Front is a communication hub that helps businesses keep the human touch in every interaction.
$29
per month per user
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product has since been discontinued.
N/A
Pricing
Front
Sparkcentral (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
Sparkcentral (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.
Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential
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.
Bringing back the option to see not only who is responding to a customers post, but actually seeing the response as they are typing it out. That was a neat feature to have.
It will timeout, which is a bit annoying sometimes but not a huge deal.
Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.
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.
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.
Sparkcentral is in an excellent place - they are the only true stand-alone social media customer care platform. We also provide support through Oracle RightNow (Chat/email), but the social add-on for that appeared to be weak. Hootsuite works fine for small teams of low volume customer care, but for a dedicated social care platform, we could not find anything else worth considering
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.
Providing customers the option to contact us via social media cuts costs for the company by lowering call in numbers and creating a more efficient way of assisting customers where they are.
Currently there is not an option to separate outside of business hours reporting for response time and within business hours. This can cause a pain point when reporting to other departments as it calculates a higher response time than the accurate one due to outside business hours.
