Pre-requisites
- Front connected and webhook active — see Connect Front.
- Email channel configured in Front — your Front inbox must be receiving emails (connected email account or forwarding address).
How conversations land in Front
Setting up
Confirm email is routing to Front
Send a test email to the address your Front inbox is configured to receive. The conversation should appear in your Front inbox.
Confirm the AI processes the email
If the conversation is assigned to the AI teammate (or unassigned with that option enabled), the AI should reply within a few seconds. Check that the reply appears as a message from the AI teammate.
Trigger a test handoff
Reply to the email thread with “I want to talk to a human.” The AI should hand off — you’ll see an internal handoff comment with summary and sentiment, and the conversation unassigned.
What the rep sees
- The conversation appears in their Front inbox as an email thread.
- The full AI-to-customer transcript is already in the thread — no separate tool to check.
- An internal handoff comment with conversation summary and detected sentiment.
- Replies sent from the Front inbox land in the customer’s email inbox.
Channel-specific details
Contact matching by email address
Contact matching by email address
OpenCX extracts the sender’s email from the webhook payload and matches it to an existing contact. If no match is found, a new contact is created with the sender’s name and email address. This means returning customers are automatically linked to their previous sessions.
Attachment handling
Attachment handling
Email attachments are downloaded from Front’s API using the authenticated connection and uploaded to OpenCX storage. The AI can reference supported file types (images, documents) in its reasoning. Each attachment retains its original filename and content type.
Teammate replies are skipped
Teammate replies are skipped
When a human rep replies to an email conversation in Front, the webhook sends an
outbound event. OpenCX detects the teammate reply and skips it to avoid duplicate processing. The AI stays out of the way once a rep takes over.Subject line preserved
Subject line preserved
Front preserves the email subject line on the conversation. The AI processes the message body content — it does not modify or set the subject.
Related Documentation
Chat channel
Web chat conversation specifics.
Connect Front
API token, webhook, and teammate selection.
Front overview
What else the Front integration covers.
Troubleshooting
AI not replying to emails, webhook errors, handoff not firing.