Front Erfahrungen

Vorteile

Front helps us respond so much faster as we collaborate on high impact messages and it lets us know what each other's doing. The support team is also really fast and reliable.

Nachteile

Runs on Electron, so can be a bit slow. Some missing features but the team is iterating really quickly.

Vorteile

The interface and how is easy to teammates collaborate and organize conversations with customers.

Nachteile

Language only in English
Some features were thought exclusive for emails and we use a lot WhatsApp and Chat channels (custom channels) that not might work that great
API Rate Limit for custom channels that we always talked that would be our main channel and after purchasing, we discovered this "limitation"

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Freshdesk, MessageBird, Intercom und Zendesk Suite

Warum Front gewählt wurde

We didn't like Zendesk layout and support

Zuvor genutzte Software

Zendesk Suite

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Front

Layout, features, support, sales proccess, pricing.

Vorteile

Ability to make notes and share with teammates directly on an email without engaging the sender. Auto Sorting/Tagging emails keeps organization on track. Setup and notifications are simple and customer service is responsive and helpful.

Nachteile

The initial launch can be intimidating without a little in-depth training. The feature-rich views and options take a little getting used to when coming from a standard email system.

Vorteile

We love using this for syncing with Pipedrive - the implementation was easy. The powerful autoresponders are helpful as well. On any given day, we can have a different auto responder, which is great because we're always in a dedicated project on Wednesdays and out of office on Fridays. It's also a bonus that send later is active right out of the box - so when I'm working on emails after my kids are in bed they show up to my clients as sent at 7am the next morning. Set up wasn't too bad since I had already used Support Bee previously. The mobile app is solid as well, though my Android phone tells me it takes a lot of battery power. I wish it was listed as a native email provider on Andoid phones - so right now if I click on a email link in my Pipedrive App, I can't have it open in Front. Front is better than Pipedrive for sending emails since I can drop screenshots inline in emails in Front - something we do on a daily basis. I recommended this to a client who initially liked the idea that it connected with Shopify, showing order information beside each email (see cons for rest of the story). It's normal email stuff works just fine as well - removing formatting, adding bullets, bold, etc all work as expected. As an admin, I like having the ability to make sure my team is keeping on top of shared emails. Additionally, when a teammate needs some help on a message, they can share it with me to help advise them.

Nachteile

Buyer beware on the TOS regarding refunds. I set this up for a client and got them paid up as an annual client with several users. However, it wasn't a good fit for them. I was not pleased to find out Front does not offer pro-rated refunds, which is costing my client a lot of money and jeopardizing my relationship with them. Customer services was unsympathetic. For this reason I can't recommend Front anymore. If a user signs up with an annual plan, they will at some point be losing money, not saving it - unless they cancel on the anniversary of when they started. Just because it's in the TOS doesn't mean it's the right thing to do: Front is one of the companies that needs to learn this.

Vorteile

Front has become an absolute essential to my work and my co-workers' work. It is to the point that it has surpassed other mail tools such as Gmail. It is a perfect mix between Gmail, Messenger and Dropbox. Likewise, it is very simple to use, and it has a real added value : it enables us, as a team work, to chat in real time and to share files very quickly and in a very organized manner. I truly believe I will definitely have a hard time doing without Front in my next jobs.

Nachteile

I have nothing to dislike about this software, except for the fact that I had difficulties in the beginning to correctly see my number of emails in my Inbox.

Vorteile

Easy to use - actually integrates well and completely replaces all other email managers. Unlike Zendesk or similar products; emails you send from Front are actually sent from your email address, not a weird routing domain like yourcompany.zendesk.com

Nachteile

When multiple emails come in on the same day with the same title (e.g., two customers respond to the same automated email they got), Front will nest them together as if they are one thread. This causes problems with the customer support team because sometimes they forget / don't know they need to scroll up to respond individually to each nested email. Pretty annoying and error prone

Vorteile

I love being able to tag coworkers on emails instead of forwarding it to them.

Nachteile

I wish threads were more customizable... merging certain ones together that wouldn't necessary give you the option to merge normally.

Vorteile

It's great as a multi purpuse tool for a lot of different scenarios. Has a lot of features and well made integrations.
It helps working and collaborating as a team on messages, requests and tasks very efficiently.

Nachteile

As it does offer a lot of functions, it's kind of bloated with options to configure and customize it. It can be tricky to find the right config and approach for the usecase you have. As it can be used for a lot of different scenarios (helpdesk, crm, communication, ...) it's not fitting to a specific usecase as good as tools that are specialised to one - it would help if Front would try to focus on something rather trying to be a solution for "everything".
The pricing of Front is unintuitive - basic features like a user and team management are exclusive to the highest tier. For this even managing just a few users and their permission and settings is a real pain as long as you're not willing to upgread to the highest tier (99$/user/month). Hiding essential/basic features in highly overpriced tiers is a disease a lot of SaaS tool have - a practice that really needs to end.

