Front

The Best Team Collaboration Tool!

Comments: My team is able to be more efficient and we all can see past comments and such so it makes our team more cohesive. Many times the client doesn't even know which team member they're speaking to because we are so united...because of Front. We are able to create Asana tasks directly from our Front inbox which saves some time. I am able to stay more organized and keep the cleanest inbox that I've ever had in my entire 20+ years of work experience. I can't believe that I could even live without Front before. I don't see how I can ever go back to the old way of just sending e-mails and losing the collaboration function that Front provides. One problem that many people have is tagging an e-mail as backup for a task or the like. With the permalink feature, we're now able to attach an e-mail string to any Asana task so that the we can quickly refer back to the e-mail without screenshots and the like. It's so much easier now to keep all of our information together without an overload of e-mail messages.

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.

Shared Email Tracking without the need for tickets

Comments: We had extremely too much email for an Outlook mailbox to handle, no SMS integration nor chat functionality. We solved all of that with Front. Now all of our communications are in one place for ease of use and management.

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.

Great for collab, not so great for the budget

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.

Great software, hard to be without

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.

Multiplayer email! Can't believe some people don't use this

Comments: Fantastic! We are a team of two, and one of us is the main visionary, the other is the one communicating with customers. We needed a quick and efficient way of having one person write an email, the other person check it and add notes, and both parties okaying it before sending. Also, with customer support, it's nice to be able to store responses I use a lot, and quickly modify them to suit the individual recipient. Front helps us in these two ways, primarily, and that makes it by far worth the money.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.