Front Erfahrungen

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

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

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 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.

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Salesforce Sales Cloud und Zendesk Suite

Warum Front gewählt wurde

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

Gründe für den Wechsel zu 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.

Vorteile

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).

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Freshdesk und Zendesk Suite

Gründe für den Wechsel zu 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.

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

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, Bird, 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

It's simplifies complex processes, breaks down your work into digestible chunks. It's intuitive, straightforward and has lots of time saving tricks and tips.

Nachteile

There's a couple of features that would be really handy, that I've requested a couple of times .
For example, dragging and dropping a jpeg into an email, adds it as an inline image. I would like a preference to select to have all files - regardless of format, to be added as an attachment.
I'm also unable to change my Download Location in my preferences, it simply doesn't work when I try to change this. Granted, I haven't reported this yet and I'm sure they'd be very helpful in solving this.

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

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!

Nachteile

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.

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

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.

Nachteile

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.

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

Frot is amazing. The best feature is email tracking through which you can get the read receipt of the email. Also, the tagging feature is good and helpful where you can tag or assign your teammates on the email

Nachteile

The user interface is a bit complicated and difficult to use for the new user. Also, the mobile app tends to go slow sometime. Rest all is good

Vorteile

The key feature that differentiates Front is that it has collaborative shared inboxes that enable us to create shared drafts, comment/communicate on threads, and manage email communications super effectively. Previously, we attempted to use Gmail to accomplish this, but Front does a great job of managing the workflow of sharing one email and collaborating effectively.

Nachteile

I wish there were more productivity / super-user oriented features that were more robust. There are some quirks about the workflows that make it slower for us to use. This is not a deal-breaker, but I wish it could be better.

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

Front is an amazingly powerful tool backed by a team of professionals who provide us with the ability to manage our email as a team. We work together to help our customers succeed and share an email account — with Front we're able to assign out emails, have thread-specific chats by mentioning team members and use the Sequences feature to send personalized messages to our customers. Using Front has increased our communication internally and has dramatically improved our efficiency when addressing customer requests. Sequences allow us to stay personal and deliver proactive outreach without sacrificing time.

Nachteile

Front is a growing company which means they roll out updates from time-to-time — anytime there are bugs they are quick to address the concerns. The CSM team and technical support have been super helpful anytime we've run into issues.

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

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

Nachteile

- 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

Vorteile

It is an incredible software in its main functionalities, because once it is implemented, it automatically organizes complex or chaotic emails, in a very fast and sophisticated way, giving amazing impressions, due to its extraordinary operation, without excluding that it is a A very useful tool, especially when we go to business scales, which require attention to their outgoing and incoming messages that they have in a multiple way, covering all these needs in a very successful and smooth way, being one of my systems favorites.

Nachteile

As a significant disadvantage, regarding the functionalities that this software maintains, we can mention that its exports are not very large that can be described in a considerable scope, where they should normally comply and operate without interruptions, highlighting that they are totally difficult to select , since it is a complex software, according to its programming, due to its extensive tools that it offers for its options of use that it commonly executes.

Vorteile

Front if used correctly can be a powerful service. We use it for our company. Everyone has access to Front with their personal account (after they get invited) and they can manage themselves which inboxes to receive emails from. The main features that I see are the following:

- User friendly interface
- Customization
- Excellent support

All in all I would recommend it for anyone searching for such a service. We are very pleased so far.

Nachteile

Front hasn't got many things going the wrong way. If I should say something that would be that at first glance it might be a bit too much and intimidating to have all those inboxes and emails coming in but after you find your way around Front you realize that it was just wedding jitters! Everything turns out fine in the end :)

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.