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10 Front alternatives for your customer support team
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Front is a tool specifically designed for customer support teams- to help them streamline communication efficiently. It enables teams to interact with customers across multiple channels, automate repetitive tasks, and get detailed insights on team performance.
Front offers four pricing plans:
-Starter plan priced at $19/user/month
-Growth plan priced at $59/user/month
-Scale plan priced at $99/user/month
-Premier plan priced at $229/user/month
But Front has some limitations..
Front’s has a complex interface that takes time getting used to. Teams will need to undergo extensive training before they can get started with Front. This adds to the cognitive load of support agents and slows them down.
Some other limitations of Front include:
- Lack of seamless integration with Gmail and Slack. You’ll find your team constantly switching tabs at work – between Front and their inboxes, for instance.
- An extremely high cost as compared to other tools. For instance, 24*7 customer support and onboarding assistance is available only to members of the highest pricing tier ($229/user/month)
Table of Contents
- 10 best Front alternatives for your customer support team
- 2. Help Scout
- So, which tool should you go for?
10 best Front alternatives for your customer support team
If you’re on the lookout for a support tool that offers better value for money and has all the essential helpdesk features, there are several other options available in the market.
We’ve compiled a list of the 10 best Front app alternatives for your support team
1. Hiver
Built specifically for companies that use Google Workspace, Hiver empowers teams to provide multi-channel customer support from inside Gmail. It is one of the more robust alternatives to Front. With Hiver, you can engage with customers on multiple channels such as email, live chat, voice, and WhatsApp. Hiver’s knowledge base is another powerful feature that allows businesses to enable self-service.
Hiver fits intuitively within Gmail, it’s incredibly easy to use, and the best part is that teams don’t need extensive training to get started.
The platform comes packed with critical customer support features that can boost your support team’s efficiency.
Hiver allows you to:
- Assign incoming customer queries to support agents with a single click
- Collaborate with teams across the company with Notes. Simply @mention a colleague and leave a comment for their inputs.
- Get detailed insights into team performance and customer satisfaction with Hiver’s robust analytics.
Pricing
Hiver has three pricing plans
- Lite priced at $15/user/month
- Pro priced at $49/user/month
- Elitre priced at $79/user/month
Hiver also offers customers a free 7 day trial.
Take an interactive tour of Hiver
2. Help Scout
Help Scout is a Front alternative that helps teams streamline customer communication and enables them to seamlessly collaborate on customer queries.
Helpscout also integrates with a number of tools and has a reporting feature that gives you insights into team performance.
But Help Scout has some drawbacks when it comes to customer support.
- The interface is complicated and it can take some time getting used to
- The knowledge base feature for self-service is limited. Simple actions such as editing an article is difficult and time consuming.
- Fundamental analytics for tracking call length and live chat length is missing
- Getting timely vendor support is missing since there is no phone call back option or around the clock support
Pricing
Help Scout offers three different pricing plans to users
- Standard priced at $20/user/month
- Plus priced at $40/user/month
- Pro priced at $65/user/month
Top 10 Help Scout alternatives
3. Freshdesk
Another one of the Front app alternatives is Freshdesk. It is a multi-channel customer service tool that is best known for its low-cost plans. Like any other helpdesk tool. It offers functionalities such as ticket tracking and assignment, automations, and reporting. Freshdesk also allows teams to engage with customers across multiple channels and improve customer experience.
Freshdesk allows agents to split a single query (referred to as the parent ticket) into multiple smaller tickets (called child tickets). This is specifically helpful for complex queries as it enables different agents to work on different portions of the ticket. This reduces overall resolution time.
But Freshdesk has some disadvantages as well. Some of them are:
- It is quite complex and difficult to set up
- Vendor support is very unreliable and getting help can be a painstaking process
- It does not integrate well with Google Workspace products. This means teams can’t resolve tickets directly from Gmail. Instead they have to login to Freshdesk, resulting in a lot of back and forth.
Pricing
Freshdesk’s Support System offers four pricing plans
- Free: Starter plan has limited features but can be used by unlimited agents
- Growth priced at $15/user/month
- Pro priced at $49/user/month
- Enterprise priced at $69/user/month
Freshdesk also offers a free 21 day trial
4. Zendesk
There are several Front app competitors in the market like Zendesk. It is a cloud-based platform specifically designed for large enterprises. It comes with features like live chat, SLA management, custom workflows and analytics.
Aside from this, Zendesk also offers several advanced features such as multiple knowledge bases, custom roles and permissions, and custom agent workspaces. These features can help streamline your teams’ work and are well suited for enterprises.
But, despite its extensive features, Zendesk has several drawbacks that can hinder support teams from working efficiently. For instance,
- The interface is complex and unintuitive. It can take some time to get your agents acclimatized with the platform
- If you want training for your agents, you will have to pay anywhere between $1,500 to $2,800.
- The pricing plan is quite complex. Often you may end up paying for features you will never use and the ones that are actually needed are offered as add-ons that cost extra.
- Automations such as round-robin assignments and ticket routing are quite expensive.
- Personalized onboarding and around the clock support cost extra
If you opt for Zendesk, you will end up paying 40% more for essential customer support features as compared to Hiver.
