Front Erfahrungen

Vorteile

The ability to treat email as a collaborative effort is groundbreaking. It's easy to create visibility and work asynchronously on emails that would otherwise take multiple forwards and slack conversations. Integrations and automations are great too.

Nachteile

Fairly expensive if you don't use it for a large number of folks, AI features are pretty limited right now.

Vorteile

It is incredibly easy to use. We transitioned to this from HubSpot support and we were concerned about a learning curve, it is about as basic and intuitive as it comes. We budgeted 2 weeks to implement and it took us less than 2 days to transfer everything over and learn how to use it for its core functions.

Nachteile

I may be doing this incorrectly- but the Slack integration doesn't always work correctly. I think it would've been helpful in the integrations section to have a troubleshooting guide if it doesn't work. For us we filled out all fields and appropriate slack channels but the messages were not sent there. (Again could be our error)

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Zendesk Suite

Warum Front gewählt wurde

HubSpot was AWFUL! I am so passionate about this. We had several situations with HubSpot where emails were sent to the wrong individuals with support tickets, the site crashed completely, and it was inconvenient that they did not have a mobile app. We got a Customer Success Representative at HubSpot assigned to us and they "follow-ed up" on the bugs and were never fixed. Eventually she ghosted us. Switching to front was the best thing that could've happened to us.

Zuvor genutzte Software

HubSpot CRM

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Front

As part of our product offering, we send emails from our client's email domain to appear as it is from them. With these integrations, Zendesk's product was unable to support the configuration but Front was able to.

Vorteile

The overall look of Front is simple, which is nice.

The snooze function on emails.

The support staff were friendly and quick to answer.

Nachteile

My company switched my team over to Front after a couple people who shared an inbox had issues with managing it. I didn't have a shared inbox, but struggled with the lack of functionality for just personal inboxes.

There are so many missed functionalities to Front it made my job incredibly inefficient. I found myself spending more time doing my job which consists of heavy emailing because of Front problems.

1. No calendar. Cannot make appointments, set up meetings, etc.

2. Unable to edit messages in a previous thread. Say someone sends you a list of questions. You cannot just answer next to their list in the previous email and say "see below."

3. Archiving messages... when we first switched to Front, the management team used it for a few weeks to test it. When the team was instructed to switch within the next couple weeks, and BOOM thousands of emails that Front could not autoarchive. I had about 10 emails in Outlook during the switch. The front inbox had accumulated thousands over the course of the management test period. Front could only auto archive shared inboxes, not personal. I had to spend 20 minutes selecting 3000 emails to auto archive since it didn't sync correctly with Outlook.

4. Saving emails... you can't. You only have the option to send a link of the email which only works for those that also used front.

5. You cannot edit pasted tables in front, as far as formatting goes. No deletion of columns or making rows smaller.

6. No red flags or categorizing. Often I'd keep emails in Outlook and red flag them to remind myself to check on it before I leave. No flagging in Outlook. This is replaced by snoozing in Front to make it reappear later, but I do miss the flag option.

7. You archive something in someone else's inbox that they share with you... it archives in their inbox, too.

8. No options to make folders. You want to move emails to a folder to refer to later? You cannot.

I could go on and on and ended up emailing a list of 18 problems after using Front for the first 3 months to management who sent to Front support. The responses were basically they hope to rollout that feature one day. Which obviously doesn't help now.

Vorteile

It has a number of very good features for helping teams work together for sales and support. The abilities to share, assign, comment on, snooze and resurface issues makes zero inbox possible. Keeps clutter down and focus on what is most important at the moment. We really like the 'product'.

Nachteile

-Front's Billing policies are absurd. If one signs up for an annual plan adding a user even if only temporarily for a day or a month while transitioning employees results in a charge for as much as a full year for that seat.

