TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Front

    Score9.2 out of 10
    N/AFront is a communication hub that helps businesses keep the human touch in every interaction.

    $29

    per month per user

    Parature (Discontinued)

    Score5 out of 10
    N/AParature was a self-service customer support platform providing a self-service knowledge base to connect with customers across multiple channels. The company was acquired by Microsoft in January 2014 and reached EOL in 2017.N/A
    Pricing
    FrontParature (Discontinued)
    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)
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    FrontParature (Discontinued)
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsDiscount for annual pricing on Starter and Growth plans. Scale and Premier plans are annual price only.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    FrontParature (Discontinued)
    Considered Both Products
    Front
    No answer on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    93%
    Would buy again
    27 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    23 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    27 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    82%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    14 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    15 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    FrontParature (Discontinued)
    Incident and problem management
    Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Front and Parature (Discontinued)
    Feature
    Front
    7.6
    6 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Parature (Discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Organize and prioritize service tickets8.26 Ratings00 Ratings
    Subscription-based notifications6.74 Ratings00 Ratings
    Ticket creation and submission7.74 Ratings00 Ratings
    Ticket response7.74 Ratings00 Ratings
    Self Help Community
    Comparison of Self Help Community features of Front and Parature (Discontinued)
    Feature
    Front
    7.0
    6 Ratings
    13% below category average
    Parature (Discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    External knowledge base7.06 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multi-Channel Help
    Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Front and Parature (Discontinued)
    Feature
    Front
    8.8
    4 Ratings
    9% above category average
    Parature (Discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Customer portal8.33 Ratings00 Ratings
    Social integration9.43 Ratings00 Ratings
    Email support9.24 Ratings00 Ratings
    Help Desk CRM integration8.42 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    FrontParature (Discontinued)
    Small Businesses
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Kustomer
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    FrontParature (Discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (35 ratings)
    6.7
    (10 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    6.1
    (10 ratings)
    Usability
    9.4
    (9 ratings)
    2.0
    (2 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.5
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.8
    (5 ratings)
    1.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    FrontParature (Discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Front
    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
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    The single element of Parature I've not seen in any other system of this kind is the Download Module. You can post files in the open, or protect them by any number of entitlement methods. The solution is also appealing to those who don't want to manage the back-end/IT needs as it is a hosted solution and has proven to be very reliable.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Front
    • 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
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • Clean/Friendly UI. It was extremely easy to navigate around Parature's menus at a high level, and you could take advantage of the more robust features as you became more comfortable and familiar with how Parature operates!
    • Strong Knowledge Base. Writing KB articles or ticket summaries and making use of the search function within Parature allows for expedient recovery of past ticket information. Being able to search for a fix action, or at least a troubleshooting article that can guide you towards a resolution is extremely valuable.
    • Enhanced Notation Capability. Being able to send/post internal or external updates to a ticket is great! You can leave the wordy technical details for other employees while making sure to communicate the high-points and fix action to the end-user.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Front
    • 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
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • Reporting is barebones at best. If you need special reports, we had to go through Parature to have them built.
    • The use of frames on a website is very 1990s. It actually impacts usability of the product, especially when combined with how Parature handled sessions. An engineer could only work one ticket at a time which, honestly, isn't very realistic for a busy support team that is working on several issues at a time.
    • Support was often unresponsive when contacted for unplanned problems.
    • The knowledge base was not very friendly for clients and it provided no real encouragement for it to be used.
    • It took several clicks to do something as simple as edit and assign a ticket or to close a ticket.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Front
    We are very happy with Front and don't anticipate changing
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    Parature has been the best option for this campus in terms of what we use it for and there is no alternative
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Front
    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
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    It was bulky, cumbersome, and didn't allow us to handle the volume of cases we received on a daily basis. Many of our issues were highly technical in nature and we would often need to work on 2 or 3 at once. The poor design choices prevented this, which was unfortunate.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Front
    No answers on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    They recently had one very extended outage. It was a data center issue - but they were not diversified enough so in the end the system was down for almost 8 hours. There are also periods of time where for no reason the system simply doesn't respond. This small outages are usually short (just a few minutes), and have in fact been occurring less often, so it appears some corrective actions have been taken.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Front
    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
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    Nothing ever seemed to get resolved
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Front
    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
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    There are services that do bits and pieces of what Parature does. We liked the idea of having one service that meets our needs
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Front
    • 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
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • Parature allows for better Customer Service
    • Can follow up automatically for tickets
    • Will automatically close tickets that haven't been responded to.
    • Allows customers to reopen tickets easily and not allow them to be missed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Front Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot