A complete guide to the Front chatbot

If you’re using Front, you know it’s a powerhouse for pulling all your customer conversations into one shared inbox. But as your team grows and support requests pile up, you’re probably looking at AI and automation to keep things from getting out of hand. Naturally, Front has its own answer to this.

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about the native Front chatbot. We’ll get into its features, how to set it up, its pretty complex pricing, and some of the major limitations you’ll run into. While the built-in bot is a decent starting point, you’ll probably find, like many teams, that you need a more powerful AI platform to really get a handle on automation and bring all your company knowledge together.

What is the Front chatbot?

The Front chatbot is the built-in tool you can use to create automated conversations inside Front Chat. It’s not a separate product, but a feature baked right into the platform. The idea is that it acts as the first point of contact for anyone reaching out through the chat widget on your website or app.

Think of it as the first line of defense for your support team. Its main job is to do the initial busywork of a conversation. According to Front’s own docs, it’s mostly used for a few key things:

• Grabbing the basics: The bot can ask for essential details like a visitor’s name, email, or what their issue is about before a human ever has to jump in.

• Answering the easy stuff: For those simple, repetitive questions, the chatbot can fire off pre-written answers, saving your agents from typing out the same response a dozen times a day.

• Qualifying sales leads: It can ask a few questions to gather contact info and other details, helping filter and send potential leads over to the right sales team.

It’s all designed to work right inside the Front ecosystem, acting as a gatekeeper so your agents can spend their time on conversations that actually need a human brain.

Key features of the Front chatbot

Front gives you a set of tools to build and manage your chatbot, all found within the admin settings. It has some handy features, but it’s worth taking a closer look at what it can actually do.

Visual flow builder

Front gives you a no-code, visual builder that lets you map out chatbot conversations with a drag-and-drop interface. You can create different paths, or "branches," for the conversation to take based on what a user types or selects. This is great for non-technical folks, like support managers, who want to build and tweak flows without having to bother an engineer.

Step types

The builder uses different "steps" that you piece together to create your flow. They mostly fall into three camps:

• What your customers see: These are the interactive parts of the chat. This includes sending a simple message, asking a multiple-choice question, collecting specific text like an order number, or asking an open-ended question.

• What happens behind the scenes: These steps work in the background to manage the conversation. You can set up branches based on keywords in a customer’s message, your team's business hours, or data you have on the visitor. You can also have a step automatically add a tag to the conversation to make routing easier.

• Actions in other apps: There’s a "Send app request" step that allows the chatbot to look up information in another system, like checking on an order status. Be warned, though: this is only on the Enterprise plan and requires setting up a Connector, which can get pretty technical.

Handoff and conversation management

Once the bot has done what it can, you need a way to either pass the conversation to a person or close it out. The "End of path" step gives you three choices:

1. Create a conversation and keep the chat open: This is your standard handoff. The conversation, along with the full bot transcript, pops up in your team's inbox for an agent to take over.

2. Archive the conversation: If the chatbot solved the customer's problem, it can just archive the chat so it doesn't add to your team's unread count.

3. Create a follow-up email conversation: If someone starts a chat after hours, the bot can grab their email and create a ticket for the team to deal with the next day.

This tight connection to the Front inbox is the native bot’s biggest plus, since it keeps everything neatly in one system.

Setting up your Front chatbot: Customization and limitations

Getting a basic bot running is pretty simple, but once you start trying to do anything more advanced, you'll start bumping into some walls.

The setup and configuration process

To make a chatbot, you need to be a company or workspace admin in Front. The process is straightforward: you name your bot, link it to a specific Front Chat channel, and then start building the flow. One thing to keep in mind is that you can only have one chatbot per channel. So if you have different chat widgets for sales and support, you’ll need to build and manage two separate bots.

Customization options

You can change the chatbot's display name and avatar to fit your brand, though Front suggests you make it obvious that customers are talking to a bot. You can also build out more complex logic using branching and "Saved Flows," which are just reusable chunks of steps.

But here’s the catch: many of the more useful features are locked behind more expensive plans. Key things like Saved Flows, AI-powered answers, and branching based on visitor data are only available on the Professional plan or higher. This means if you’re on the Starter plan, your chatbot is stuck being a very simple, one-track conversation.

Key limitations to know

The native bot is a fine first step, but its cracks start to show when you try to build a truly smart automation strategy.

• It’s stuck in a knowledge silo: The Front chatbot mainly works off the flows you build by hand. Its "AI Answers" feature can pull from a help center, but that’s about it. It can't connect to and learn from all the valuable knowledge scattered across your company. It has no way to access information locked away in Confluence, Google Docs, or, most importantly, the conversational gold mine of your past support tickets. This leaves the bot clueless on a huge range of customer questions.

This infographic shows how eesel AI can centralize knowledge from many different sources to power support automation, a key limitation of the standard Front chatbot.

