Front Continues Aggressive Growth and Product Innovations
On October 6, 2021, Front briefed Info-Tech on their latest product functionality and roadmap, alongside their growth in the EMEA region. Front – a unified customer experience platform provider – offers a centralized communications hub that enables the fluid interchange of information for both internal and external communications.
On October 6, 2021, Front briefed Info-Tech on their latest product functionality and roadmap, alongside their growth in the EMEA region. Front – a unified customer experience platform provider – offers a centralized communications hub that enables the fluid interchange of information for both internal and external communications. Front serves 6,900 businesses through North America and Europe (with a new office opening in Dublin, Ireland) and across a wide range of industries, including travel, financial services, and manufacturing.
Front aims to mitigate the problem of fragmented customer communication across siloed departmental tools. Employees communicating with customers using a customer support tool, for instance, do not see information also being communicated through a marketing tool. Front is the overlay on top of the CRM that brings all this communication (both between internal employees and with customers) together into one hub. This creates a stronger picture of each customer journey across departments, enabling different departments to collaborate within a single windowpane more easily.
Major organizations that use Front range in size from small to enterprise. These include Cisco Meraki, Shopify, and Altour. Front is aggressively innovating, with a continuously updated tracker on their website for quarterly releases.
Key functionality includes:
- Automated workflows for responding to customer enquiries.
- Classify and organize communications by tagging.
- @mentions and team channels.
- Shared drafts and team inboxes.
- Add comments to drafts and messages.
- View full history of customer journey and previous communications.
- Analytics and reporting for your team’s workload and customer experiences.
Our Take
For organizations with limited customer experience management functionality, Front provides an excellent means for employees to maintain consistent communication with customers. Front’s interface is intuitive and offers features that enable strong ease of use for users to connect, collaborate, and share information. Indeed, Front is recommended for small- to mid-sized businesses that may also want to leverage this product for a lightweight CRM that creates an engaged customer service strategy.
For Info-Tech members interested in the broader strategic piece (and thereby what technologies IT should be providing for supporting customer engagement), an ABMP-centric approach can aid modelling a desired future state and derive requirements to streamline and enhance customer service. Info-Tech’s blueprint Develop an IT Strategy to Support Customer Service guides you through structuring this project, defining the future state, and building out a roadmap.
Source: Develop an IT Strategy to Support Customer Service. Accessed October 27, 2021.