Vorteile

I loved the Inbox -> Channels system. We were able to organize the mess that several shared Exchange mailboxes brought us over time.We now have a bird eye view of everything. Assignments and comments made it easy to reroute conversations as needed.

Nachteile

It lacks an Italian translation. Most of us don't know English, but the tool was valuable enough that we made the necessary steps to abilitate non-english collegues to use Front.

Vorteile

I can write comments and tag colleagues under specific mails

Nachteile

In a conversation, when I click on a mail I will see the preview of the first mail I haven't read in that conversation. This may mislead if I am in a hurry

Vorteile

Being able to chat with coworkers about emails before they send. Being able to take over a draft someone else wrote, and send from my account, and share drafts with colleagues and have them edit, take them over, OR just give them back to me. Basically it's multiplayer mode for email. And I love the canned responses feature.

Nachteile

There are issues with the canned responses that make it not 100% efficient. Example: hard to filter canned responses other than by keyword in the title, not easy to make quick edits to them or replace an old one. Maybe because not everyone likes that feature other than me. But it still works and I have confidence it will improve in the future.

Vorteile

I think my favorite thing about Front is the ability to collaborate with teammates on emails + share drafts. I also use the canned response feature A LOT, as well as the Snooze ability. It helps me keep my inbox clean, while still allowing me to follow up at a time of my choosing!

Nachteile

I still use the Gmail calendar interface. I think improvements have been made to Front's calendar though, so I need to check it out again.

Vorteile

I use Front daily to communicate with customers. Overall, Front is a powerful and accessible email client with a very pleasing UI.

What I like in particular is the template functionality. Templates for emails can be stored, changed at any time, and are lighting-quick to access. I also like Front's internal messaging system for writing notes to colleagues (using the @ system). This means I can leave notes for colleagues, for customer cases that require more time or team input.
Front's search functionality is also unparalleled. If my organisation has ever had any contact with a customer, I can find it using the barest of search strings. To give an example: Front will pull up alternative email adresses that customers have, by cross-referncing known information such as customer name.
Lastly, the UI uses colors that aid readability, but are also visually very pleasing.

All in all this software is critical to my daily work, and is the most pleasant and easy-to-use email client I've ever used.

Nachteile

I personally find very few faults or things that could be improved, that would have a direct effect on the work I do. Having said that, I find the conversation tracking function ever so slightly redundant. This is because I keep track of conversations myself, by having multiple Front tabs open. On the alternate tabs, I use search strings to keep all prior conversation with a customer open. I am aware however that this is my personal style of working, so it doesn't say much about the tracking function itself.

Vorteile

What I definitely like the most is the way you can assign emails to your team mates - especially when reviewing the same inbox. Generally with other provider is always difficult to organize your workflow and dividing email by forwarding them all. In this way, by using a super simple and well designed app, you can simple go through the object of the email, even read it if needed and then directly assign it to your colleagues. Moreover, you can even assign the email to more than one people - keeping everyone posted about important issue. Last but not least, you can use this app even to comment and share plus information about email or work to do with that email/costumer directly using the chat below the main inbox (this is something that can be shown just between team mates - avoiding the possibly of sending personal information to the direct costumer while forwarding the email to your colleagues).

Nachteile

I think that the app version could be improved, especially in the way it shows notifications. Each time I open it - I can see the amount of my entire inbox and it always seems you still have work to do even if you are up to date with all your daily emails.

Vorteile

I've used Zendesk for years, which is a really popular customer ticket support software, and this software is way better than it! The UI is already familiar as its set up like the main inbox to your Gmail or Outlook account and you can actually see when a customer has 'Seen' your message! The software has its own Desktop app unlike a lot of others, but I mostly use it through the web to sift through multiple tickets easily. A great benefit, as well, is how easily you can integrate other software into their plug in feature. So you can connect it with your business' Shopify, Salesforce, WhatsApp, Google drive and many many other apps! There's a comment section on each conversation that you can use to communicate with team members and because it's a true emailing software, you can CC and BCC other people on your customer's messages, if necessary. You can set a time limit for how long you have to cancel a sending response and you can create templates for canned responses/macros that you will have to use on a regular. It's a really great software and I wish I could use it for every email/ticket customer support role I'm ever in.

Nachteile

The only dislike I have is when I was first given access to it, I selected the option to log in with my work's Google account to make the process easier. I then realized that my work emails were actually coming into the main Front's inbox and all the other teams could see those messages. I found the option to turn off all personal incoming messages but I could not unlink my Google account from it so I can still see all my old messages in my inbox and have no way of removing them without them being deleted from my actual work account's email.

