business is the information that is in front. So we're trying to, create a copilot in front for you that will allow you to work more quickly. One of those features is compose for Copilot. So what we released here is that now you can have this chat GPT like back and forth conversation in your composer. You're talking to your copilot and giving it an instruction in just plain language, and it will write the draft for you. It's not going to, you know, predict. This specific feature is not predicting the reply, which is another copilot. That's called suggested reply. This one is you are actually getting to tell it exactly what to do, and you can have it back and forth. You can tell it to shorten something, translate something, fixing grammar or tone. So, this is very cool if you haven't already tried it. And, speaking of tone, our AI replies also can now have, automatic tone matching. So these are different from that previous slide that I was just on. This is when we generate a suggested reply or an automatic reply for you. We are automatically now matching the tone from your historical messages that you've sent. So now it actually sounds like you and your brand. That was also very highly requested, and our customers have given us very, very good feedback about how they're we're just they're just so much more on brand and more comfortable using auto replies, AI powered auto replies now. A couple of other AI features that we've released is that Front AI can now actually read your attachments and messages. So maybe a customer sends you a message, and they have an attachment. And they're referencing something in the attachment that they didn't actually write out in the email with reg you know, with text, Front AI can now actually say see that, okay. They're referencing something in the attachment. They can go and read the attachment and then create a response that is also referencing the attachment. So that is new. Very exciting. And lastly, you can now sync knowledge from, you can already sync knowledge from Notion, but coming soon, we are adding Google Docs, SharePoint, and Confluence. So if you use any of these tools to host your company knowledge, Front AI can now add that in to inform its automated and suggested replies. So super exciting. Those will be available soon. Alright. And a couple more AI features. So if you have been using Copilot and or Autopilot, a new feature is that you can now track how effective they are in the new analytics reports. So you can see how many suggested replies or auto replies were used and track reply or resolution time. So and in fact, if you click on any of these metrics, if you wanna dive deeper, you can see all of these suggested or auto replied messages that were actually sent. Whereas, you know, before, maybe you had to you if you wanted to see them, you had to go manually look through your inbox for what was sent. Now they're all collected together in this analytics report for you. And as kind of a quick, recap, if you're not familiar with what autopilot is, it it diff it's different from Copilot. Autopilot is just the automated version of the responses that we are suggesting you with Copilot. So Copilot says, hey. You might want to respond with something like this. Do you like it? Yes or no? You can choose. Autopilot, when Front feels that we have high confidence in automatically sending responses for you, we will suggest those topics to you and show you this is what we would respond, and you can turn on those auto responses per topic. So you have very granular control over what topics get the autopilot responses. And the the impact of that is that you now don't have to manually review and or send those responses. Autopilot is confident in sending it for you. Once we get your confidence after your review and you turn it on, then you're just you're just letting the AI handle those inquiries for you, and your agents and your team can focus on the actual complex issues that require human decision making. So that's just a quick recap on what autopilot is if you're not familiar. Alright. And then, also, this is coming soon. You'll be able to review the auto replies and suggested replies that were either sent or rejected. And the key part here is that you're gonna be able to provide guidance on how to improve those responses. So what we mean here is that you can now look through a list of com or a list of messages that were not exactly the right response, and you can tell Front AI this is how you would respond correctly, and Front AI will learn from that. So this is also very highly requested, and we're very excited that this will be coming soon. Okay. And then, another one that's coming next quarter. And by the way, France, q one starts in February. So when I when you see the little q '1 label on these slides, it's referring to, February and the next three months following that, starting in February. Alright. So the something that we are working on right now is that, it's a major upgrade to Copilot. We we try to always have Copilot generate a suggested reply, and the way it does that is by looking at your past conversations and or the knowledge sources that you verified and connected to Front for it to use. However, Copilot is not always going to find a matching historical conversation that perfectly answers this question. So when those situations happen, when a suggested reply isn't available or when deeper context is needed, we are working on this next generation of copilot, which is that we want it to be a partner to help you figure out that that reply that you should be writing. And how are we going to do that? We're gonna do it in kind of these three ways that are listed in these bullet points. The first one is we wanna help you research. So earlier, I mentioned one of your biggest resources is your own work that you've been doing in front, this huge repository of information. So what we'd like Copilot to help you with is that you can ask it any question, and it will give you an answer based on all of the information that is in your front or that least in the inboxes that you've turned it on for because you can turn it on and off for your inboxes. So you can ask the copilot any question, and you can quickly add the responses into a draft that you're working on. So in, a one click, insert this information into the draft that I'm working on. This is currently in development. It's launching next quarter. Another