A practical guide to Front support automation in 2025

If your customer support team feels like they're constantly drowning in tickets, you're not alone. The pressure to be faster and more efficient is always on, and for many teams, it’s a matter of survival. This is why tools like Front, a popular customer operations platform, have popped up, promising to bring some calm to the chaos with automation.

But does it actually work as advertised? This guide is a straight-up, balanced look at Front support automation. We’ll get into its features, how its workflows are set up, and what it really costs. By the end, you'll know if Front is the right tool for your team or if you should be looking at other options.

What is Front support automation?

At its heart, Front support automation is about cutting down on the repetitive tasks that eat up your day. Front's big idea is a collaborative, shared inbox that feels less like a rigid ticketing system and more human. Their automation tools follow that same vibe, aiming to help agents and smooth out conversations, not just replace people with bots.

A look at Front's collaborative, shared inbox interface.

They basically break their automation down into three main parts:

• Workflow automation: This is your classic rule-based engine. It lets you automatically route, tag, and manage conversations without anyone having to lift a finger.

• AI-powered assistance: Tools like Copilot and Summarize are there to give your agents a hand, helping them draft replies or get the gist of a long email thread in seconds.

• AI-powered resolution: This is Autopilot, Front's fully autonomous AI agent. It can handle common questions all on its own, freeing up your team to tackle the trickier problems.

The goal is to have all these tools working together across your channels, from email to live chat to SMS, so every conversation lives in one place.

A deep dive into Front support automation and AI features

Front’s automation is kind of a two-sided coin. On one side, you've got the traditional, rule-based workflows that are the backbone of most support platforms. On the other, you have a growing set of AI tools that are meant to bring a bit more intelligence to your inbox.

Workflow automation and rules in Front

Front gives you a no-code rules engine that uses simple “if this, then that” logic to manage the daily grind. It's pretty easy to get the hang of and helps with all the little tasks that clog up your team's schedule.

Here are a few things you could do with it:

• Automatically send any message with words like "billing issue" or "urgent" over to the finance or escalations team.

• Tag conversations based on customer info from your CRM, so you can easily spot a VIP customer who needs a quick response.

• Set up service level agreements (SLAs) to track response times and get an alert when a ticket is about to breach its deadline.

• Use macros to do a bunch of things at once, like applying three tags, assigning the ticket, and sending a pre-written reply with a single click.

This stuff is great for simple, repeatable tasks. But there’s a catch. The number of rules you can create is limited on the cheaper plans. If you’re on the Starter plan, you only get 10 rules, and you’ll hit that ceiling fast as your team gets bigger.

Front AI: Copilot, Autopilot, and more

Okay, this is where things get a bit more futuristic. Front AI is a bundle of features designed to make your support smarter, not just faster.

Front's AI Copilot suggesting replies to save agents time.

Let's look at what's in the box:

• Topics: This feature uses AI to automatically figure out what your incoming messages are about. Instead of you having to manually tag every single ticket, Topics reads the message and categorizes it. This is the magic behind smarter routing and helps you see what your customers are actually asking about.

• Copilot: This is like having a helpful assistant sitting next to your agents. It suggests replies based on your team's past conversations and your help center articles. The agent still has the final say, they can edit the draft or write their own reply, but it's a huge time-saver for common questions.

• Autopilot: This is Front's real AI agent. It can manage a whole conversation from start to finish without a human jumping in. It uses your conversation history and knowledge base to answer basic questions instantly. You can set rules to control which conversations Autopilot handles, so you don't lose control of the experience.

• Smart QA & Smart CSAT: These AI tools are built to handle the boring parts of quality assurance and measuring customer satisfaction. Instead of manually checking tickets or spamming customers with surveys, these features analyze conversations to score agent performance and figure out how the customer is feeling.

Limitations of Front support automation

While Front has a decent toolkit, it's not perfect. Before you sign on the dotted line, you should know where the platform can get a little clunky, especially as your team's needs get more complicated.

• Onboarding and implementation: Front's interface looks clean and simple, but don't let that fool you. Getting advanced features like Autopilot working just right takes a lot of setup, testing, and tweaking. It’s a real project. In comparison, a tool like eesel AI is built to be self-serve from the get-go. You can connect it to your current helpdesk and have it running in minutes, not months.

• Knowledge source rigidity: Front’s AI is smartest when it’s learning from your Front messages and its own knowledge base. But what happens if your company knowledge is scattered across Confluence, Google Docs, or Notion? That's where things can get messy. This is exactly the problem eesel AI was built to solve. It connects all your knowledge sources together, giving its AI a much more complete picture of your business.

