Front

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

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.

Easy to use - actually integrates well and completely replaces all other email managers. Unlike Zendesk or similar products; emails you send from Front are actually sent from your email address, not a weird routing domain like yourcompany.zendesk.com

When multiple emails come in on the same day with the same title (e.g., two customers respond to the same automated email they got), Front will nest them together as if they are one thread. This causes problems with the customer support team because sometimes they forget / don't know they need to scroll up to respond individually to each nested email. Pretty annoying and error prone

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

The snooze function on emails.

The support staff were friendly and quick to answer.

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.

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.

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.

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

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