Front Analytics & Reporting Explained (2026)

Where analytics lives, and what reports you get

Front's analytics is reached from the left navigation → Analytics, and it fans out into a set of reports rather than one giant dashboard. Per Front's Understanding Analytics overview, the core reports are:

• Live dashboard — a real-time view of open and unassigned conversations right now, for spotting a queue backing up before it becomes a fire.
• Workload report — the volume view: counts of sent and received messages, resolution figures, and a busiest-times heatmap so you can see when the wave hits.
• Team performance report — reply times, handle time, participation, and a per-teammate breakdown of who is carrying how much.
• Tags report — tagged versus untagged conversations, plus how much traffic and time each tag category consumes.
• Resolution report — how long conversations sit in each ticket status, replies-to-resolution, and first-reply time.
• Time goals report (formerly the SLAs report) — met time-goal percentages, overdue and at-risk counts, and average overdue time.

Alongside those sit Customer satisfaction (CSAT), Smart QA, Chatbots, Message templates, and Knowledge base reports. Not every report is on every plan — analytics is described as available on Front's latest plans, with Starter access limited and some reports gated higher (more on that below).

On a brand-new account the dashboard looks half-empty on purpose — with no aggregated history yet, the Efficiency panel reads "No data" and most key metrics show a dash. That's the fresh-trial state, not a broken report; the numbers fill in as conversations accumulate.

"New conversations" vs "resolutions": the two numbers people confuse

The single most misread pair of metrics in Front is new conversations and resolutions, because they sound like they should net out and they don't.

• New conversations counts conversations that were opened in the reporting window — driven by inbound messages arriving in an inbox. It's a demand signal: how much work showed up.
• Resolutions (and the related resolution time in the Resolution report) counts conversations that were closed — archived or moved to a closed ticket status. It's a throughput signal: how much work got finished.

The two are measured against the same period but describe different events, so a day can easily show more new conversations than resolutions (you're falling behind) or the reverse (you're clearing a backlog). Front's Resolution report goes further, breaking down how much time conversations spend in each ticket status and comparing resolution by tag, so you can see whether "billing" cases resolve slower than "shipping" ones. Reading new-conversation volume as if it were resolution volume is the classic way to draw the wrong conclusion from an otherwise honest dashboard.

Team performance, tags, and the SLA (Time goals) report

Beyond raw volume, three reports answer the questions leads actually ask.

Team performance is the capacity view. Per Front's Team performance report, it surfaces reply time, handle time (how long a teammate actively works a conversation with it open), participation, and a busiest-times heatmap, all sliceable down to the individual teammate. One nuance worth internalising: Front credits every teammate who replies in a conversation, not just the official assignee — so if one person is assigned and another jumps in to answer, both accrue metrics on that thread.

Tags turns your labelling discipline into an operations report. If your team tags well, the Tags report shows how much traffic and time each category demands and which tags resolve slowest — which is why consistent Front tags are the difference between a useful analytics view and noise.

Time goals (the report Front used to call SLAs) is the accountability view. Per the Time goals report docs, it measures reply-time performance per rule — surfacing met time goal %, overdue and at-risk counts, and average overdue time — so you can see exactly which goal you keep missing. Front is explicit that this report is available on the latest Professional plan or above, and the underlying reply-time goals are enforced through Front rules, not a separate SLA product.

What's plan-gated (and what isn't)

Analytics is one of the areas where Front's plan tiers show up most, so it's worth naming honestly. On the Starter plan, analytics access is limited — you get basic visibility, not the full report suite. The Resolution report additionally requires Professional or higher and ticketing enabled in your workspace, since it's built on ticket statuses. The Time goals / SLA report is a Professional-and-above feature, and in practice the richest SLA-attainment dashboards are associated with Front's larger, enterprise-scale (roughly 50-seat) tiers.

If you're weighing which tier you actually need, Front's pricing tiers lay out where each report unlocks — don't assume the trial you're on shows everything the paid plan will.

The honest limit: the sequence-inflation caveat

Here's the caveat that quietly corrupts otherwise-clean numbers. If your team runs outbound sequences through a shared email address, Front's analytics counts each of those against your volume. Per Front's Analytics FAQs, when you send a sequence from a shared inbox, "analytics will count each individual outbound message towards the shared inbox's New conversations metric, which also rolls up into the Active conversations metric."

Read that carefully: a 500-recipient outreach sequence doesn't just send 500 emails — it can add up to that many to your New conversations count and inflate Active conversations with it. A support lead glancing at "new conversations spiked 3x this week" might conclude demand exploded, when in reality sales fired a campaign through the shared channel. The same FAQ notes a second inflation source: when a teammate is deleted, their now-unassigned conversations register an unassign action that increases the Active conversations metric for that window. Neither is a bug; both are counting rules you have to know to read the dashboard correctly.

The wider limit is the one every analytics tool shares: reports describe the past, they don't act on it. Front can tell you resolution time is climbing and the billing tag is your slowest queue with pinpoint accuracy — and then the work of actually replying to those conversations still lands on a human. Analytics measures the gap; it doesn't close it.

Where an AI layer picks up

That closing-the-gap job is exactly the seam an AI agent fills — not by replacing Front's analytics, but by moving the numbers the analytics is measuring. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists to do the reasoning-heavy resolution work that a report can only ever count.

Macha is one such layer. It runs on top of the Front you already use through the live Macha–Front connector — it does not replace Front, your shared inboxes, your rules, or your reporting. When your Time goals report flags a queue that keeps breaching, Macha's agent reads those conversations, understands intent rather than keywords, and drafts or sends a grounded reply — pulling a real order or account status through a custom tool that turns your REST API into something the agent can call. The result shows up back in the same dashboards you already trust: resolution time falls, met-time-goal percentage rises, the billing tag stops being your slowest lane. If you want the mechanics, connecting Front to Macha to route conversations to AI walks through it. Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, never per resolution — reasoning, retrieval, and replies each have a real cost, and it's honest to price them that way rather than pretending every case is worth the same.

The clean division of labour: let Front analytics be the honest scorekeeper, and layer an agent on top to move the score. For how the pieces fit, see the Front shared inbox model and, again, Front tags explained — good tags are what make the analytics worth reading in the first place.

FAQ

Where do I find analytics in Front? From the left navigation → Analytics. It opens into a set of reports — Live dashboard, Workload, Team performance, Tags, Resolution, and Time goals (SLA) — rather than one combined view. Analytics is available on Front's latest plans, with limited access on Starter.

What's the difference between "new conversations" and "resolutions"? New conversations counts conversations opened in the period (inbound demand). Resolutions counts conversations closed — archived or moved to a closed ticket status (throughput). They're measured over the same window but describe different events, so they rarely match.

Which Front analytics reports are plan-gated? Starter access is limited. The Resolution report needs Professional or higher plus ticketing enabled. The Time goals (SLA) report is Professional and above, with the fullest SLA-attainment reporting associated with larger/enterprise tiers. See Front pricing explained for exactly what unlocks where.

Why did my "new conversations" number suddenly spike? Often a sequence. Per Front's Analytics FAQs, sending an outbound sequence through a shared email address counts each individual outbound message toward the shared inbox's New conversations metric, which also rolls up into Active conversations — so a campaign can inflate both without any real jump in inbound demand.

Can I improve the numbers in Front's reports without replacing Front? Yes. An AI agent layer like Macha connects to Front as a live connector and runs on top of your existing inboxes, rules, and analytics. Your reporting keeps scoring honestly; the agent resolves the flagged conversations, so resolution time and met-time-goal percentages improve in the same dashboards.

Ready to move the numbers your Front reports are measuring? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Front in minutes.