Front Reviews

Pros

I love being able to comment to teammates and to create a client-specific e-mail for our clients to respond to in order for collaboration to be smoother and for communication to be shared. I like being able to share drafts with my team so that they can review and even send if needed. If my direct reports want an e-mail to come from me but want to be sure I say exactly what they want to be heard then they just type up the e-mail, share the draft and @mention me, I edit it, my signature automatically attaches and then I send the e-mail as if I had written it. It's actually quite brilliant instead of sending an e-mail to one person to review, you can share it and everyone can see the edits. I like how you can immediately see at the top the tags of whose folder you're in so that you don't have to search through the e-mail to realize where you may be or which client you're working with. I also like the feature that lets you know if one of your colleagues archive the message that you're currently looking at. It helps to know this so that you know whether or not you need to reply to the message or assume that they're still going to respond. I also love how we can snooze an e-mail until later so they don't junk up the inbox. I am usually terrible at just leaving my inbox full with unnecessary messages that I forget to get back to until it's too late. With Snooze, I now say goodbye for now and get it out of my mind completely and then am reminded of it at the appointed time.

Cons

I haven't really found anything that I don't like yet. One thing that may improve but is not a big deal is that tagging folders at the top right does not always work but if I drag the message to that folder then it does work. It would be nice if you could add an Asana task from Front without adding it to a project. For example, if it's a private task that I don't want shared with anyone else then I should either be able to make it private or not add it to a shared project. I was going to say that I would love to make reactions to the comments placed in Front but it appears that that option was added 18 hours ago so someone else beat me to the punch. It might be nice to have the option to add a follower to an e-mail thread but make it so that they cannot see any previous comments to when they were added. This would just make it so that you can share current information going forward but not include any past information that you may not have wanted to get into their hands. I'm sure Hillary would have loved that feature. One thing that I would love to add is an @mention to say something like @all or @everyone that tags everyone that is assigned or a follower to a particular e-mail comment thread.

Pros

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.

Cons

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)

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Front

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.

Switched From

HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Switching to 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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

Front allows multiple teams within my company to manage massive amounts of email in shared mailboxes, meet or exceed customer SLAs and seamlessly integrate our communications with our management systems. We also like that we get all of the same functionality of email ticket tracking, but without the need for communicating the standard ticket responses and ids to our customers. It allows for a more personal engagement with our clients.

Cons

Our teams took sometime to get used to the new interface as it was difficult to pry Outlook out of their hands. However, once they got the hang of Front they loved the integration and tracking abilities that Outlook does not have.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Choosing Front

We had extremely too much email for an Outlook mailbox to handle, no SMS integration nor chat functionality.

Reasons for Switching to Front

We liked the email integration of front wherein ticket ids and perfunctory auto responses were not required, but we still got all the same functionality of other email / ticket tracking systems.

Pros

The best part of Front is that it only adds a layer on top of already existing things, such as an e-mail inbox. Other helpdesk software systems tend to be built around their own database structures and add e-mail on top of that instead. The approach that Front uses also means that if one were to ever leave Front, every single correspondence with customers is still sitting in your e-mail account (s).

Cons

There's not really anything I've ever disliked about the software. My pet peeve is that they've raised the prices quite dramatically over the last years. I'm disappointed that software creators these days seem to lure customers in with low prices to build their base and then raise the prices once they have a big enough customer base. But all in all, the software in itself is great.

Alternatives Considered

Freshdesk and Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Switching to Front

Because Front uses a completely approach which I think is a much more logical one, especially for a company like hours where each "ticket" or correspondence is usually resolved quickly.

Pros

I appreciated the all-in-one functionality Front seemed to have--way more tools than we actually needed.