Pricing
Zendesk’s Support plan has three pricing tiers
- Support Team priced at $19/user/month
- Support Professional priced at $49/user/month
- Support Enterprise priced at $99/user/month
Zendesk also offers a Suite plan that has four pricing plans
- Suite Team priced at $49/user/month
- Suite Growth priced at $79/user/month
- Suite Professional priced at $99/user/month
- Suite Enterprise priced at $150/user/month
Zendesk vs Hiver: A detailed comparison guide
5. Gmelius
Gmelius, another alternative to Front, enables teams to assign, track, and collaborate on customer queries that specifically arrive via email. It also offers Kanban boards and meeting schedulers for sales and project management teams.
However, Gmelius may be better suited for smaller businesses as opposed to businesses dealing with huge volumes of customer queries and emails. This is because Gmelius does not allow teams to engage with customers across channels such as live chat, phone, or knowledge base.
Pricing
Gmelius offers three pricing plans for customers
- Flex priced at $15/user/month
- Growth priced at $29/user/month
- Pro priced at $69/user/month
Gmelius offers a free 7 day trial
6. Missive
Missive is another alternative to Front. It is a great choice for teams that want a single tool to manage customer support as well as collaborate on internal projects.
Here is how Missive can help your customer support teams:
- Enable agents to assign, track, and collaborate on incoming emails.
- Offers standard templates agents can use to respond to common customer queries
- Chat rooms that enable you to have one-to-one conversations or internal group discussions.
- Optimize team workload by allowing you to assign conversations to different members depending on workload and availability
But Missive has some drawbacks when it comes to customer support. The platform, for instance, lacks analytics and reporting features. This makes it difficult for teams to track important metrics.
Aside from this, there’s a limit on how long you can retain conversation history for. The free plan, for instance lets you retain conversations for 15 days while the Starter plan retains conversation history for just 6 months. This can prove to be challenging if a customer comes back requiring further help on closed conversations.
Pricing
Missive offers a four tiered pricing plan
- Starter priced at $14/user/month
- Productive priced at $18/user/month
- Enterprise priced at $26/user/month
Missive also offers a free 14 day trial to users
7. DragApp
DragApp is a tool that turns your Gmail into a collaborative hub. It is a popular Front competitor. With DragApp, you can assign incoming emails to team members, automate certain tasks, and track team performance.
However, DragApp has some limitations when it comes to managing customer support.
- It does not support communication channels such as live chat, phone, or knowledge base.
- It uses tags to categorize emails rather than folders and this can prove to be very confusing when trying to segment incoming emails.
- The interface has a very slow loading time.
Pricing
DragApp has a three tier pricing plan
- Starter priced at $10/user/month
- Plus priced at $12/user/month
- Pro priced at $18/user/month
DragApp has a free plan (with limited features) that is meant for smaller teams and startups.
8. Kayako
Kayako allows support teams to engage with customers across multiple channels such as email, social media, and chat. The helpdesk software has over 600 integrations and comes with a number of functionalities such as workflow automations, analytics, and more.
Kayako offers both a cloud as well as an on-premise solution. This is great for businesses that prefer to keep their data stored on local servers.
However, Kayako has some disadvantages as well.
- A complex interface that is not user-friendly and challenging to implement
- Frequent changes in pricing plans without any real value-add
- Long ticket loading times
Pricing
Kayako has three pricing tiers
- Inbox priced at $15/user/month
- Scale priced at $60/user/month
- Enterprise priced at $100/user/month
9. Trengo
Trengo is a customer engagement platform that allows you to manage all your support channels from a single place. You can monitor customer conversations and track key metrics without having to switch between multiple tabs.
One of the biggest challenges with Trengo is that their basic plan, although competitively priced at $18, has several limitations. For instance,
- Customer conversation history is only stored for 6 months. If a customer happens to circle back on a closed query for some reason, they may end up having to repeat the issue all over again.
- Analytics is quite limited and the platform does not allow you to track CSAT and other key metrics.
- Workload distribution feature is missing. This makes it difficult to assign incoming queries to agents.
Pricing
Trengo has a three tier pricing plan
- Grow priced at $22/user/month
- Scale priced at $37/user/month
- Enterprise priced at $50/user/month
Trengo offers a free 14 day trial
10. Google Collaborative Inbox
If you’re on Google Workspace, consider looking at Google Collaborative inbox. It’s free and offers basic features that help you manage customer queries. For instance, you can assign queries to your team members and track their status.
However, there is a catch. As your customer support team grows, you will have to start looking for more advanced tools since Google Collaborative Inbox lacks a number of essential support features.
Google Collaborative Inbox does not have a reporting dashboard, has very limited features for team collaboration, and more importantly, it is not a scalable solution.
So, which tool should you go for?
There’s a plethora of customer support tools available in the market, all with varying capabilities and functionalities. Choosing the right support tool for your business from amongst all of these tools can be an overwhelming task.
At the outset, Front may seem like a good fit for your business. However, the platform has a number of limitations as we saw in this article.
Hiver’s customer support tool allows you to save 60% more annually, and comes with the same feature set (email assignments, tracking, advanced analytics, live chat, knowledge base, and so much more).
And the best part is that you don’t have to leave your inbox and learn an alien tool to manage customer support.
If you’d like to know how Hiver can help you deliver faster customer support, give it a spin with our free 7 day trial.
