How Front AI transformed customer service: A step-by-step guide

Trying to scale great customer service can feel like you're caught in a trap. As your company grows, it gets tougher to maintain those personal, high-quality conversations that customers love. Your team gets swamped with the same questions over and over, response times start to lag, and that special touch you're known for begins to slip. This is exactly the problem AI is meant to solve, not by replacing your team, but by acting as a sidekick that handles the repetitive stuff so your agents can focus on what they do best.

Front AI is one of the tools out there built to tackle this challenge by weaving AI directly into your support workflows. This guide will walk you through, step by step, how to use its features to reshape your customer service, from figuring out what customers need to automating the answers.

What you'll need to get started

Before you jump in, a little prep work can make a world of difference for a successful AI rollout. Here’s what you should have ready to go:

• A Front account: You'll need to be on a Professional or Enterprise plan to use the AI features we're about to cover.

• An existing knowledge base: While Front's AI can learn from your past conversations, it really shines when connected to a well-kept help center. This gives it a clear source of truth for its answers.

• Clear goals: What are you actually trying to achieve? Is it cutting your first response time in half? Bumping up your CSAT score? Deflecting 30% of your basic tickets? Knowing your target helps you know if you're winning.

• Admin access: You'll need to be a company admin in Front to turn on and set up the AI features.

How to transform your customer service with Front AI

Changing your support process doesn't happen with the flip of a switch. It's a journey that starts with understanding, moves to assisting your team, and eventually leads to automation. Here’s how you can follow that path with Front AI.

Step 1: Figure out what your customers are asking with Topics

You can't fix a problem you don't understand. The first and most important step is getting a real, data-backed picture of why your customers are writing in. Guessing just doesn't work.

This is where Front AI's Topics feature is supposed to help. It automatically scans your entire conversation history and sorts every ticket by its main reason, like "refund request," "billing question," or "feature idea." Instead of manually tagging tickets or trying to make sense of spreadsheets, you get an instant overview of what people need.

This insight is so valuable because it helps you:

• Spot recurring issues and identify which ticket types are eating up most of your team's time.

• Decide which processes are actually good candidates for automation.

• Automatically send conversations to the right team or person based on the topic, which speeds things up right from the start.

Step 2: Give the AI something to learn from

Once you know what your customers are asking, you have to feed your AI the right answers. An AI is only as good as the information you give it.

In Front, you can connect your knowledge sources to power its AI features. This could be their built-in Front Knowledge Base or a link to an external, public help center. The AI then reads all this content to learn how to answer questions correctly.

But there's a bit of a snag with using external sources. According to Front's own documentation, you have to manually click a button to re-sync it every single time you update an article. If someone on your team updates a guide and forgets to hit that sync button in Front, the AI will keep serving up old, wrong information. That creates an extra, easy-to-forget task for your team.

While Front’s method can work, tools like eesel AI have a more hands-off approach. eesel connects directly to the places where your knowledge already is, like Confluence, Google Docs, or even past tickets in help desks like Zendesk. This means your AI is always learning from the latest info on its own, without anyone having to remember to do a manual sync.

Step 3: Give your team a boost with Copilot

Now that you've done your analysis and connected your knowledge, it's time to help your agents work faster and more consistently. This next phase is all about giving your team an assist, not replacing them with full automation.

Front's Copilot is built for exactly this. It works right alongside your agents, drafting suggested replies based on the conversation and the knowledge base. It gives your team a head start on every ticket.

The big win here is the "human-in-the-loop" model. Agents don't just blindly fire off AI-generated responses. They can quickly read, tweak, and personalize the drafts to make sure the tone is right and the answer is spot-on. It's about combining speed with quality control. Plus, features like Summarize can get an agent caught up on a long, complicated ticket in seconds, and Compose helps clean up grammar and tone with one click.

Step 4: Start automating safely with Autopilot

This is the final stage of the journey: moving from AI assistance to full-on automation. Once you've found those simple, common questions that your AI nails every time, you can start letting it handle them completely on its own.

Front's Autopilot is its AI agent for the job. It can automatically resolve routine questions with AI-generated replies, clearing tickets from the queue before an agent even sees them. Front encourages a "quality-first" setup, where you get to decide exactly which Topics are safe enough for Autopilot to manage. Anything complex or sensitive gets sent to a human, so you can scale up support without your customer experience taking a hit.

