| 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> | 7 <p>Thena is one of a handful of up and coming support platforms tailored to B2B focused customers. It's focus is on Slack-centric teams (where it excels), however, it also provides support for email, a basic live chat widget, MS teams and forms. Additionally, we were pleased to see that you can configure an AI agent to respond to messages for you as well as the ability to set up a basic help centre.</p><p>However, it lacks support for many channels that non B2B focused businesses might want such as all social platforms or phone calls.</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> | 6 <p>Thena's web app is well presented, however, given the sheer breadth of features, it can feel overwhelming at times. Instead of a traditional email style inbox, it places a focus on a kanban-style tickets view which may be unintuitive for agents who aren't used to project management platforms. Despite this, the UI was designed well to present information and buttons are intuitively placed such that the learning curve is not too steep. It would take an average SMB employee an hour to master the tool.</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> | 7 <p>Thena's web app is well designed, fast to load and easy to use. It has a modern feel to it and looks great in both dark mode or light mode. We especially appreciated the addition of keyboard shortcuts across the inbox that help agents zip through the platform when tackling a large backlog of tickets.</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> | 6 <p>Thena offers a number of facets for customization. It's internal facing interfaces offer the most scope - with things like inbox views, AI agent context and workflows, all fully configurable.</p><p>However, its external facing interfaces are limited in their customizability. For example, both its live chat widget and help centres only offer basic aesthetic options such as colours and logos.</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> | 4 <p>Unfortunately, Thena does not offer a self-serve free trial for its platform. Instead you'll need to hop on a sales demo to get access. However, the sales call is often with the founder and was helpful and swift. One we got access, initial setup was limited and the platform can feel slightly overwhelming given the sheer breadth of features and facets you can customize. However, given its Slack centricity, getting connected to it is very simple thanks to a native integration which only takes a few clicks.</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> | 8 <p>Thena primarly provides support via a 1:1 slack channel with their team. When tested, agents responded in <15 minutes and were well versed and very helpful, even for complex setup style questions. Additionally, Thena provide a well written and rich help centre that can answer most 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>Thena offers integrations with popular task management platforms (Jira, Linear), CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot) and incident management platforms (Rootly, Incident.io). We would like to have seen a Zapier integration like many of its peers offer though. That being said, Thena does offer an API through which technical teams can interact with the platform directly.</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> | 7 <p>Thena offers self-serve export functionality to CSV/JSON for tickets and their details within their web app. Additionally, Thena offers an API through which you can interact with tickets directly.</p> |
