Front

Overview

Front is a shared inbox platform that pulls email, SMS, chat, social media, and messaging apps into a single interface. The bet is simple: your support team spends 40% of their day switching between tools. Front eliminates that tax. Who uses it: Support teams (5–500 people), customer success ops, and sales teams that field inbound requests across multiple channels. If your customers email, text, and DM you on Slack, and your team currently has five browser tabs open to track it all, Front is the workflow you're missing. Core operator scenarios: **Inbox triage at scale.** A support team of 12 gets 300 emails, 40 SMS, and 50 Slack DMs daily. Without Front, messages scatter. With it, one person triages all incoming, assigns to the right owner, and the team sees one queue. Routing rules (keyword-based, language-based, customer tier) automate the first filter. **Preventing duplicate replies.** Two team members reply to the same customer email because neither saw the other was already working on it. Front's assignment and real-time visibility kill that. You see who's on it, and the conversation locks to avoid collision. **Measuring response time.** First response time (FRT) and resolution time are operator metrics that matter. Front tracks both automatically. You can see which channels are slowest, which team members are bottlenecks, and where automation could help. **Handoff and collaboration.** A support agent gets stuck on a technical issue. They @mention an engineer, add context, and hand off the conversation without leaving the platform. No email forwarding, no context loss. **Outbound + inbound in one place.** Success teams run campaigns (email sequences, SMS blasts) and need to see replies in the same interface. Front lets you send and receive without toggling. Pricing reality: Front charges per user per month (pricing changes — check the vendor). Most support teams start with 5–10 seats and scale from there. There's usually a free trial; use it to map your actual channel mix and see if the consolidation saves your team time. Honest limits: Front is a consolidation layer, not a ticketing system. If you need deep SLA automation, custom workflows, or tight Salesforce sync, you may need a ticketing tool (Zendesk, Intercom, Help Scout) alongside it. Front works best when your support process is relatively straightforward: triage, assign, resolve, measure. If your workflow is heavily custom, Front becomes a middle layer instead of a replacement. Alternatives: Zendesk (heavier, more features, higher price), Intercom (chat-first, better for product messaging), Help Scout (simpler, cheaper, fewer integrations), Slack (free but fragmented for support ops). When to pick Front: You have a distributed support team, multiple inbound channels, and you're losing time to context switching. You don't need deep ticketing logic or SLA automation yet.