-During the sales process, you will experience significant personal, real-time communications. Once the sales process is over, don't hope to EVER be able to have a real-time conversation with anybody. Regardless of the severity or complexity of the issue, the only option is email that often takes days to get a response which can be a real problem when the platform is down since it is the only way to contact them. They had a chat ability for a while but turned it off apparently because customer expectations for a timely response were too high.

-Don't bother making suggestions. Although they have what appears to be a strong attitude towards involving customers, suggestions get a pat on the head and swept into a 'we'll pass that on' basket. No methods or interest to surface ideas and suggestions in a way that other end-users can expand upon or upvote/prioritize.

Vorteile

My favorite functionality would be the collaborative chat tools amongst team members for email threads. Its an amazing tool.

Nachteile

The thing I struggled the most to adapt to was the Tags functionality. It is not something we use daily but had a slight learning curve for me and my team.

Vorteile

Sharing emails without having to forward them, being able to have internal conversations within an email, plenty of integrations

Nachteile

When I need to speak to all the team, I have to create a discussion and add them all, one by one.
I'd rather have the possibility to @team within an email or a discussion to make sure they are all included.
I also whish we could find a slack inbox where we could find all the channels we have and avoid having to switch between the two softwares.

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 the ability to interact with all our support tools - phone, email, chat from intercom, while interacting with our full team (support team of 5). We stay connected on each user, and can easily run reports and track year over year metrics. We especially like the ability to chat back and forth before we respond to tricky situations, and the ability to Snooze.

Nachteile

I would love for more integrations - specifically survey functionality, or the ability to have automation once you close out an email/chat. We have this on intercom but it lives within the intercom platform now.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Zendesk Suite

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Front

I like that it can pull together everything, and be accessed on the go.

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

Used as a shared inbox for our customer success org and it solves so many problems. Shared inbox, Salesforce integration, and assigning tasks are some highlights

Nachteile

Can be difficult to implement, time consuming to create but saves time in the long run

Vorteile

I believe the product is very easy to use. Especially for someone that is on a computer daily for work, this product is very streamline and functional in terms of being user friendly. The admin needs to have some tech savy to them to operate and set up, but truly that was not anything difficult. For a company that time is truly our job we need to be on par with everything that is going on. With Front that dream is possible as we can all be on one email communicating with their Comment function and never have to email out. This prevents any miss communication or double communication. Efficiency is taken to an all time high. With other email platforms you can't have all your company on one email, other than outlook I believe, but it still fails to compare to the functions and ease of Front. Especially that no one misses out on an email if someone does archive it. Sense Front saves a personal file for you! Truly they mind and soul for this product was truly to help productivity, efficiency and the customer experience which birth Front.

Nachteile

It is hard to really give it a straight con, as it is a growing software and just in the yearish we have used them I have seen it grown so fast. It would be wrong to brand it cons but more so improvements that are on its way. I didn't realize this truly at the start till Front personally reaches out and gets to know you and you to them. A improvement I see growing is the support line. Depending on the nature of your business you need this more so than others in a more timely manner. Our company being time based we need things fixed fast to provide our job. Front does the best to their availability to do this, but its still a growing improvement. I know I am not going to get someone in five minutes, but for sure within the hour and once then I will be able to get immediate help till the solution is at hand. Another improvement is their reports. Due to the nature of our business this has helped us out a lot but with all the variables we have it is hard to get a true accurate report. It has base functions that will help any company, but for diving into even finer details its not there...yet. Least to say I would die on a hill to say there are truly no cons, but truly just improvements I see coming and know they are continuing to work on. You can't hop in a car without knowing how to drive and expect to drive. Takes time to master anything, but you see how you can't live without once you learn a little about it.

Vorteile

I work at the HQ of a moving company (Bellhops) and my job consists of constantly messaging our movers in the field spread over 25+ cities around the country. The best thing about Front is the ability to prioritize messages involving conversations that are more pertinent than others. Some are urgent and need to be handled right away, and others aren't and Front allows the visibility to determine the difference. My personal favorite attribute is the 'following' inbox including all active conversations you're apart of.

