Front

Avantages

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

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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'.

Inconvénients

-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.

Avantages

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

The snooze function on emails.

The support staff were friendly and quick to answer.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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).

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.