feature that's also coming next quarter is summarizing, so giving you more relevant recaps and suggested next steps that, you know, may be a really long thread. It would have taken you very quite a quite a long time to catch up on. But Copilot can give you a a concise summary, and it can suggest to you, this is what I think you should do next. So that saves you a ton of time. This is also launching in q one. And, also, we will be the third bullet point is getting knowledge suggestions. So even though we don't have the reply drafted for you as a suggestion, we can suggest to you knowledge sources so that you can go and look at the proper in the proper articles for you to come up with the best reply in this situation. So that is kind of the next generation of copilot that we are currently building, and we really want it to be a very powerful assistant for you to work faster and also to have access to all of the information that you do have in Front. Okay. And then a couple of more updates to power the AI automation flywheel. Front AI is now available on Slack. We are going to get into that a little bit more in the integration section. And, also, Smart CSAT, which is another AI feature, in the previously, it would reopen your conversations. Now it's not going to reopen your conversations. This was a highly requested feature. And, also, now in the Smart QA report, you can see the average score. And, also, coming soon, you can very quickly, find low score conversations as well. Okay. The next product pillar we'll talk about is AI workflow. So in in addition to those AI enhancements that we covered in the previous section, we also released a ton of new AI workflows that will allow you to automatically handle complex customer requests with autopilot. So we'll get into some rule templates and some AI playbooks and just more ways to help your customers self serve. Alright. So first thing is we, so rather than building a really long list of conditions, we are simply going to ask AI a question in natural language to help it decipher what to do with conversation. Autopilot is gonna read that your question that you've inputted, and then it's going to route the workflows into the right branching rule to determine how to respond to the customer inquiry. That sounds very, very complex. Let me try to break it down a little bit what's going on here. So, we already know that Front has rules. That is one of our top features that people come to Front for, and it and it literally, you know, runs half their business is you can automate so many things that you no longer have to spend time manually doing. So now we add autopilot to Mix, meaning that autopilot can automatically handle a lot of these things. Traditionally, rules were based on very specific, like, kind of hard coded events happening, triggers, and then actions. But now you can just give Autopilot an instruction on how to read this message and how to evaluate this message. So the example you're seeing on screen here is maybe a message comes in, and you are telling Autopilot to ask this question to about this case. Is the message about canceling the subscription? The potential outcomes could be yes, no, or no answer matched. If yes, then do these things. If no, then do these things. And if no answer matched, then do these things. So it's, automatically making more complex decisions for you. Not so complex that you're not comfortable handing it off to Autopilot, but, I'm sure there's at least a handful of things and workflows happening in your business that you can very clearly build out these standard operating processes for. And these are the things that are really perfect fit for this feature where AI can just triage these conversations, get them to the right place at least, and or it could send a specific response for you. Alright. The next feature, you can now use prompt based instructions to tell Autopilot to generate a personalized auto reply using conversation context and the dynamic variables that are connected to your external systems. So in the past, you could really just use rules to send a message template, and you have written out the message template to be this exact wording. Now autopilot can actually dynamically write a response based on the instructions that you're giving it. So every response might be different. It will be personalized to what the incoming request is, and now it's just a lot smarter in responding. So it can even pull in the other dynamic variables as you can see on the screen here. So this is a super, super powerful, feature that we've released. And lastly, you can also now have Autopilot extract details from customer messages. So, for example, like, cities and dates, and you can instruct Autopilot on how to action on those details that you've extracted. So, like, for example, you wanted to pull the cities and dates, and then you want to send it to the travel booking team for you. So all of these things can now actually be automated. We're very, very excited about this kind of suite of features that that are now available for autopilot. Okay. And, we also released company rule templates that are new. There are two new templates. To give you some context, if you're not familiar with company rules, these are, the highest level rules, the rules that power all rules. They can action on both your individual inboxes as well as your shared inboxes. Whereas workspace level rules only work on a specific individual workspace, aka shared inboxes, And then individual roles, obviously, only work in your individual inboxes. So company roles work for both both of those. And the two new ones that we have is, number one, you can mirror individual conversations in a shared inbox. What this means is that if you have a conversation in your own individual inbox, a company rule can take that conversation and expose it in the shared inbox so that your team has visibility. The use case for this might be, you have clients that are emailing you personally because clients, you know, clients like to do that. They have a relationship with you. They will email you, and that happens all day long. So in those cases, it might actually be beneficial for the rest of the team to have visibility into the conversations with this customer. And so you can set up this mirror and inbox company rule to say, you know, for example, for this company domain, mirror these conversations also in the team inbox. It doesn't change