Front vs. Sparkcentral (discontinued)

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

Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential

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

• The biggest advantage of the Sparkcentral platform is its "inbox zero" philosophy. With this, our customer support requests are queued within the app, and agents need to work down the queue to keep it empty.
• The app is designed from the ground up for customer care - instead of taking a generic social platform, and sprinkling in some customer care tools. Everything about Sparkcental is designed for helping our customers.
• Sparkcentral allows us to do much better CRM. We can make customer notes, see recent interactions, determine who helped the customer (and when).

• 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

• In the beginning our team had the option to see what another user was typing as they responded to a post. With the latest update, this was taken away. That feature was key for us to shadow agents remotely who are still in training to provide real time feedback.
• Our company has a number of different brands that we manage. Having a truly unified queue would be a great addition for us!
• The bulk resolve should allow the option to select on the posts that you wish to resolve instead of selecting a time frame for bulk resolve. Often we find that marketing posts generate more volume in the evening. However, there are sometimes posts where the customer needs assistance during that time. So, if we were to bulk resolve for a certain number of evening hours we would potentially miss a customer's concern through that option as it is currently. But, if the option was to go through and select on all marketing posts and then bulk resolve you would ensure that you are not missing a post where a customer needs assistance.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.

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

The system meets all my expectations.

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

Incredible customer service team that replies back very quickly, follows up on the reported issue till it's resolved in a very timely manner.

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

Sparkcentral does what it has offered to do, where other software made empty promises, Sparkcentral delivers. They also inform us, anytime they are undergoing maintenance or when Twitter or Facebook has an API change, where in previous cases we would have to discover this ourselves.

Incentivized

• 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

• Customers appreciate fast responses to the things they post on social media. This tool allows that to happen.
• The dashboard allows us to keep up with how many are waiting in our queue so we can keep up with how busy we are during the day and manage it.
• Customer satisfaction has seemed to increase while using this tool.
• Being able to add notes with the customers address and phone info is awesome as well.

Incentivized