I’m Mathilde, CEO and co-founder of Front. To give more context about our shared inbox, we started by trying to solve the pain points around responding together to group emails like contact@ info@. Email isn’t collaborative; it’s unclear who is supposed to respond to a group email, forwarding/reply all/CCs are messy, and you can’t even internally discussion an email in the inbox. But, it’s still the main communication tool for businesses, so that’s why we’re tackling the team email inbox problem first.
We expanded Front for multi-channel use (live chat, SMS, Facebook, Twitter) because even more teams (customer support, success, operations, marketing, etc) need a centralized communication tool that brings all their emails, channels, apps, messages into one place. It’s been interesting to see the many new use cases that we now support as a result of this change.
Ultimately, our longer term vision for Front is to create a platform that helps to break down the silos between teams that are using various specialized tools/apps and make collaboration easier within an entire company. And I think we can use the inbox to be that central platform. But, we’ve got a long way to get there and things to consider over time (like our pricing). You can see our public roadmap on Trello (http://frontapp.com/roadmap) and submit your ideas to help us get there.
I wrote some thoughts on my vision on Medium if you’re interested: https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/to-new-beginnings-announc...