A deep dive into Front AI Quality Assurance (and a more flexible alternative)

Let's be honest: manual quality assurance for customer support is a tough job. It’s slow, only covers a tiny sliver of tickets, and often just depends on which conversations a manager happens to click on that day. It feels less like a data-backed strategy and more like a series of random spot checks.

AI-powered QA is supposed to fix all that. By automatically looking at 100% of your customer chats and emails, these tools can give you consistent, unbiased feedback and a full picture of your service quality. Front is one of the companies in this space with its own built-in AI features.

This guide will walk you through Front’s offering, called Front AI Quality Assurance (or Smart QA). We’ll break down how it actually works, what it costs, and where it falls short. We’ll also look at a more flexible option for teams who want top-tier AI QA without having to switch their entire helpdesk.

What is Front AI Quality Assurance (Smart QA)?

Front’s AI quality assurance tool is officially named "Smart QA." It’s an AI feature built directly into the Front platform that automatically reviews and scores customer conversations. The idea is that instead of a manager spending hours manually sifting through 2-5% of tickets, Front’s AI quality assurance tool scans every single closed ticket to grade how well it was handled.

According to Front, the main perks are:

• Automated reviews: It cuts down the time managers spend on manual audits, freeing them up to focus on coaching and bigger-picture strategy.

• Comprehensive reporting: It creates Internal Quality Service (IQS) reports that give leaders a full overview of how agents and teams are performing.

• Customizable scorecards: Managers can set up scoring criteria based on what’s most important to their business, like tone, professionalism, or personalization.

• Coaching insights: By spotting trends across thousands of interactions, it can point out specific areas where agents might need a bit more training.

The most important thing to get about Smart QA is that it’s baked into the Front platform. You can't use it unless you're already using Front as your helpdesk. This might seem handy at first, but as we’ll get into, it can create some real headaches for teams that aren't looking to completely change their support setup.

How Front AI Quality Assurance works (and its limitations)

AI QA tools like Front's Smart QA use some pretty cool tech, mostly Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning. In simple terms, the AI reads and understands the text in a conversation, kind of like a human would. It picks up on things like customer sentiment (are they happy or frustrated?), the agent's tone, and whether the agent followed company guidelines.

The AI then scores the conversation against a scorecard you've set up and flags interactions that might need a human manager to take a closer look. This gives you a much, much wider view of quality than manual reviews ever could.

The problem with a closed ecosystem

A big downside of platform-specific tools like Front Smart QA is that they live in a bubble. Front’s AI is only trained on conversations, knowledge base articles, and data that exist inside Front. If your team is like most, you probably have important information scattered in other places, and the AI just won’t see it.

An infographic explaining how a flexible tool can unify knowledge from various sources, a key alternative approach to Front AI Quality Assurance.

This is where more modern, flexible AI platforms really shine. A tool like eesel AI works like an intelligent layer that connects to all your knowledge sources, no matter where they are. This helps it build a more complete and accurate understanding of your business, which leads to smarter and more contextual evaluations.

Features and challenges of an integrated approach

Deciding to use Front just for its AI QA tool is a pretty big decision. It’s a good idea to weigh the pros and cons of its tightly-knit approach before you jump in.

The benefits of an all-in-one platform

To be fair, there are a couple of real advantages to keeping everything under one roof.

• A single workspace: The main appeal of Front's model is its simplicity. With QA built right in, you don’t have to manage or pay for another piece of software. Everything from ticketing to team collaboration and quality assurance is right there in one dashboard.

• Streamlined reporting: Since your ticketing and QA data live in the same system, it’s easier to see the connection between the quality of a conversation and key metrics like how long it took to resolve or the customer satisfaction score.

The challenges of an all-in-one platform

But those benefits come with some serious trade-offs that can corner you and limit your options later on.

• Vendor lock-in: This is the elephant in the room. To use Smart QA, you have to move your entire customer support operation over to Front. This isn't just flipping a switch on new software; it’s a huge project that involves high costs, retraining the whole team, and the very real risk of messing up your customer workflows.

