Question
What is the best tool for customer support?
And does your team use one app for email, another for live chat? Or do you have one app to handle everything?
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If you are bootstrapped and want something that works well, try Crisp Chat
https://crisp.chat
We were able to get a lot done with their free tier for my previous startup
And they had the mobile app so could respond to people pretty easily. This may seem like a parity thing these days but to get it in the free version was great !
Yeah, Intercom's pricing seems like it can go up quite quickly since it's billed on active people/customers not just your team's user size. Plus they have so many products to pick from.
How much did your team end up spending on Intercom, if you can share a ballpark figure?
Around $600-$800/mo now, depending on how often we send marketing emails.
Intercom charges per active user. Active user = logged in OR received an email in the past 90 days. So when we send a marketing email to all of our users and leads, the active count goes way up.
Yes for sure. I'm looking into that. Intercom also doesn't have the ability to manage multiple unsubscribe groups, which is a big problem.
FrontApp.
We are heavy on email and don't offer live chat support (although I believe they offer it). The integrations are great and it is swift to get new staff working on it without training.
@quietnotion Curious, does your team use Front for personal business emails (e.g. to their personal name@yourcompany.com address) also, or do you use it solely for support@yourcompany.com style shared email addresses?
Good question.
We leave it to staff to decide which app (gmail interrace of google apps, front, etc) for their individual email (name@yourcompany.com).
For shared email where team interactions often happen, it runs through Front. So, support@, onboarding@, etc.
Gottcha, thanks for sharing! Seems like the ideal Front usecase is to use it for all work email, both personal and shared. What's your team's favorite thing about Front for shared email?
Our best tools are those that we notice add a lot of utility but we don't have to think about a whole lot. Front just does the shared email function very well. We onboard a new hire, add them to front and a shared inbox or inboxes, start assigning them chains and off they go. We don't see much fall through the cracks.
My favorite aspect is the zapier integration options with Front.
Very cool. Leaning strongly towards using Front for our customer support emails—though not sure on paying the extra for Twitter inboxes, and may just continue managing those in Tweetdeck. Have you used Front's Twitter integration enough to have an opinion on its value?
And what are some of your favorite Zaps for Front?
We don't have experience with the twitter add-on.
Some zaps we use with Front automatically send personal kickoff emails while tagging the assigned staff, tagging orders with relevant information and anything else that keeps the chaos of customer communications in sync with the single point of truth in our database.
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Neat—what's your favorite thing about Crisp?