Cons

Their pricing model is an incredibly bloody gouge. ONLY annual billing, all due at signing, minimum seat count of 2 seats and their terms say NO refunds. Meanwhile their trial service doesn't actually even have full functionality to test that it works with integrations.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk Suite

Reasons for Switching to Front

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

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

Front is a beautifully designed app for managing private and team emails as well as your company's other communication channels such as chat widgets, social media platforms and even SMS through a service like Twilio. I appreciate the thoughtfulness that has guided Front's development over the years. The Front team's dedication to optimizing the app based on customer feedback is evident in each iteration, and it's great that the Front app is regularly freshened with feature updates and additions. Today's existing integrations with Front coupled with new regularly added services makes Front the perfect platform for unifying your communication workflow. One "inbox" for all your accounts is awesome!

Cons

There are a couple of pain points for me when it comes to my daily usage of Front. My chief complaint is that at this time there is not bi-directional sync of archived or permanently-deleted messages. In my case, archives and deletes in my Office 365 account are synced to Front, but when I apply the same actions in Front, they do not sync to Office 365. This behavior is annoying in the context of my personal inbox—messages acrue and clutter the inbox—but counterproductive for a shared inbox with a mix of Front and Office 365 users. The obvious solution is to move all users to Front but in my case it is not realistic to onboard our entire team at once. Front should sync all actions back to Office 365. My second and last complaint is Front's calendar: it's not as robust as it should be if it's intended to be used instead of, say, Office 365. The experience for creating timed versus all-day events is cumbersome and to my knowledge, cannot be toggled between. Additionally, there is no functionality for creating recurring events. Unfortunately, my time is currently wasted switching between Front and Office 365 for simple calendaring tasks. I am looking forward to the Front team addressing both the sync and calendaring issues in an upcoming release. These pain points are partially behind my hesitation to push Front to all team members.

Pros

Great intuitive interface, convenience, high level of possible customisations and API integrations. Great possibilities in team sharing and communications

Cons

Some necessary features may be expensive, for us this was integration with HubSpot and CloudTalk, but overall reasonably prices.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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).

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

My team uses Front daily for our customer communication, as well as internal communication. The ability to tag an internal user and comment on the threads without having to reply to the email is a game-changer when it comes to problem-solving and communication regarding more complex emails.
We used multiple inboxes, separated into different inbox groups, with different permissions. It was easy to track and manage despite having so many inboxes.
In a shared work model, the ability to assign emails to yourself or other members of the team was extremely useful, to ensure we were not doing double-work or responding to emails at the same time. On top of that, you would be able to see when a teammate was replying or typing under the email, which was a good way to know who was working on what.

Cons

Front tended to have quite a few outages and crashes that impacted our workflow heavily. Fortunately these were able to be resolved quickly and communication was reliable and fast! However, the number of times we experienced an outage was frustrating.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

it's very convenient to have ALL of your company's communication in ONE place. Nothing slips through the cracks - from emails/facebook messages/tweets and text messages you name it it's all there. It's very intuitive to talk with the team and get back to customers/prospects with an answer.

A win win and great investment for company that works digitally.

Cons

It takes a while to onboard the whole team and get them to understand all the features.
Also it's quite pricey per user per month.

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk Suite

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

- Assigning emails to coworkers- Dividing work between colleagues- Delegating tasks- Organising work in a cross-functional team

Cons

- As an admin user, tracking the performance of the team is not practical and we still need to do it outside the platform. It would be good to apply more filters and functionalities for the tracking part. For instance, I'm trying to understand the SLA of the team when replying to messages, but the data is inaccurate because it also calculates when there's a reply again to the message

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

I work remotely, as does the rest of the team I belong to, and using Front to coordinate client emails is essential to presenting a united front in terms of responses and feedback. The ability to tag, comment and reassign is especially helpful in providing clients with a consistent and uniform voice when answering.

Cons

If I had something that I like least about Front, it is the problems that can arise from someone re-opening an already archived email. It can cause the email to show up in the inbox of the individual who archived it and nothing can be done with it, and it is a pain to make it re-archive.