Boxton keeps world-class shipping service while working remotely

Boxton uses Front to quickly respond to incoming requests and manage shipments — and their team transitioned to remote work without missing a beat.

Boxton is a logistics technology company that provides shipping management automation for growing companies who don’t have access to traditional platforms or marketplaces. The Boxton team used Front to manage email while working from their San Diego office, and now as they’ve transitioned to remote work, they’re loving Front more than ever. 

Challenge

Email is the hub of your work day, and for Boxton CEO and Co-founder Warren Kucker, this is especially true. “Everything about your work day is in your email — we’re glued to it all day.” 

Kucker never liked the way email worked for managing shipping and logistics, however. Email kept them from being able to give fast, reliable responses to their customers. “You have these 75-email-long chains that were impossible to keep track of,” he explained. They were using Apple Mail, and they made a new folder for every shipment. It was difficult to understand what emails needed a response. “We always hated it, but didn’t realize there was a solution for it.” 

Solution

Kucker found Front and hasn’t looked back since. The Boxton team has 6 shared inboxes in Front to manage requests and shipments, and they regularly receive more than 250 emails a day. “Front’s been absolutely fantastic, even as we’ve transitioned to remote work,” Kucker said. “It’s so critical to our business that I don’t know how we would stop using Front if we wanted to.” 

“I absolutely would recommend Front for remote work. It’s one of those things that people don’t know they’re missing out on right now.”

— Warren Kucker, CEO and Co-founder, Boxton

Staying on top of every shipment with assignments and tags

Between receiving requests, approvals, and updates, each request has a lot of back and forth — and a lot of emails to manage. They tag each shipment with the request number to keep all the communication around it in one easy-to-track place. “Tags and archiving in Front has been a million times better than our old process,” Kucker noted. “And now that we’re remote, we’re using the assignments feature to make sure everyone knows what they’re responsible for replying to.” 

Customer service that stands out

Kucker said that especially in the shipping world, quick customer service makes all the difference. With Front, they’re responding faster, and it’s a selling point for new business. “Our fast response times with Front has been a big differentiator for us,” Kucker said.

Collaborating is easy — even when you’re not in the same office

The Boxton team uses Front’s comments feature to chat about emails directly on their email threads. “Being able to discuss the content of an email directly on the email thread is huge.”

“The communication that would have just happened out loud as a quick question can happen easily, directly on the email thread in Front.”

— Warren Kucker, CEO and Co-founder, Boxton

Training new teammates is simple

“We onboarded 2 new teammates a week before we transitioned to remote work,” Kucker said. It was simple to add the new users in a few clicks and instantly get them access to their team’s communication. “It’s phenomenal to train a new teammate in Front compared to Gmail,” Kucker said. “We can share an email with a teammate, they can write drafts that I can edit, and we can comment back and forth to discuss how to respond, directly on the email,” he added. “It makes a huge difference.”

A platform the team can grow with — remote or not

As Kucker’s team continues to grow, he has said Front is ready to grow with them. “Front’s useful for our team now, and it would be useful if we had a team of 300 too.” The team plans to continue using Front no matter where they are. “It’s invaluable whether you’re working from home or not.”