Front

Pros

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.

Cons

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

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

Reasons for Choosing Front

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Front

Pros

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

The snooze function on emails.

The support staff were friendly and quick to answer.

Cons

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.

Pros

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'.

Cons

-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.

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.