Front is a communication hub that helps businesses keep the human touch in every interaction.
$29
per month per user
Help Scout
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Help Scout is help desk software. The vendor’s value proposition is that that their solution reduces time spent on training users because Help Scout is simple to use and set up and scales like any enterprise product. This solution includes multiple mailboxes to support as many email addresses as needed in order to work collaboratively across teams, and manage several products or brands from one account. Reports on conversation trends, team performance, productivity, and customer happiness are…
$30
per month starts with 100 contacts
Microsoft Viva Engage
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Viva Engage, formerly Yammer, is used for private communication within organizations or between organizational members and pre-designated groups.
$24
per year per user
Pricing
Front
Help Scout
Microsoft Viva Engage
Editions & Modules
Starter
$29
per month per user
Growth
$79
per month per user
Scale
$99
per month (billed annually) per user
Premier
$229
per month (billed annually) per seat (50 seat minimum)
Standard
$30
per month starts with 100 contacts
Plus
$90
per month starts with 200 contacts
Company
Contact sales team
Microsoft Viva Employee Communications and Communities
$24
per year per user
Microsoft Viva Suite
$144
per year per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Front
Help Scout
Microsoft Viva Engage
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Discount for annual pricing on Starter and Growth plans. Scale and Premier plans are annual price only.
—
Microsoft Viva Engage is also available in some Microsoft 365 packages.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Front
Help Scout
Microsoft Viva Engage
Features
Front
Help Scout
Microsoft Viva Engage
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Front
7.8
6 Ratings
5% below category average
Help Scout
8.5
23 Ratings
4% above category average
Microsoft Viva Engage
-
Ratings
Organize and prioritize service tickets
8.46 Ratings
9.023 Ratings
00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications
7.04 Ratings
7.813 Ratings
00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission
7.94 Ratings
7.821 Ratings
00 Ratings
Ticket response
7.94 Ratings
9.422 Ratings
00 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Front
7.2
6 Ratings
11% below category average
Help Scout
8.3
21 Ratings
3% above category average
Microsoft Viva Engage
-
Ratings
External knowledge base
7.26 Ratings
8.620 Ratings
00 Ratings
Internal knowledge base
00 Ratings
8.119 Ratings
00 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Front
8.8
4 Ratings
10% above category average
Help Scout
8.4
23 Ratings
5% above category average
Microsoft Viva Engage
-
Ratings
Customer portal
8.43 Ratings
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Social integration
9.33 Ratings
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Email support
9.14 Ratings
9.523 Ratings
00 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration
8.52 Ratings
7.215 Ratings
00 Ratings
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
Front
-
Ratings
Help Scout
-
Ratings
Microsoft Viva Engage
8.3
46 Ratings
7% above category average
Task Management
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
8.728 Ratings
Gantt Charts
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
8.515 Ratings
Scheduling
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
7.923 Ratings
Workflow Automation
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
7.523 Ratings
Mobile Access
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
8.843 Ratings
Search
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
8.143 Ratings
Visual planning tools
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
8.326 Ratings
Communication
Comparison of Communication features of Product A and Product B
Front
-
Ratings
Help Scout
-
Ratings
Microsoft Viva Engage
8.5
49 Ratings
6% above category average
Chat
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
9.344 Ratings
Notifications
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
8.449 Ratings
Discussions
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
9.648 Ratings
Surveys
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
9.238 Ratings
Internal knowledgebase
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
9.338 Ratings
Integrates with GoToMeeting
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
7.314 Ratings
Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
6.713 Ratings
Integrates with Outlook
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
8.632 Ratings
File Sharing & Management
Comparison of File Sharing & Management features of Product A and Product B
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.
Small businesses that want a conversational type of customer support experience. Nothing wrong with support tickets, but it does make you feel like a number. Also, we needed to get up and running quickly so the "inbox" feel of the dashboard was already familiar with the team so they could adopt the new software quickly.
Yammer is great when you have a company culture that encourages friendly collaboration and communication. It can be a great supplement (but certainly not a substitute) for bonding and sharing ideas and thoughts. Certain channels can be really successful, too, like a channel where people can post dog pictures or something fun like that!
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.
Extremely simple to use and understand as a user - treats communications like human beings and provides a much more personal feel to communication (as opposed to making people feel like numbers).
The email newsletter.
They are super responsive. They are pretty rad and transparent: if something goes wrong on their end they are not afraid of admitting fault. Which leads me to trust them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little about the product, but as leadership, that's something that I really need
Help Scout does exactly what it needs to (facilitate organized, efficient conversations between customers and support people) without getting in the way.
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.
Trying to group tickets is a bit unflexible. You can create folders which can be part of a workflow (automatic trigger) but you can't create a folder based on tags. This needs to be improved because there's a need to create smarter segments and mix them.
Metrics are useful but there needs to be more details about them. You can drill down in some but others are still not very actionable or visible (ok, that number went down, but what was the cause? what's the criteria with what you measure that?)
Although the social enterprise network works very well, there is room for some slight improvement - such as the ability to attract users. By being part of the Microsoft Office Suite, it is offered as an "add-on" and many overlook it and see it as unnecessary at first. It would be smart for Microsoft to sell it as its own product so it could gather more popularity as a "social network".
Giving an option to filter results could be better as well as giving an option to turn off the "recent activity" bar on the home page.
We are receiving feedback from the organizational level that they may want us to transition to a different solution to provide consistency across the company.
Microsoft is dedicated to continual improvement on Yammer. They realize the value that Yammer brings to the table with their clients. In the short time that we have had Yammer implemented, we are just now beginning to see the strong impact it has on becoming more effective and efficient around collaboration.
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.
Help Scout is a great solution for support teams. There are many articles and webinars to help you learn how to use Help Scout. There are also many features to help make your workflows easier and more efficient. I would readily recommend Help Scout to any small or medium-growing support teams.
Overall easy to use and intuitive, although limited in the possibility to personalize layout and look & feel of a site. Some functionalities are not easy to use, like document editing, but some others are quick and effective (posts and tagging above all). Performance and responsiveness of the Yammer site is typically acceptable, in my experience.
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.
We have never had to use the support for Yammer. The tool works well and we have not come across any bugs. User Interface is simple and easy to use, similar to other forum type products, thereby removing the need for any extensive training. Team members are invited in and immediately are able to start using the tool.
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.
Only have minimal experience with G-Suite for a much smaller company. This worked well for that organization but did not have similar specialization functions that suite our larger organization very well. Help Scout's pricing makes sense, and continues to service our needs well. Minimal usage of other programs, but have no need to explore alternatives at this time.
Our team briefly used Salesforce.com's Chatter product before switching over to Yammer in 2012. While Chatter is essentially the same product as Yammer, it left much to be desired. Chatter's design was (and remains) clunky and difficult to navigate. Yammer is a simple, easy-to-use product that offers similar functionality as Salesforce's Chatter.
We are able to retain our customer base due to the outstanding customer service our Customer Experience department provides. Without an organized tool like Help Scout, this would not be possible. We pride ourselves in quick response times to customers and are able to do so by effectively routing tickets to the right agents.
My company is pleased with the positive impact Yammer has created departmentally and on an individual basis with work flow efficiency.
Adversely, most old and new employees are more familiar with SharePoint, causing the company to pay for training for all current and incoming employees.
As Yammer becomes more widely used, the need for training may diminish, which is where we will see our return on investment, as the product clearly provides a more effective form of file sharing and communication between employees and their department.