| Functionality | 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> | 4 <p>Missive’s positioning as a more generalised tool for customer facing teams means that its overall feature set as a dedicated customer support tool is relatively lacking. To be more specific, Missive is best suited to smaller teams with low ticket volume who manage customer interactions across a range of social and email channels. That being said, its omni-channel support is well rounded, with only a native Slack integration being a possible major drawback of teams. Additionally, its rule based ticket routing and analytics filtering features are deep and offer room for a lot of customisability. </p> |
| Ease of Use | 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> | 7 <p>We find Missive’s self-serve onboarding to be simple and intuitive. It would take an average SMB employee less than a day to become proficient in using the platform. Additionally, its web app is fast to load and easy to navigate for new agents.</p> |
| Look and feel | 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> | 8 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We find Missive's interface to be modern, sleek, and fast to load. Both its light and dark themes are well designed and easy to navigate with clear accent colours applied to core features and buttons. </span></p> |
| Customisability | 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> | 4 <p>At present, Missive lacks many customer facing features that you might expect from a customer support tool, such as a help centre. Additionally, it's live chat widget only allows for limited customisability focused on themes and colours.</p><p>That being said, there are some areas where customisability is a core strength for Missive. For example, the ability to centrally manage email signatures for all agents with the ability to add interactive surveys into them - or the ability to create rich, rules based workflows to route tickets.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 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> | 8 <p>Missive 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 - for example connecting your email can be done with just a couple clicks instead of needing to set up email forwarding manually. </p> |
| Customer Support | 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> | 5 <p>Missive offers a dedicated customer support email which we find helpful and responsive (reply times were typically >24 hours). Additionally, its 'help' documentation is rich and answers most common issues and queries. However, we would have liked to see the addition of a live chat widget for support on more urgent queries.</p> |
| Integratability | 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> | 5 <p>Missive provides a number of integrations with popular CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot) automation platforms like Zapier. Additionally, it offers an API through which users can interact with data directly. </p><p>That being said, we found it missing some key integrations natively that we would like to have seen, such as a native Slack integration and integration with common project management systems (such as Jira and Asana). </p> |
| Ease of Migration | 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> | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Users can export key data across a range of categories including past conversations, customer profiles etc. through self-serve.</span></p> |
