Front

Pluspunten

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

Minpunten

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.

Pluspunten

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.

Minpunten

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)

Pluspunten

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.

Minpunten

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.

Pluspunten

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

The snooze function on emails.

The support staff were friendly and quick to answer.

Minpunten

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.

Pluspunten

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.

Minpunten

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.