Front App

Commentaires: Front has a positive influence on the way I process communication because it allows me to aim for and realistically reach inbox zero. This is possible by allowing me to either respond immediately to a message, snooze it for a later reply or most importantly to me, easily delegate the message to another team member while still being able to follow the conversation. These features allow me to realistically manage multiple inboxes and ensure timely responses to all inbound communication.

Avantages: Front is a beautifully designed app for managing private and team emails as well as your company's other communication channels such as chat widgets, social media platforms and even SMS through a service like Twilio. I appreciate the thoughtfulness that has guided Front's development over the years. The Front team's dedication to optimizing the app based on customer feedback is evident in each iteration, and it's great that the Front app is regularly freshened with feature updates and additions. Today's existing integrations with Front coupled with new regularly added services makes Front the perfect platform for unifying your communication workflow. One "inbox" for all your accounts is awesome!

Inconvénients: There are a couple of pain points for me when it comes to my daily usage of Front. My chief complaint is that at this time there is not bi-directional sync of archived or permanently-deleted messages. In my case, archives and deletes in my Office 365 account are synced to Front, but when I apply the same actions in Front, they do not sync to Office 365. This behavior is annoying in the context of my personal inbox—messages acrue and clutter the inbox—but counterproductive for a shared inbox with a mix of Front and Office 365 users. The obvious solution is to move all users to Front but in my case it is not realistic to onboard our entire team at once. Front should sync all actions back to Office 365. My second and last complaint is Front's calendar: it's not as robust as it should be if it's intended to be used instead of, say, Office 365. The experience for creating timed versus all-day events is cumbersome and to my knowledge, cannot be toggled between. Additionally, there is no functionality for creating recurring events. Unfortunately, my time is currently wasted switching between Front and Office 365 for simple calendaring tasks. I am looking forward to the Front team addressing both the sync and calendaring issues in an upcoming release. These pain points are partially behind my hesitation to push Front to all team members.

Commentaires: Major time savings and better organization is the key benefit we get as well as being able to build our own custom plugins.

Avantages: Front allows teams to work in a more organized flow with incoming emails. One of the ways we have been able to utilize Front has been to group all emails for specific teams into Team inboxes and then team members can take emails out of the queue and work to bring the box to zero. This has saved us a lot of time from trying to organize emails in outlook. The main selling feature for us however was the ability to create a custom plugin in the panel on the right as well as pull data from the current conversation from the Front API that is well built. This allows us to customize our flow. Front also has several default integrations some more useful than others. They seem to be growing at a large pace so you can expect to see major enhancements with the product in the future.

Inconvénients: The price can be a little high per user and the Enterprise version doesn't seem to offer the kinds of benefits you would want to see for such a large price jump. There also seem to be some features on enterprise that feel like they should be one tier down like user roles and authorization.