• The automation is pretty basic: The bot can tag and route conversations, but its ability to do more complex, custom tasks is very limited. For instance, what if you want the bot to look up order details in Shopify, check the delivery status, and then update a custom ticket field? You'd need a developer to build a custom integration for that. There's no easy, no-code way to give the bot more advanced skills.

• You have to test it on live customers: Front doesn't offer a proper sandbox mode to test your chatbot on old tickets before you set it live. This means you’re forced to test in a live environment, which is always risky. You can't really know how the bot will do or what your automation rate will be until it's already talking to real customers, which can easily lead to a bad first impression.

• It’s a Front-only tool: The bot only works within Front Chat. If your team uses Slack for internal support, or if you ever decide to move to a different help desk, you can't take your automations with you. You're locked into the Front ecosystem, which creates a silo that doesn't help your entire company.

Understanding Front chatbot pricing

Let's talk about the price tag, because this is where things get... complicated. Front's pricing is famously tricky, and the chatbot's features are tied directly to its plans and various add-ons. What you get depends entirely on how much you’re willing to spend.

Features locked behind pricey plans

While a very basic chatbot is available on all plans, most of the features that actually make a chatbot useful are reserved for the more expensive tiers. The Starter plan is incredibly limited; you can basically just make a pre-chat form and a welcome message.

Here’s a quick look at how features are split up:

Feature	Starter Plan	Professional Plan	Enterprise Plan
Basic Chatbot	Yes (Limited to 1 of each step type)	Yes	Yes
Saved Flows	No	Yes	Yes
AI Answers	No	Yes	Yes
Branch by Visitor Data	No	Yes	Yes
Send App Request	No	No	Yes

To get a chatbot that can do more than just ask for a name and email, you have to be on at least the Professional plan, which will set you back $65 per person, per month.

The extra cost of AI add-ons

This is where the pricing gets even more confusing and potentially very expensive. The most advanced AI features, like the AI Autopilot, aren't included in any plan, not even the top-tier Enterprise one. Instead, you pay for them every time they're used.

Front's AI Autopilot costs $0.89 every time it resolves an issue.

This per-resolution model creates unpredictable costs that can easily get out of hand. If you have a busy month with a lot of support requests, your bill is going to be huge. It's a model that basically punishes you for automating successfully. The more questions your AI answers, the more you have to pay, making it almost impossible to budget for your support costs.

When to upgrade to a dedicated AI platform

If you're nodding along to those limitations or getting nervous about the unpredictable pricing, it might be time to look at a dedicated AI platform that works with your existing tools. An AI layer like eesel AI is built for deep integrations and smarter automation, letting you give Front a major boost without having to switch platforms.

Here’s how a dedicated platform solves the biggest problems with the native bot.

Unify all your knowledge, instantly

Unlike Front's siloed approach, eesel AI connects to over 100 knowledge sources right out of the box. You can instantly teach your AI using past tickets from any help desk, your entire Confluence space, scattered Google Docs, and your external help center. This gives the AI a complete picture of your business, so it can give much more accurate and helpful answers to customer questions.

Go live in minutes with total control

eesel AI is designed to be completely self-serve. You can sign up, connect your help desk and knowledge sources, and get an AI agent running in minutes, no mandatory sales calls or demos needed. Its workflow engine gives you fine-grained control to set the AI's personality, tone of voice, and the exact custom actions it can perform. Whether it's looking up order information or updating ticket fields, you can build complex automations without writing any code.

This workflow illustrates the quick, self-serve implementation of an AI platform like eesel, from connecting data sources to going live, which is a major advantage over a more limited Front chatbot.

Test with confidence and predictable pricing

This might be the most important part: eesel AI has a powerful simulation mode. You can test your AI setup on thousands of your past tickets in a safe environment. This gives you a real forecast of your resolution rate and cost savings before you ever turn the bot on for customers.

A look at the eesel AI simulation mode, where you can test your AI setup on past tickets to predict performance before activating it for live customers, unlike the Front chatbot.

That confidence carries over to the pricing. eesel AI offers transparent, flat-rate plans based on the features you need, not how many tickets you resolve. There are no per-resolution fees or hidden costs. Your bill is the same every month, so you can scale your automation without worrying about a surprise invoice.

The eesel AI pricing page, showing the transparent, flat-rate plans that contrast with the complex, per-resolution pricing of the Front chatbot.

The right chatbot for your Front workspace

So, what's the verdict? The native Front chatbot is a fine choice for teams who are already deep in the Front ecosystem, are on a higher-tier plan, and only have very basic automation needs. If all you want is a simple tool to collect contact info or answer a few FAQs, it can get the job done.

But for any team that's serious about scaling support with smart automation, those limitations will quickly become a major headache. If you need to pull in knowledge from multiple places, perform complex actions, test your setup properly, and keep your budget predictable, a dedicated AI platform is the way to go.

If you’re looking for an AI solution that offers deeper integrations, full control, and a fair pricing model to level up your Front workspace, it’s probably time to see what a platform like eesel AI can do for you.