| Functionality | 8 <p>Founded in 2015, it’s not surprising that Crisp offers a mature, well-rounded and complete feature set as a customer support tool. We found all the basics features to be present such as a strong live chat offering, a deeply customisable help centre and very complete omni-channel support. We also appreciated some less common, but nevertheless powerful touches such as the ability to ‘co-browse’ with a customer via live chat to enable an agent to troubleshoot customer issues right on their screen.</p> | 8 <p>Front offers most of the support functions that small and medium-sized businesses need, including live chat, email, and integration with channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram. It also features a help center, comprehensive AI, automation, and reporting tools. However, it lacks advanced features like the extensive chat customizability and automation of the likes of Intercom and Zendesk.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 6 <p>Due to its rich functionality and customisability, we found Crisp to have a moderate learning curve but is generally straight-forward and intuitive to use. An average SMB employee can become proficient with the platform after 1-2 days and some guidance. The interface is simple, making daily use straightforward for most team members. </p> | 9 <p>Front is one of the most beginner-friendly and intuitive support platforms we've tested. There were many things that stood out to us. It's clear Front uses simple language as opposed to industry jargon. "SLA" is "reply time goals". Automation templates come with graphics to show you exactly what's happening.</p><p>From an agent perspective, replying to tickets is exactly the same as replying to emails, making the learning curve extremely gentle. The onboarding is also excellent, offering clear, step-by-step guidance for setting up the system.</p> |
| Look and feel | 5 <p>Though we found its web app and live chat offerings to be fast, responsive and easy to use - Crisp’s web app and customer facing widgets/help centres felt a little bit dated from a design perspective. If you’re looking for a more modern design aesthetic, both from an agent and customer facing perspective, you’re better off looking elsewhere.</p> | 8 <p>Front offers a visually appealing interface that is fast to load. The design is clean and modern, making it pleasant to use on a daily basis.</p> |
| Customisability | 7 <p>Crisp offers a huge amount of options when it comes to customisability of just about everything - help centres, live chat widgets and analytics dashboards. Almost every element of customer facing widgets and sites can be customised - including the basics you’d expect such as logos, colours and header/welcome messages. It’s internally facing features are also fairly customisable - for example, you can create custom analytics dashboards to help you find the metrics you care about most more easily on the fly. </p> | 7 <p>Front offers a good level of customisability. Users can create custom fields, views, and reports. The live chat and help centre have standard customisation features, and there's a chatbot builder.</p><p>However, it lacks some advanced customization options like custom objects and custom actions. The level of customization available should be sufficient for most SMBs users, but power users might find it somewhat limiting. </p> |
| Ease of Setup | 7 <p>Crisp offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be very simple, taking less than 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels is also a simple process - live widgets involve pasting a simple script into your website and email integrations can be achieved in just a few clicks. However, when it comes to deeper customization, Crisp's sheer breadth of features means that you can spend a number of days tweaking appearances of widgets and setting up help centres.</p> | 8 <p>Despite it's power, we find Front to be one of the easiest tools to get started with in the sector. It offers a simple, self-serve free trial for their platform. Once in, the initial setup is very brief, taking less than 5 minutes. Connecting your first channels is a one-click process too across many core providers from social media sites like Facebook/X to email platforms like Gmail and Outlook.</p> |
| Customer Support | 10 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We found Crisps's customer support to be best in class. Whilst you can contact the team through a range of channels - the easiest remains via a live chat widget via their app/website. From our testing, we found it incredibly easy to get in touch with a real agent, often in under a minute, who'd be able to help troubleshoot even the most complex of issues.</span></p> | 4 <p>Front's customer support is somewhat limited. Unless you pay for the "Scale" plan ($100 per seat per month, minimum of 20 seats), you only get access to email support. However, when tested, we've found the Front support team to be helpful and responsive.</p> |
| Integratability | 7 <p>Crisp has a deep and rich integrations ecosystem, which includes popular CRMs (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce), project management tools (JIRA, Trello), and email marketing platforms (Mailchimp). They also provide an API for custom integrations as well as a Zapier integration for even more extensibility.</p> | 8 <p>Front offers over 110 pre-built integrations. These cover a wide range of commonly used apps including CRMs (Pipedrive, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho), Project Management tools (Linear, Jira, Trello), and more. It also has an API for custom integrations.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 5 <p>Crisp does offer users the ability to export customer profiles self-serve to a CSV. However this is limited to a maximum of 200,000 profiles. Beyond this, Crisp offers relatively little in terms of data export options. However, it is worth noting that there are plenty of other ways you can interact with data within Crisp via either its API or one of many third-party integrations (e.g. Zapier).</p> | 5 <p>Front's data export capabilities appear to be limited. While reports can be exported directly from Front, users need to contact support to export other data (e.g. conversations).</p> |
