Front vs. Groove by OptimizeCX

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

Groove is great for people who are wanting to provide accountability and organization for teams across your business. It is suited well for an organization that has many email requests coming in every day, because you can assign tickets to specific team members. It would not be suited for an organization that utilizes more phone support, than email support

• 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

• Creates Tickets when someone emails in or you can create a ticket within the groove system.
• They have great reports on response times and the average amount of time it took for a ticket to close. You can even see individuals average response times as well as specific teams.
• We use their Knowledge Base which is a great tool for creating FAQ and sending people to that.

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

• Better Follow-up by customer success team
• More customization within their major features to fit both, large and small sales teams, alike
• Their site goes down fairly often

Incentivized

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

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

It's well organized, but slow.

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

I'm giving them a 3 for the really great support they gave for general questions. They also have a good knowledge base. I'm giving them only a 3 though because of my last customer service when I need a billing resolution. I was very disappointed in how they handled that. I also find it very bad practice to send out ONE email notice that they were raising my rate three times as much at the end of the month. When I was with Desk.com, I had numerous emails over months letting me know their billing plans were changing. Even worse than refusing to refund me the difference was that they just stopped responding to me.

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

We also use Trello for project management. I have used both systems and we like Groove because it allows for our clients to contact us via email. They do not have to go to a ticket submission page, they can just email us directly and it will create a ticket. Groove also provides analytics on how long it takes to respond to tickets

• 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

• We wasted a lot of time setting up the product before we discovered a lot of features listed on the website aren't ready for public use