the fact that you will still respond. It still allows you to respond and maintain that relationship, but it gives the team automatic visibility into those conversations so that somebody else can jump in, someone can fill in for you when you're out. Your manager has an eye on things, or you as the manager can have an eye on the conversations that are happening with the clients. The other company role is, really, really beneficial for admins, enforcing company standards with safety nets for outbound messages. So you can now block teammates from sending messages under specific conditions. For example, certain domains you don't want people to be sending emails to. So you can now set rules and create conditions for this company rule to block outbound messages. And a couple more updates to scale your operations. The first one is that we now have company macros. So now you can share and maintain macros across the workspaces much like those rules. Now the macros macros are also on the company level. We can also manage permissions with teammate groups. So teammate groups is when you have a group, and there's a bunch of teammates listed under that, and now you can assign a new role to the group, and it'll apply to everybody under that's under that group that is listed within that group. So instead of now having to manually choose every single teammate to have certain permissions or roles and doing that manually one by one, you can just add them all to the same group and give them all the same permissions in one go. So super powerful for, just managing your workforce. And then thirdly, you can also now report by custom fields in analytics. This is coming soon. You can drill down, reports to better understand performance. Alright. And coming up, this is also something we're very excited about. This is a sneak peek. The team is hard at work on a new vision for natural language workflows that will give you give the admins a no code way to build really powerful AI workflows. So these this means that AI is going to recognize what to do with an inquiry, and then it's going to execute a full workflow according to exactly what you've described. So kind of giving you a perfect balance of automation and control, And we are we might maybe call this playbooks, AI playbooks in front. But, essentially, you can see on the screenshot, what's happening is that you can describe instead of, like, programming an exact trigger, like, in rules, like, oh, whenever an inbound message comes in or whenever a tag's added, you can just use plain language to describe when this playbook should start to be executed. So you can you can say when a customer expresses that their battery is not charging or having an issue, you can just describe that situation, and then you can tell AI for an AI the exact steps to execute. And the steps, as you can see, can get pretty complex. So you can add a list of steps that you wanted to run for you, and this becomes a playbook for these situations that you feel comfortable automating with AI. So this one will be coming next quarter. Another one coming next quarter is, we are working on a new vision for AI powered self-service support at scale we're gonna be launching next quarter. It's what do we mean by that? We are trying to do essentially three things. One, we want to resolve help help your customers resolve requests instantly. So, we want them to be able to self serve common workflows, like refunds and cancellation. They should be able to do that on their own without waiting for support, so we wanna provide them a way to do that. Also, the second thing is we would like for, help to be available twenty four seven without live chat staffing. So we this this new vision of self serve support, that is something that we would like to help you accomplish. And, also, thirdly, we wanna follow your processes. So, again, we've seen a lot of features where you get to define exactly what to do for the AI to do for you, and so you we want you to define your SOPs. Every request should run through your approved workflows, and it should deliver a very consistent outcome for you, once once it's set up. So this is coming soon. There will be more information shared. The the image you see, the GIF here is just conceptual. This could be one way that we might execute this. It may not, but this is kind of our vision, and we have very impactful goals in mind for how we want this to overvalue for you guys. Okay. And then our last product pillar is that of features that we've launched is we made a bunch of new improvements, the integrations for all the tools that you use the most. And so what are those? They are firstly, we now have a revamped Slack integration, and Slack is something that we know so many of our customers use. You can now automatically resolve conversations in Slack using Front Autopilot. You can also get suggested replies with Copilot. You can spot customer trends happening in Slack with topics, and you can get automatic agent, performance insights and CSAT insights, with you can you can get a discounted SmartQA CSAT bundle, but you can now do all of this in front without leaving front. And the customer continues to get a really wonder your customer continues to get a really wonderful Slack experience as they regularly do on Slack communicating with you. So this is great for our customers who, you who you provide provide, customer service to via Slack Connect and using private Slack channels. We know that is a common use case for Slack. So now you can bring those channels into Front. And as you can see in the GIF, you can do so many more things, directly in Front, and the customer will see it on Slack as they are used to, communicating with you. Alright. So, a couple of more Slack and Front features that we launched. We're not done with the Slack stuff. Aside from the AI updates, we've also made it, available for you to mention Slack users directly within Front. So you would just, like, at start use the at symbol and start typing in somebody's name. Their Slack user will actually the username will actually be, selectable for you. And then once you select them, the user that you've mentioned will just get a ping in Slack even though you did it in front. So super cool. You can also now send outbound messages to Slack, but within front. And soon, you are going to easily set up customer channels in bulk. So that is for that use case where we know you're providing, a