Nachteile

It would be great to see front integrate with software used by our company so we wouldn't have to input new contacts once we hire a mover in the field. This may already be available, or in the works.

Vorteile

After a full year of using Front, the thing I find the most useful is the ease and efficiency of sorting and prioritizing my daily email. The ability to snooze, assign to another individual, or add quick notes about the email, along with the ability for others to see who is working on a reply, has made our efforts so much more efficient! Everything runs seamlessly and it has become second nature, very quickly.

Nachteile

There are still a few "glitches" when it comes to opening certain attachments, but I think that is always the issue with any email program. The only other issue is with the mobile app - it takes a few extra steps to modify email recipients, but it isn't that often that this has to happen.

Vorteile

It gives is realtime collaboration with our staffs.
It has a very intuitive interface and dashboards.
The customer service is good.
It is a no code tool and we love it as it makes it easy and fast for is to automate our workflows

Nachteile

It has been good all along and we have experienced no dislikes

Vorteile

I love the customer support. The tool behaves as expected and has the requirements we need to manage a global set of 6 inbound sales teams, managing tickets that come from all of our property listing sites. It has integration with Salesforce that allows our reps to interact seamlessly (for 90%+ of instances). We're very happy with the rule automation and workflow management. Our company heavily relies on Front and is happy to do so!

Nachteile

The analytics are pretty good, but could use some more flexibility. There are a couple niche, specific limitations that we have that we have to build workarounds for. Honestly can't think of a major pain for our use case. It is a sales use case, not customer support. Very rare down time, and any issue is displayed for all to see and addressed quickly.

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

Cases are created directly from new emails that come in. For customers, it’s as easy as sending emails back and forth with us, but as agents using Front, we get so much more functionality. Things like canned responses, automatic case sorting and assigning, internal threaded discussions on individual cases, and integrations with third-party tools make Front almost the perfect choice for what we were looking for.

Nachteile

As a user and not an admin, I am not exposed to the full extent of Front’s capabilities, but I am completely satisfied with what I do use. The only issue I’ve had thus far is when I use a canned response it contains three different fonts and just looks odd. This is only evident in the iPad app, but from Desktop they look fine. This was an issue in the way the canned response was created, and while even as a user I do have the ability to fix it, my first attempt failed. This may just be a training issue and I haven’t reached out to Front with help on it yet, but I know if and when I do I will receive excellent service based on others’ interactions with Front’s customer service.

Vorteile

The shared inbox is a great feature for our client service team. We provide 24 hour support, and being able to assign open emails to available team members ensures that our clients can receive acknowledgement and support when needed. I also enjoy the various integrations with other systems that are available (contacts, calendars, proprietary workflow management systems, etc.). The Front support team is also accessible and responsive to issues and requests.

Nachteile

The notification settings seem spotty - I either receive none or a notification for everything, whether or not the email is assigned to me. Additionally, there are quite a few service delays or interruptions. Occasionally the inbox counts can be off from the actual numbers of emails therein.

Vorteile

The way they priced the product before doubling the price.

Nachteile

Doubling the price without telling us. Stole 15 000 USD from our account and cannot explain how they calculated that amount.

Vorteile

internal comment and sharing between teams

Nachteile

Emails simply disappear from the inbox, from the archive box, from the sent box, the search function is useless, can't find the emails.Can not organize and archive emails in folders. everything is a huge pile of emails. if the search function does not work and gives you a result, you have to waste huge amounts of time scrolling through the huge pile of emails in the archived box. No undo function!!!!

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

The internal commenting system was instrumental to make sure everyone on the team knew where we were with a specific ticket. The ability to build custom modules for the program allowed our dev team to hook up our customer database to Front to easily search any relevant piece of info we needed without having to leave the program.

Nachteile

They recently updated the UI to be more modern and user friendly, but unfortunately hid or removed a lot of the features that were in the forefront with the old design. You can still access most of them, but they now require a few extra clicks, which can interrupt work flow.