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August 28, 2014

Front – Better Customer Support

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Front is a tool that professional teams can use to collaborate on customer support, hiring, and sales. Using shared email inboxes, organizations are better able to stay productive and answer customer questions in a timely manner.

CC’s, BCC’s, and redirected emails are bogging companies down, complicating workflows and making it more difficult for professionals to answer the messages coming in through both email and social media. Front brings email and social media together, inviting you to collaborate with your team through shared inboxes. New messages are assigned to the right team member—for example, an incoming email about job availability would be assigned to your human resources representative, while a question from a customer about how a particular product works would be routed to a product specialist—and tagged for future accessibility. Team members can then solicit help from each other using internal communication tools, and they can reply with canned responses, depending on the nature of the query.

Front’s real-time activity feed and notification center ensures that team members stay in the loop, even on conversations they’re not a part of. Front also offers detailed analytics tools that show the activity of every inbox and teammate. In addition to tracking incoming and outgoing emails, Front also collects Twitter mentions and brings those tweets to the attention of its users.

Practical Uses:

  • Send canned responses to customers who ask common questions
  • Receive notifications when your company is mentioned on Twitter
  • Share email addresses with your colleagues
  • Quickly find customer conversations from the past year

Insider Tips:

  • Use analytics tools to follow the activity of your team members’ inboxes
  • Tag specific conversations to make following up easier in the future
  • Comment on conversations internally with your team
  • Visit the notification center to find out what you’ve missed overnight

What we liked:

  • Groups can assign specific conversations to the right colleagues
  • Teams don’t have to worry about CCing and BCCing emails
  • New messages and pending messages are separates from each other
  • Front supports Twitter, in addition to email

What we didn’t like:

  • Front doesn’t yet integrate with Facebook, LinkedIn, or Disqus
  • The Standard plan only includes 3 users

Alternatives:

Company Info:

  • Launched: June 2014
  • Privately Held
  • Headquarters: San Francisco, California
  • Founded by: Mathilde Collin, Thibaud Elziere, and Laurent Perrin
  • Web site: https://frontapp.com

Costs:

  • Free plan
  • Standard plan is $29 per month
  • Premium plan is $99 per month

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