FrontApp is an excellent platform to manage your customer communication. It’s packed with features, and has various pricing plans to fit most company’s financial needs.
But, it’s not for everyone.
It requires you to switch your entire company’s email activity onto the platform, which can be a time-consuming process. The primary focus of the platform is to help customer service teams, so if you need a FrontApp alternative for sales or other business email activity, it may not be a perfect fit.
In this FrontApp review, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of FrontApp, and show you the best alternatives to FrontApp if you decide it’s not the best platform for your email management needs.
Let’s jump in.
FrontApp pitches itself as a customer communication hub that combines an email inbox with a CRM.
You connect it with your email inbox, and all of your team’s emails will be brought into FrontApp where you can manage your replies and anyone on the team can jump in and handle a conversation.
You can even bring in other communication channels by integrating Front with your website live chat, WhatsApp, Facebook messages, Twitter, and more. Whenever a customer has a query, your team can easily get back to them, no matter which channel they reached out on.
FrontApp lets you build custom workflows to fit almost any scenario you need, such as adding tags to segment emails, or auto-archiving conversations when they meet certain rules.
As well as that, you can track email analytics and metrics to help you understand your team’s email performance.
All in all, FrontApp is a robust platform that can support a wide range of email management needs.
There are various benefits to using FrontApp.
Firstly, it’s scalable. It’s designed for companies with 5 to 5,000 users, so as your company grows it will adapt.
It’s also ideal for companies relying on shared inboxes, as you can quickly give everyone access to that inbox inside Front. Whenever a new customer email lands in the inbox, anyone on your team can jump in and reply, ensuring a customer is never left waiting.
Because FrontApp is made for large teams, there are useful real-time collaboration features included. For example, if another team member is already replying to an email, anyone else using FrontApp will see that. There won’t be any awkward situations where a customer receives multiple identical, or worse, conflicting emails from your team.
Another collaboration feature included is the ability to leave notes and tags on conversations to help other members of your team get up to speed on a support ticket or sales lead.
Clearly, FrontApp is a powerful platform. But, is it missing anything?
FrontApp’s main USPs are the collaborative aspects of the platform and how it acts as a replacement for your day-to-day email inbox.
However, that isn’t for everyone. Here are some of the reasons why FrontApp may not be the best fit for your company.
Firstly, it requires migrating your email activity to the platform rather than using your team’s usual Gmail or Outlook inbox.
That requires a significant shift in how your business operates. Even though FrontApp’s UX is well designed, onboarding your entire team to a new email management platform will require time and investment in training.
Another factor worth mentioning is that FrontApp isn’t designed for sales teams. The main focus is customer service and success, so if your sales process relies on emails with customers, the features won’t be designed to make that process significantly better.
Finally, Front quickly becomes expensive if you need access to the majority of features.
If you need access to email analytics, CRM integrations, and custom workflows, you’ll need to sign up to a higher-tier plan. As it’s billed on a per-user basis, it can quickly become expensive.
It’s worth considering FrontApp alternatives for a few reasons:
The primary differentiator between FrontApp and a platform like timetoreply is that FrontApp is an email management platform to help you receive and organise your emails, whereas timetoreply is an email response management platform that helps you actively improve how you use your team mailboxes.
It’s always worth looking at the alternatives before making a decision.
In the next section, we’ll show you some of the best.
Best FrontApp Alternative: timetoreply
One of the best FrontApp alternatives for teams that need to improve their email productivity but aren’t ready to switch to a whole new email ecosystem is timetoreply.
timetoreply is business email analytics software to help you measure your customer-facing teams’ email activity and metrics, helping you gather the data and insights you need to improve team email performance.
timetoreply works with both Microsoft and Gmail, as well as any other custom mailbox solution you use.
Once you connect your team’s mailboxes to timetoreply, your email activity data will instantly populate and you can see your team’s individual and collective reply time performance, average email volumes, peak hours for email activity, and much more.
timetoreply is designed to work seamlessly for customer service, sales, and any other customer-facing team in your business, making it the perfect alternative to FrontApp if you need email analytics for multiple departments.
You’ll have all of the metrics you need to improve how your team engages with your customers and your sales leads using email.
You can try timetoreply today with a Request free trial
Everyone has improved their reply times by at least 300-400%, giving our customers 3-4 times faster and therefore a better experience. As a business owner, that’s huge!
There are several distinguishing features that make timetoreply an excellent alternative to FrontApp.
1. Powerful email analytics to optimise performance
The key difference between FrontApp and timetoreply is that timetoreply helps you improve your team’s email performance with powerful business email analytics.
From the moment you install timetoreply on your team inboxes, it will start collecting actionable data on key metrics such as:
You will immediately start making improvements to your processes, goals, and staffing requirements to ensure your key stakeholders are never left waiting for a reply.
2. Goal setting and SLA management
timetoreply is designed to be more than just a standard email analytics tool. It’s here to help you turn those insights into real improvements.
On FrontApp, SLA management is only available on higher-tier plans and needs to be set up using custom rules, so it can be tricky to use without spending time setting it up correctly.
One way that happens is with goal setting and SLA management.
For example, you will set your SLA goals that your team needs to meet, and timetoreply will compare how your team performs against those goals.
You can see if your reply times are within your SLA goals, and if they’re not, use the insights to make improvements to ensure they are hit in the future.
Suppose that you didn’t hit an SLA goal, but then noticed it was because you didn’t have enough support reps working at peak email volume times. You will then address that by hiring new team members, or routing fewer emails to support by using a self-service system.
When you start using timetoreply, you’ll quickly identify key areas for improvements to ensure you always hit your company’s most important email targets.
3. Start seeing results in minutes
FrontApp is a great platform, but it’s going to take time before you fully switch all of your email activity onto the platform and start seeing the benefits.
With timetoreply, you can get set up in minutes. As soon as your inbox is connected, historical data is populated in your dashboards so you can see past performance.
Using that, you can set future targets for your team, and make decisions with real data to back them up.
As well as that, timetoreply includes features like:
timetoreply’s email response management software will help your team level up their email performance and ensure your customer-facing teams deliver the service experience your existing customers and sales leads expect.
Looking for the #1 FrontApp alternative? Request free trial
There are a variety of FrontApp alternatives on the market, such as timetoreply, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, and Email Meter.
Each one has different strengths and the best one for you will depend on your needs.
Here’s a breakdown of their features to help you choose.
Frustrated with FrontApp? Request free trial
As we’ve seen, there’s no denying that FrontApp is a powerful email management platform for customer service and success teams. It can help you bring all of your email activity into one place, and collaborate on email replies.
However, it’s not right for every team. Depending on your requirements, some of the tools we looked at in FrontApp alternatives section may be a better fit.
If you’re looking for a tool with powerful email analytics to help you improve customer service and sales team email performance, timetoreply is the only option for you.
Get started with a free Request free trial
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