The Best 7 Frontapp Alternatives

Are you considering using Front for customer support but aren’t absolutely convinced that it’s the solution for you? Are you wondering if there are any FrontApp alternatives that could work better for your brand?

Well, you’re in luck, then.

Below, we’ve compiled a whole list of the best Frontapp alternatives that you should consider.

Before we get to them, though, let’s take one last look at Front, shall we?

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What is Front (sometimes called FrontApp)? 

Front is a customer communication platform that allows you to bring multiple channels together, including email, to exchange messages with customers. Essentially a team inbox, Front allows you to scale your communications with a full-fledged help desk that offers important features. Enabling collaboration, internal communication, and automation, Front is extremely helpful for customer support teams. 

Front combines the best of email and help desk software resulting in a powerful shared inbox tool. Front works behind the scenes to deliver an exceptional customer experience, eliminating the headache that comes with collaborating on customer conversations. Customer insight is enhanced with this kind tool, as well as overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.  

With Front, you can take customer communications up a level. Integrations with WhatsApp for Business, Telegram and Google Business Messages gives you access to important channels customers may want to use to get in touch with your business. Since 81% of customers consider customer service to be influential in their purchasing decisions, businesses will want to adopt a tool like Front. 

Why do companies choose Front? 

It’s likely that you’ll consider Front if you want shared inbox software to manage customer queries. This means you want to receive emails and other message types from customers getting in touch with your business about various issues. You might currently be using an email provider such as Gmail, or a free shared inbox tool such as Google Collaborative Inbox, but discovering that these tools no longer meet your needs. 

Front elevates your customer service by eliminating the need to hire extra agents to handle customer queries. By offering shared inbox features to enable teams of agents to collaborate on email, customer service departments can be more efficient and productive while remaining within their budget. 

Companies choose Front for the following advanced features: 

• Analytics – with Front, you’ll never be in the dark when it comes to your customer service. For example, track demand over time or analyze team performance to identify top agents. Customize your dashboards for leadership to view. 

• Knowledge base – create self-service content for your customers to help them solve their own queries, deflecting more issues and increasing productivity for agents. 

• Chatbots and live chat – allow chatbots to automatically converse with customers and fix their common queries or jump onto live chat where human agents can instantly start helping customers. 

• Workflows and automations – eliminate the manual work that comes with managing a help desk by automatically assigning queries, avoiding the hassle of traditional email with forwards and reply-alls. 

• Collaboration – allow agents to work together on conversations by assigning ownership, conducting internal chats, accessing vital customer context and quickly tagging teammates. 

• Integrations – no shared inbox is complete without robust integrations with other customer service tools such as Asana or HubSpot, and you can create automated workflows between apps to enhance productivity.

• Mobile app – Front joins the club of mobile apps with the ability to access Front on the move, using a limited set of features. 

With such great features on offer, it’s no wonder that many businesses end up choosing Front. While Front is an appealing solution for many omnichannel customer service teams with multiple support channels, we’re here to tell you why Front might not be for everyone and offer up some alternatives so you can continue to help more customers.  

Why isn’t Front for everyone? 

With Front, you’ll encounter some limitations when it comes to displaying your emails and importing your email history. Some companies find this restrictive if they want to access their entire inbox when using a shared inbox software. Consider Keeping, for example, which is simply an extension for your shared Gmail account so you have access to everything you already had inside Gmail. 

Front offers limited support for multiple aliases, whereas Keeping allows you to sync and access unlimited mailboxes from your Keeping account. This means you can manage different email addresses through Gmail and Keeping in case your agents are monitoring support@, info@ and so on, which you can’t do with Front. 

Also, when you adopt Front, it integrates with Gmail, Outlook or whichever mail client you use externally so you have to leave the platform you love in order to access Front. Front has a relative complexity when compared to simple extensions such as Keeping which live on top of Gmail. 

So while Front is absolutely fantastic for some customer support teams, many wish to adopt simpler tools such as Keeping which provide a powerful upgrade to Gmail. Front is less dedicated to email than other tools and also locks your email data within Front so you’ll lose it if you choose to migrate. 

Some challenges customers encounter with Front

Some users have also discovered the following challenges when trying to use Front. 

• Some customers have encountered some restrictions with the pricing plan, such as when it comes to adding a user for a short space of time which is billed for a year. A lack of flexibility causes customers to look for alternatives. 

• Customers report that Front’s hard-to-contact customer service turns some off who are seeking to obtain help with Front. Problems have arisen when the system is down, leading to downtime with Front. 

• A few have experienced problems with loading archived emails due to a slow system or system crashes, which typically affects users with large volumes of data. 

However, like all software platforms, Front is continually growing and is no doubt addressing these problems. In the meantime, if you want to consider an alternative to Front, just read on. 

7 Best Frontapp Alternatives To Consider

1. Keeping

The first Frontapp alternative we’ve got for you is Keeping. 

With Keeping, your shared mailbox customer service tool remains invisible. Customers feel like they are just communicating with you over email – because they are. Keeping works powerfully behind-the-scenes to enable your agents to work collaboratively and support more customers with the same resources. 

You always know what you’re going to get if you choose Keeping. Primarily enhancing collaboration, reporting and automation options within Gmail, Keeping avoids overwhelming new users with foreign features while expanding the possibilities for managing email. Keeping gives you the simplicity of Gmail combined with the power of the help desk. 

Consider the following essential features of Keeping: 

• Shared notes – collaborate with other agents using shared notes right within Keeping. 

• Email assignment – know who’s responsible for what with email assignment designating responsibility. 

• Collision detection – avoid stepping on each other’s toes by locking emails that are being worked on. 

• Automated workflows – set up rules and automations to enhance the efficiency of your inbox. 

