Front's inbox delegation feature allows you to give another user temporary access to your inbox (to view and take some actions, but not respond or comment by impersonating you). It means that if a customer writes into that individual inbox, it won't get missed.
Currently, only the owner of an individual inbox can delegate it, but we have heard from several customers that they would like to delegate one user's inbox to another user. These are the main use cases:
Employee offboarding - keep that person's inbox live for a window of time, and delegate it to someone else in the team
Someone is away unexpectedly (e.g. off sick), forgot to delegate before going on PTO or set up the delegation incorrectly
A new user is onboarding, and their supervisor would like to view the new user's inbox or share their own inbox, as part of the training
There are currently a couple of workarounds but they are not ideal
Delegate the inbox directly in gmail or outlook - not available for all channels, and it means the conversation history is lost
'Log as' the user from the Identity Provider and set up the delegation. Okta allows this, but it can break offboarding workflows
Agreed, the feature should be in the hands of the admin rather than the user to delegate their own mailbox. There are advantages to have this. Alternative in Outlook would be 'Open Another Mailbox' in OWA/Exchange Online whereby the user has Read Permissions to another mailbox. Can be really handy in all types of situations. Delegation would solve this, but to administer, we would have to ensure the employee sets this up themselves, which is not right.
I believe this is essential for the company admin because the inbox directly in gmail or outlook forces the manager to have gmail/outlook open and considering that with Front use the source mailbox is becoming more out of sync it is hard to make sense of an employee's inbox if they have migrated from the source provider to Front.