lot of customer support to your clients via Slack, so you can now add them in bulk very soon. Alright. So also coming soon, a couple of these are already out, but we have been, in the past year, releasing a lot of deep native like integrations with voice and SMS providers. What I mean by deep integrations is, like, it looks so native and the experience is so much better in front than it used to be that it seems like we are the service providers for you, for your, SMS and voice, but we are not. These are integrations. So we've already rolled out Dialpad, Aircall, and RingCentral, and we are continuing to add on more. The next one will be Zoom contact center. So if you are a Zoom contact center user, you will soon be able to add that into Front and get a really wonderful integrated experience. Okay. The next feature that we are working on is a we we've redesigned the plug in experience for both Salesforce and HubSpot. Sorry. This is available now, not working on, but it's already available. We've launched a new Salesforce and HubSpot plug in experience. So another integration. It's like a sidebar, right sidebar integration. You have a new user experience in those plug ins. There is on demand contact sync, which is huge, and more easy and flexible ways to log conversations to the objects and contacts in those third party apps. So, just much easier ways for you to have access and make changes in your other CRMs that we know everyone is using. Okay. And then, lastly, we have for an even integrated more integrated experience, we have been building out our connectors product feature, which is essentially a way for you to access any third party tool that you have outside of and accessing them not only accessing them, but actioning within those apps without, again, leaving Front. So those are called connectors, and we have taken a couple of ones that we know are our customer are are really popular with our customers. The top three are Jira, HubSpot, Salesforce. We have prebuilt those connectors for you that you can now just turn on and use. And in fact, we are running, a couple of live workshops to help you turn it on, build the workflows that are specific to your company between these three, tools and Front. And we our goal is to have you walk away from these workshops having built those workflows and have them running. So it's three separate workshops, one for each of these features. And we have a link for you to sign up, which Caroline will put in the chat right now. If you have Salesforce, HubSpot, or Jira, or just interested in seeing how you can potentially work with these things within Front, sign up for one or two or three of these, workshops, and you will be able to learn exactly how to use them upfront. So, yeah, that brings us I've been talking for a long time. That actually brings us to the end of today's webinar. All of the things that I've covered, I want to also reiterate that we will be posting the link to the recording of our webinar today in the front community post, which we'll send just one more time. Thank you, Caroline. In this post, go click subscribe, and you'll get an update when we update you'll get notified in your inbox when we add the recording and also when we answer the q and a's from today. So, if you leave here today and you think of something or you're watching back of the recording and you think of something to ask, also, just hit reply on this community thread in this link and post your question. We are directly looping in our product team to answer all of the product specific questions that were covered today. So, yeah, we will make sure we get every question answered, and we welcome you to sign up for the connectors workshops. We are continuously rolling out many, many more resources. And, to continue just directly engaging with us, join Frank community, talk to us there, Come to our weekly live office hours. We love seeing you there and answering your questions. And I think that concludes today's session, And we are really excited to host these every quarter, and we will, be back hopefully next quarter to share with you a recap of things that we launched and things that are coming. And I know that we've received a ton of really great questions, so I'm really glad that you're all, excited about these features as we are because we're building them to be as impactful as possible. I do see one question that says where is the subscribe button? So when you click on that Front Community link, the subscribe button is at the bottom kind of middle of the post, at the end of the post. If you click the subscribe button of on that post, it will ask you to log in to Front Community if you're not already logged in. And if you've never logged in to Front Community before, you just use the same login that you have for Front. It's all connected through SSO on the back end for you. So if you're already a Front user, you just log in to this to Front Community the same way, activate your account, and then now you have access to all of the resources in Front Community. And I'll quickly just I'm just seeing a, question here that I can answer. Where can I find training for beginners? So if you look on Frank Community, there is a navigation bar across the very top of the page. There's, a link there's a tab there called academy. And so if you click on academy, that has a ton of self serve training, all the courses and things like that. So go there and start signing up for classes. They're all self paced. They're all free included with your front subscription already. So that's how you can get up to speed. And, yeah, that is all for today. One question that maybe is relevant before I end, will the presentation will will I share these slides? The slides themselves won't be shared. They will be included recording as you go through the recording. So in a way, they're they're shared within the recording. But, we will be sending out an email to everybody that registered with all of these follow-up resources. I just wanted to make sure I give them to you before the presentation ends so that you can look at them if you want to. But there is going to be an, an email following up with all of the things that I mentioned as well. So, yes, thank you so much for spending today with us. Hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you, Caroline, for all of the support, and we are very much looking forward to seeing you all again. Alright. Bye, everyone.