• Lack of flexibility: Once you’re on the Front platform, you're stuck with their way of doing things. If Smart QA doesn’t quite fit your team’s needs as they change, you can't just unplug it and try a different QA tool. You’re stuck with what they give you.

• No trying before you buy: With Front, you can't really see how its AI will perform on your team's actual historical data before you commit. You have to take a leap of faith, move everything over, and just hope it works out. That's a massive risk. In contrast, platforms like eesel AI have a powerful simulation mode. You can connect it to your existing helpdesk, whether that's Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom, and test its AI agent on thousands of your past tickets. This gives you a clear, data-backed prediction of how it will perform before you ever let it talk to a live customer.

A view of an AI simulation mode, which provides a data-backed alternative to tools like Front AI Quality Assurance that lack a trial period.

Front AI Quality Assurance pricing

You can’t just buy Front's Smart QA as a separate product. Its price is rolled into Front's overall subscription plans, and for most of them, it’s an extra add-on.

Let's break down the pricing from their official site. On the Starter plan, which costs $25 per seat per month, Smart QA is available as a $20/seat/month add-on. If you're on the Professional plan at $65 per seat per month, it’s also a $20/seat/month add-on. The feature is only included when you jump up to the Enterprise plan, which is $105 per seat per month.

So, what's the real cost? If you have a team of 10 agents on the Professional plan, you're not just paying $650 a month. To get the QA feature, your cost jumps to $85 per seat. That’s a total of $850 per month ($10,200 per year), and it locks you into using Front for absolutely everything.

This pricing gets particularly expensive for teams who are happy with their current helpdesk and just want to add a smart AI QA layer on top. You’re being asked to pay for a whole new platform just to get one feature.

A flexible alternative: Adding an AI layer to existing tools

For teams who want the power of AI without the pain of switching platforms, there's a much better way. Instead of ripping out the tools you already have, you can add an intelligent AI layer like eesel AI that plugs directly into the helpdesk and software you already use.

eesel AI was designed as the modern alternative for teams who care about flexibility, speed, and having control. It's built to solve the problems that closed platforms like Front create.

• Go live in minutes, not months: eesel AI is completely self-serve. You can sign up, connect your current helpdesk with a single click, and launch an AI agent without ever having to talk to a salesperson. There are no long onboarding sessions or disruptive migration projects.

• Unify all your knowledge: Unlike Front, eesel AI isn’t stuck with just the data in your helpdesk. It learns from all the places your team keeps information, including Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, and Slack. This gives it much richer and more accurate context for judging agent performance and providing genuinely helpful answers.

• Test with confidence: The simulation mode is a huge deal. Before turning anything on for your customers, you can run eesel AI on your old tickets to see exactly how it would have performed. You get a data-backed forecast of its resolution rate and potential cost savings, which takes all the guesswork out of the equation.

• Total control and customization: With eesel AI, you get very specific control over your automation. You can decide exactly which types of tickets the AI should handle and what actions it can take. This goes way beyond simple scoring; you can build workflows that automatically tag tickets, send them to the right team, or even look up order information from Shopify using custom API calls.

A screenshot showing AI customization rules, illustrating a flexible alternative to the fixed approach of Front AI Quality Assurance.

Front AI Quality Assurance: Choose the right AI strategy for your team

Front AI Quality Assurance is a solid feature, but it comes with a steep price: getting locked into an expensive, all-or-nothing platform. The real choice for support leaders today isn't about a single feature; it's about your entire AI strategy. Do you want to move your whole tech stack and bet on one vendor for everything, or do you want to add a flexible and powerful AI layer to the tools you already know and trust?

For teams that want to stay agile and in control, eesel AI is the clear path forward. It improves the tools you already love, giving you advanced AI capabilities without the disruption, risk, and high cost of a forced platform switch. It lets you call the shots, allowing you to build the exact AI-powered workflows your team actually needs.

Ready to see what AI can do with your current setup? You can sign up for eesel AI for free and simulate an AI agent on your own historical tickets in just a few minutes.