Close CRM vs. Front vs. Hiver

Excellent software to increase sales and follow up with existing and new customers. Email and SMS handling are really easy for the sales team, managing leads is really great, and Close merges duplicate leads to help our Data Leads avoid repetitive and unnecessary calls. As mentioned in some comments before, must improve in reports, Close is not appropriate to handle or track agents' hours making it necessary to implement additional software to cover this area.

Incentivized

I think Front is very useful for every company with multiple teams working together on different emails from clients. Not so useful if a lot of different teams need to work on a request at the same time, because when an email is sitting in multiple shared inboxes things can get messy. Also would not recommend for teams that work is individualized, as team work is the main point of Front.

Incentivized

One scenario where Hiver works really well is in a shared support or billing inbox or anywhere multiple team members need access to the same messages. For example, when a customer emails about a billing question, we used to reply and manually loop in the billing team or forward the message. That often caused confusion, especially when someone forgot to “reply all” or responded only to the teammate instead of the customer.Now with Hiver, we just assign the conversation to the billing inbox, and whoever is available can respond. Everyone on the team can see the thread, status, and notes, which avoids duplicated efforts and missed replies. We also used to rely on Google Groups, but it wasn’t clear if someone had already replied, and there was no easy way to collaborate behind the scenes. Hiver completely solved that for us.As for situations where Hiver might be less ideal, I’d say if your team isn’t using Gmail or Google Workspace, then it’s probably not a good fit. It’s really designed for teams that live in Gmail so the team doesn't have to learn a new system. I'm sure some businesses will require a more robust ticketing solution but for our use case, this was a perfect option to improve outcomes, client service, and satisfaction.

Incentivized

• Email sequences. Create and send a sequence of emails until the sequence finishes or the contact replies to your email. You can also pause the sequence manually.
• Email sync. Syncs in real time with your email account, which is huge.
• Zapier integration. We've automated a lot of our pipeline management through the Zapier integration. This saves us soooo much time.

Incentivized

• Even if you are just trying to compose a single email, Front gives a smart system that has options such [as] organized templates, tags, alerts, [and] changing your outbound dpt email.
• Tasks- with Front you will not miss any interaction. When you are required to get assistance from a coworker, you only need to mention him/her and that notification will appear automatically in their inboxes.
• Smart Notifications- sometimes we are just overwhelmed about the several notifications on our devices that we tend to miss some of them, but Front offers a new way to notify every email, discussion, mentioning, or tag that you really would not want to miss.

Incentivized

• automation through rules
• tagging emails, anaylics behind them
• support, chat always responds right away

Incentivized

• Make it so one can set the time at which the emails go out.
• Make it easier to set up my workflow.

Incentivized

• Their integration to Salesforce is lacking. As the owner of our productivity tools and how they are used, I have very little control over what things to enforce, or even change what objects are available. For example, we don't use Cases in Salesforce but with the Salesforce integration the Cases object shows up. There's no need to have that there. I've heard there is a roadmap improvement forthcoming.
• One of our uses is for our sales development reps to prospect with visitors. Because of the high volume of inquiries it's difficult for our reps to efficiently manage all their follow ups. It would be nice if we could run a "scheduled campaign" where a predesigned cadence of email follow ups can be sent automatically. To be clear, they do have a scheduling capability, but it just can't be used as a prebuilt option.
• Integrations to other systems require you have a user account to those systems. We have SSO and therefore we don't always have a user account. For example, out integration to Jira uses SSO so we don't each have individual Jira logins. This is an outage for us.

Incentivized

• It could be considered expensive, but ultimately worth every penny for those who use shared inboxes/groups to run their business.

Incentivized

We are very happy with Front and don't anticipate changing

Incentivized

It's my favorite CRM to recommend to sales organizations. Robust Telephony options including a Power Dialer, SMS, and Voice Drop, are completely integrated into the CRM. The kicker is you can have "Unlimited" contacts where many platforms charge based on the number of users. This can make a huge difference in monthly billing.

Incentivized

It's very easy to understand and use by new customer support agents as well. Be it a technology, product, or marketing person, we have trained most of the company folks to read and respond to customer conversations in their free time with the help of the Front app. It is also easy to set up for an admin and manage his/her team with communication rules.

Incentivized

Easy to use

I haven't really had the need to use their support, but the only time I had an issue with the platform, the Close team was very attentive and responded in a short span of time. Also they take minimal time to solve issues. The only con here is there is no way to reach out to them apart from email.

Incentivized

The support is good, and it's definitely prompt, but still lags when it comes to technical requirements, as I guess they are slow in developing newer features fast. So no complaints in terms of responsiveness, but yeah, at times it's not very helpful when you need certain features or are blocked on things which can't be unblocked.

Incentivized

Support is there, can be slow at times.

Pipedrive was great for us for a long time. We used it for over 4 years. Our product and process was simple. When things got more complex, we needed something that could handle our growing needs and Pipedrive kept falling short. We built our own custom solution in Airtable and though it worked, we spend a lot of time managing it. Close was able to solve all our issues and save us hours per week in admin work.

Incentivized

This is something I am not familiar but it seems like it is [available] in Gmail. Thus I cannot give any feedback about it. What I am sure about is Front works for our team and I see Zoom using the service in the Customer Success Organization in a long run.

Incentivized

True ticketing solutions are certainly more robust in that you can typically manage social media channels and phones, etc. But, in my opinion, when you don't have a team solely responsible for managing a ticketing system they can be complicated to implement. With HIVER, we're already all accustomed to managing our own G-Suite inbox, so it was simply a matter of teaching the team how to utilize the solution.

Incentivized

• Positive - It's much easier now with Close.io to make sure that no deal falls through the cracks. Therefore helping us recover lost revenue.

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• Saved our executive team considerable amount of time chasing support questions through different channels.
• Gave our team clear accountability for who was lead on a support issue and how to escalate.
• Customer regularly say our support is the best in the industry.

Incentivized

• The ROI on showing how many emails are being received and addressed in a timely manner are great for KPIs
• the ability to search and ensure emails are not being deleted as an automatic report is sent out the following day saying if any emails were deleted by whom
• the ability to automate who gets assigned what emails from specific vendors per entity

Incentivized