Vorteile

I love Front's ability to display who on an email chain has read our last response (revolutionary!) & the ease at which my team can comment back and forth and converse with each other, all while hidden from our customers in the email thread. Email tagging, inbox splitting, & the infinite number of archiving and email redirection rules we can put in place keeps my team organized (& myself sane!)-- as a company that receives tens of thousands of emails a day, Front allows my operations team to truly battle the "Front lines" of customer communication.

Nachteile

The biggest issue we deal with is Front's occasional latency. In an industry where fast is better than perfect, the last thing my team needs is Front to be lagging or down. We have a huge backlog of archived emails (Front also acts as customer documentation platform for us) so searching information can be super tedious if the platform doesn't load or crashes. My team works to urgently solve problems and every second counts, so we cannot risk even a minute of latency.

Vorteile

Pretty accessible to learn up front, but they are not communicative at all about the updates they release.

Nachteile

Front pays very little attention to user experience, as evidenced by the fact that they did not give users the option to opt of their Front 2.0 release. Our company's workflow was based heavily on the layout of Front's original version, and they gave zero warning about the enormous changes that were coming with 2.0.

Additionally, their customer support team is an absolute joke. They consistently refuse to look into reported issues with even minor effort, and will often straight up tell members of my team that they are wrong about reported bugs rather than offer assistance. When one of my team members gave a front representative a poor review with detailed feedback in response to how he handled a bug report, the front rep actually gave my colleague a 1 star review in reply. Not a great way to run a company at all, especially considering that we are paying customers.

Vorteile

Great help in setting up, Easy to maintain, transparent in billing, Great customer service, Love being able to comment internally on emails, sharing them, collaborating on drafts, and having internal discussions on emails.

Nachteile

It is rather expensive for our use, but still worth the money for us. When we share a link, if the email hasn't been shared with a specific individual, the link won't work for them until they have express permission.

Vorteile

Easy inbox management, use of the archive feature and snooze allows you to delay not important emails, or to clean up emails awaiting replies.
Tags allow easy sorting of various tasks and topic related emails into one place.

Nachteile

When viewing a discussion on the mobile app, it takes you from the start of the discussion, rather than the most recent message, which is a pain for internal conversations between multiple employees on a topic.
the search feature is implemented well, but needs some work with regards to discussions.

Vorteile

Front allows teams to work in a more organized flow with incoming emails. One of the ways we have been able to utilize Front has been to group all emails for specific teams into Team inboxes and then team members can take emails out of the queue and work to bring the box to zero. This has saved us a lot of time from trying to organize emails in outlook.

The main selling feature for us however was the ability to create a custom plugin in the panel on the right as well as pull data from the current conversation from the Front API that is well built. This allows us to customize our flow.

Front also has several default integrations some more useful than others. They seem to be growing at a large pace so you can expect to see major enhancements with the product in the future.

Nachteile

The price can be a little high per user and the Enterprise version doesn't seem to offer the kinds of benefits you would want to see for such a large price jump. There also seem to be some features on enterprise that feel like they should be one tier down like user roles and authorization.

Vorteile

This platform is very light, it really allows you to get by your day without feeling you had to follow a too convoluted workflow since Front is designed to be very intuitive and easy to use, this allows for you to clear a high volume queue relatively fast.

Nachteile

It can come a little clunky since its meant to be simplistic, this can be an issue if what you are looking for is an advanced level of customer experience, and it could also affect the way you track your data since this platform is not too well versed on that department.

Vorteile

I simply love this app, even though I don't like it at first, now I love it.

You can assign the email to relevant team members. So no ball drops between two players.

Nachteile

It's a little confusing to start but soon you will love it.

Vorteile

Easy to manage various inboxes
The UI is nice
Ties channels togeter nicely

Nachteile

Nasty price hike
You need to adapt to their way of doing things
Some downtime

Vorteile

I really like the ability to set timers for emails to reappear in my inbox, and having the ability to assign and @mention team members are also helpful features that use daily.

Nachteile

I still miss having actual folders. I feel like it gets confusing using tags and having my emails sometimes auto-archive. I actually missed including some invoices on my month-end statements last month, because those emails archived and I didn't see them in my open tab in under that tag. I also recently discovered that we can't use our mail merge app with Front. In our industry having the ability to use a mass-mailout software or app is very important.

Vorteile

I love that everything is in one place! If I need to see e-mails from multiple client inboxes, it's all in my team inboxes. I can also add as many personal inboxes as I want and all the emails show up in one inbox in Front with color tags to differentiate the actual e-mail addresses they came from. If I need to communicate with my team regarding tasks in Front, the comment tool makes it easy. I can use the Asana integration to create workflow tasks without ever leaving the Front app.

Nachteile

The biggest downside of Front is the pricing. It's a bit expensive for only being one piece of our operational tech stack but we think it's worth it.