• Analytics – detailed analytics to track key metrics that give you insight into inbox performance, demand and SLAs. 

• Saved replies – set up a library of canned responses to share with other agents that save you time. 

• Automatic replies – let customers know you’re working on it with customized automatic replies. 

• Multiple mailboxes – access all of your inbox in one place with Keeping. Not more logging in and out or switching tabs. 

• SLA management – set rules for response and resolution time to maintain a high level of service for customers

Focus solely on email ticketing with Keeping, and help your customers right where they’re at. Simple to access, easy to adopt and productivity-enhancing, Keeping is a great option among team inboxes for managing shared email. Built for teams serving customers in a highly personal way, you always have the option to migrate to another tool with all your data should you wish. 

2. Zendesk

When considering Front app alternatives you’ll likely have come across Zendesk, which is a ticketing system for customer service teams. Highly complex, customizable and adaptable, many teams find value in Zendesk for fielding customer inquiries and enhancing customer satisfaction. To get the most out of Zendesk, you’ll want to train your administrators and agents in how to use this powerful tool. 

Zendesk scales comfortably with large customer service teams, so no matter your company size you’ll be glad you chose Zendesk — even enterprise companies. You can take advantage of Zendesk’s extra features such as an in-built knowledge base for customer self-service and Zendesk AI powering personalized bots. 

If you choose Zendesk, you’ll know you are in good company with hundreds of thousands of companies using this software. Adhere to strict SLAs and customer service protocols with Zendesk’s customizable workflows. Trust that your data is being handled properly with Zendesk, and provide unparalleled support for customers. 

3. Missive

Missive is another shared email tool counted as one of the Front app alternatives. It functions as a powerful inbox that enables you to field customer tickets with ease, including all the features you’d expect from this type of software. Internal notes, ticket assignment, tagging and AI combine to give you the best user experience with Missive. 

The calendar within Missive enables you to organize and keep track of your tasks without ever leaving your emails. Missive’s collaborative writing features lets your agents work together to compose emails, enriching the customer experience and accelerating productivity. 

The advantage of Missive is you can also integrate other channels with your email communication so you can talk to customers over WhatsApp, live chat, Facebook Messenger and more. Developer tools allow you to make more of Missive with webhooks and UI/iFrame integrations. 

4. Help Scout

Another powerful tool for managing customer email is help desk software Help Scout. Help Scout is shared inbox software that enables customer support teams to receive, respond to, and manage incoming messages alongside other channels such as chat and social to ensure that you never miss a trick. Help Scout’s omnichannel support means you can use the shared inbox to gain visibility into every message. 

Build a knowledge base to empower customers to help themselves instead of emailing your agents. Help Scout’s in-built knowledge base software makes content creation a breeze so you can spend less time writing articles and more time helping customers that need it. 

Set automations for your conversations to take action when you receive an email, such as sorting, prioritizing, assigning or escalating them based on particular parameters. Shared email becomes a lot easier when you can work as a team and use Help Scout to chain multiple conditions together. 

5. Freshdesk

Freshdesk by Freshworks is user-friendly help desk software with a free plan that integrates with all the other tools in Freshworks’s suite of software. Support is intuitive and contextual, even as Freshdesk enables your support team to scale without the friction. A knowledge base and custom widgets keep support tickets lower and makes support more economical. 

Freshdesk makes use of AI to enable your team to run on autopilot with automations that directly increase productivity. Generative AI gives agents assistance in responding to customers, naturally augmenting the human touch. For example, you can follow up with customers automatically to remove the need to remember. 

Naturally, the collaboration tools you would expect in a shared inbox come as part of Freshdesk. With a focus on facilitating cross-functional collaboration for the entire team, agents can keep ownership of a ticket while involving other stakeholders while accessing vital customer details. 

6. Gorgias

Ecommerce companies will be excited to learn that there’s a shared inbox just for them in the form of Gorgias. Provide support to your online shoppers with AI to prioritize, assign and tag every ticket as it arrives in your inbox. Immediacy is critical in ecommerce and you’ll miss customer opportunities if you don’t use a tool like Gorgias to support them. 

You can integrate Gorgias with all your favorite tools like Shopify so you can instantly process returns, send tracking codes and generate discount codes all for your customers. Customer support agents are more empowered to solve problems when they have access to this information, especially without needing to switch contexts. 

Coordinating with other team members becomes much easier when you use Gorgias, especially those in other teams. For example, when you are able to keep track of conversations, customer support becomes more effective and coherent. You can use rules to surface the most important requests so agents know to prioritize your VIP shoppers. 

7. Kayako 

Kayako is help desk software you can use to take your customer support to the next level. Kayako as a Front alternative is useful if you want simple customer service software to help you collaborate, integrate, and then track the customer journey. Kayako embraces the modern look and user experience to allow customer support teams to focus on helping customers, not battling with outdated software. 

One of Kayako’s big selling points is their live chat tool which you can use to send instant messages to customers, whenever, wherever. You can also have an insider’s view into how customers behave before and after they talk to you, giving you a better oversight of the overall customer journey. 

Manage any customer conversation with custom views, tags and assignments so you can track any open issue as a team. Kayako is focused on being a shared inbox without the fuss so you can help customers from one platform. Like other solutions, Kayako also has a self service portal you can use to create content that aids customers.                                                                                 

Wrapping up

The concept of using a shared inbox is not new, so that’s why many businesses have heard of FrontApp for the purpose of customer service. You shouldn’t stop there, when there are so many helpful Front alternatives to consider if you want to make your customer service more efficient. Front has many advantages, not least because it is full-featured and scalable, but another option may suit your needs better which eliminates any need to undergo extensive training.