Front is a communication hub that helps businesses keep the human touch in every interaction.
$29
per month per user
Parature (Discontinued)
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
Parature was a self-service customer support platform providing a self-service knowledge base to connect with customers across multiple channels. The company was acquired by Microsoft in January 2014 and reached EOL in 2017.
N/A
Pricing
Front
Parature (Discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Starter
$29
per month per user
Growth
$79
per month per user
Scale
$99
per month (billed annually) per user
Premier
$229
per month (billed annually) per seat (50 seat minimum)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Front
Parature (Discontinued)
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Discount for annual pricing on Starter and Growth plans. Scale and Premier plans are annual price only.
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.
Parature earns a "7" on my rating scale because it fits the bill for a ticketing solution. While it is not the most powerful utility I have come across, it is fairly user friendly and gets the job done. There is quite a bit of room for customizing the interface, but it comes with a learning curve. A score of "7" reflects what I would tell anyone who is looking for feedback on this application; it's better than a majority of the market share, but still has room to grow!
I call them "sticky notes" but Front calls them Comments. It's a way to collaboratively make comments on messages sent to joint inboxes for folks to coordinate a response before it goes back to the sender.
When exchanging with someone using the Comments feature, someone can create a draft reply and then share it before it goes out. It also includes the typing indicator letting you know they are not just replying, but specifically working on a draft reply. These things are really great for individuals, or teams, that don't sit next to each other.
Tagging. It's a fairly simple concept, but very useful for classifying notes and being able to manage, what could be, a messy inbox. Additionally, the ability to have your own personal tags really allows the user to manage their own messages in a way that works best for them.
Zoom Meeting Integration as there are some clients who want to have a call immediately.
Tagging can be improved - looks scattered.
Calendly Integration, they have their own calendar appointment but it would be good if I don't need to leave the front to set up [calendar] appointments.
We left Parature for Salesforce Service Cloud. While Parature was functional, as our business matured we needed better support, more stability, and a lot more features. In addition, it integrated with our sales, marketing, and finance department, allowing us to all use a single solution and be able to share information across departments.
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.
It was bulky, cumbersome, and didn't allow us to handle the volume of cases we received on a daily basis. Many of our issues were highly technical in nature and we would often need to work on 2 or 3 at once. The poor design choices prevented this, which was unfortunate.
They recently had one very extended outage. It was a data center issue - but they were not diversified enough so in the end the system was down for almost 8 hours. There are also periods of time where for no reason the system simply doesn't respond. This small outages are usually short (just a few minutes), and have in fact been occurring less often, so it appears some corrective actions have been taken.
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.
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.
Before choosing Parature we reviewed many of the currently available solutions before building our short list of Parature, SugarCRM, Zendesk, Salesforce, and NetSuite. In the end, the licensing models for Salesforce and Netsuite eliminated them from consideration. The SugarCRM solution was our current solution, and didn't appear to be a key area of focus for Sugar (though we continue to use SugarCRM for everything except the Ticketing feature). Zendesk lacked the Download Module feature which is a critical element of our deployment. In the end, it was Parature that addressed all of the needs we identified and did so in a single, hosted solution. It was also one of the least expensive to deploy and maintain.
Quality- with all the benefits given, in just matter of time, all your organization will find it familiar and less effort is needed when composing emails.
Effectiveness- no one wants to miss an email, or never respond to a possible customer. Front will help you that. If you do not want to send that email now, you can set a timer and Front will send it for you later on.
Simplicity- Front is not the most difficult app to handle, indeed, it is too easy to learn. From the first moment you will have a guided tour and will learn all the good things that it has for you.
Positive: everything is housed in one place, we are paperless and we are efficient.
Negative: the bugs of this product make the above equally as frustrating. Also, some people don't use it correctly and going back and fixing their mistake is time-consuming. The reporting feature are also pretty flawed.