• "All-or-nothing" automation: It can be nerve-wracking to just flip the switch on Autopilot and hope for the best. While Front gives you some control, it's hard to test how it'll perform on real tickets before it starts talking to customers. This is a huge plus for eesel AI, which has a powerful simulation mode. You can run the AI on thousands of your past tickets to see exactly how it would have performed and what your ROI would be, letting you roll out automation gradually and without the anxiety.

• Customization and actions: What if a customer asks for an order status that's in Shopify, or you need to create an issue in Jira? With Front, connecting to external tools to perform these kinds of actions can get complicated, fast. With eesel AI, you get a fully customizable workflow engine where you can set up custom API calls, escalate tickets, or even change the AI’s personality, all without needing a developer.

Front's pricing: What does Front support automation really cost?

Figuring out the true cost of Front support automation isn't as easy as looking at the per-seat price. Many of the best AI features are either locked away in the most expensive plan or sold as pricey add-ons. You can get hit with some unpleasant surprises on your bill.

A screenshot of Front's pricing page, showing the different plans and add-ons available.

Here’s a look at how the main automation features are split across their plans:

Feature/Plan	Starter ($25/seat/mo)	Professional ($65/seat/mo)	Enterprise ($105/seat/mo)
Automation Rules	Up to 10	Up to 20	Unlimited
AI Topics	Included	Included	Included
AI Copilot	Limited (10 replies/seat)	Limited (10 replies/seat)	Included (Unlimited)
AI Autopilot	Add-on ($0.89/resolution)	Add-on ($0.89/resolution)	Add-on ($0.89/resolution)
Smart QA	Add-on ($20/seat/mo)	Add-on ($20/seat/mo)	Included
Smart CSAT	Add-on ($10/seat/mo)	Add-on ($10/seat/mo)	Included

A couple of things probably stick out right away:

• The Starter plan is extremely limited with just 10 automation rules. That's hardly enough to get your feet wet.

• Autopilot, the most powerful automation tool, costs extra on every single plan. At $0.89 for every ticket it resolves, your bill will climb higher the better it works. It’s a strange model that basically penalizes you for being efficient.

• Unlimited Copilot and the AI quality tools are only included on the highest Enterprise plan, forcing you to pay a lot for features that feel like they should be part of the package.

This is a totally different world from eesel AI's transparent pricing. Our plans are based on a predictable monthly interaction volume and include everything, the AI Agent, Copilot, and Triage. There are no sneaky per-resolution fees, so you never have to worry about a surprise bill just for automating your work.

The alternative: Flexible, powerful automation with eesel AI

Instead of ditching Front entirely, think of eesel AI as an AI brain that you can plug into the tools you're already using. It's designed to solve the very limitations we just talked about, giving you a much more flexible and capable automation setup.

A workflow showing how an AI layer like eesel AI enhances Front support automation.

Here’s what makes eesel AI different:

• It plays nice with your existing tools. You don't have to go through a painful migration. Just connect eesel AI to Front (or Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom) and your knowledge sources, and you can be up and running in minutes.

• You get full control over your workflows. You decide exactly which tickets get automated. You can build custom actions to look up order info in Shopify or create a ticket in Jira, all from a simple dashboard that anyone can use.

• It pulls all your knowledge together. eesel AI connects to your help center, past tickets, Confluence, Notion, Google Docs, you name it. This gives your AI a complete understanding of your business. It can even spot gaps in your knowledge and draft new help articles for you based on successfully resolved tickets.

• You can test without any risk. Our simulation mode shows you exactly how the AI will perform on your real tickets before a customer ever sees it. You can launch your automation feeling confident, not just hopeful.

• The cost is predictable. With no per-resolution fees, you get all the perks of automation without worrying about a bill that spirals out of control. Your costs are clear and grow with your needs, not your success rate.

Final thoughts on Front support automation

Front is a solid platform for bringing all your customer conversations into one place. It has a good set of basic workflow automations and some interesting AI tools. It’s definitely a big improvement over a messy Gmail inbox.

But for teams that are really looking to scale their support, the platform has some real drawbacks. The lack of flexibility, the siloed knowledge sources, and the expensive, unpredictable AI pricing can become major headaches. When you go with an all-in-one platform, you often have to make compromises, and with Front, that compromise is often on the power and control you have over your automation.

For businesses that want a more powerful, flexible, and affordable AI solution that works with the helpdesk they already have, a specialized AI layer is the way to go.

Ready to see how you can boost your existing helpdesk with AI that gets to work in minutes? Try eesel AI for free.