However, you really need to pay attention to the pricing model here. Autopilot is an add-on that costs $0.89 per resolution. That means you get charged every time the AI successfully closes a ticket. While that sounds simple enough, it can lead to unpredictable costs that are tough to budget for, especially when you have a busy month.

A pay-per-resolution model can sometimes hold you back from automating as much as you'd like. Other platforms, like eesel AI, go a different route with predictable pricing. The eesel AI Agent is included in its monthly plans, so you can automate to your heart's content without worrying about a surprise on your bill.

Step 5: See if it's working with Smart QA and Smart CSAT

All these changes are great, but they don't mean much if you can't measure the impact. You have to prove that what you've done is actually making your service better and your customers happier.

Front gives you two tools for this: Smart QA and Smart CSAT. Smart QA automates the boring task of reviewing agent conversations, giving you a constant read on your team's performance. Smart CSAT takes it a step further by guessing customer satisfaction based on the conversation itself, so you're not just relying on those surveys that barely anyone fills out. These tools help you see what's working and find new ways to improve.

Things to keep in mind when using Front AI

Front AI has a strong set of tools, but like any platform, it has its quirks and trade-offs. Here are a few things to think about before you go all-in.

Knowledge and control limitations

That manual knowledge sync for external help centers is a real operational pain. It puts the pressure on your team to remember to keep the AI's brain updated, and just one person forgetting can lead to a bad customer experience.

And while Front lets you pick which topics to automate, it's hard to test how it will actually perform before you flip the switch for your customers. You're more or less going live and hoping for the best.

This is where a solid simulation mode, like the one from eesel AI, can be a huge help. Before you let its AI Agent talk to a single customer, eesel lets you run it on thousands of your past tickets in a safe, sandboxed environment. You get a full report showing what its resolution rate would have been and can see the exact answers it would have given, letting you tweak its performance with absolutely no risk.

The hidden costs of scaling

Let's talk money. That $0.89 per-resolution fee for Autopilot can add up fast and make your monthly costs a moving target. In a way, you get penalized for being successful, the more you automate, the more you pay.

On top of that, many of Front's other AI features are also paid add-ons ($20/seat/mo for unlimited Copilot, $20 for Smart QA, and so on). These can seriously inflate your total bill, especially as your team gets bigger.

Feature	Front AI	eesel AI
Knowledge Sync	Manual re-sync needed for external sources.	Automatic, real-time sync with all sources.
Pre-Launch Testing	Limited to picking topics; no big-picture simulation.	Powerful simulation mode on historical tickets.
Automation Pricing	Pay-per-resolution ($0.89 each).	Included in predictable monthly/annual plans.
Setup Complexity	Stays inside the Front ecosystem.	Radically self-serve; you can go live in minutes.
Integrations	Connects to external data via its Connectors.	Deeply integrates with the help desks you already use.

The eesel AI alternative: A faster, more flexible approach

If any of those considerations made you pause, it's good to know there's another option out there designed to tackle them directly. eesel AI offers a path to transforming your support that's all about flexibility, control, and predictable costs.

• Go live in minutes: eesel is built to be self-serve. You can connect your existing help desk, like Freshdesk, point it to your knowledge bases, and have a working AI agent running the same day, no sales call needed.

• Total control and confidence: Use the powerful simulation engine to test everything without any risk. A granular, no-code workflow builder lets you define exactly how your AI should act, from its tone of voice to the specific tasks it can handle.

• Predictable pricing: Forget about per-resolution fees. eesel's plans are transparent and based on overall usage, so you can scale your automation without getting an unexpected bill.

The eesel AI Agent gives you a direct path to transforming your support by plugging seamlessly into the tools and knowledge you already have, wherever they happen to be.

What's the verdict on Front AI?

Transforming your customer service with AI is a step-by-step process: you have to understand your support demand, connect your knowledge, empower your agents, automate resolutions, and then measure the results. Tools like Front AI offer a clear path to get there, guiding you from analysis to automation all within its own system.

But a real transformation is about more than just features; it's about having the flexibility, control, and predictable scaling to do it right. As you start your AI journey, make sure you choose a partner that puts you in control, letting you build, test, and launch with confidence.

This video explains how Front's own team uses its tools to resolve customer inquiries faster.