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Zendesk vs front which one is best for your business

Last Updated: March 2024

Zendesk and Front, both the softwares help streamline your customer service support and retain your brand loyalty.

Yet there are few distinguishable differences between these two platforms and so let’s find out which one is best for your business.

Zendesk vs Front

Overview comparison

Zendesk is a SaaS (software as a service) based company that provides. The company was founded in 2007. Trusted by more than 100,000 businesses and it helps all sizes of businesses – startups, small, medium, and enterprise. One of the top-rated companies on Gartner, g2, getapp, etc.

Out-of-the-box and easy-to-use software that is also customizable and scalable. It is designed to help your customers, your teams, and your company on the whole. There is a free trial of the software available to try its full features. Paid plans start from $19 per month. They also offer six months of free services for startups.

Founded in 2013, Front is a California-based software company that develops shared email inbox and customer communications solutions. It’s been helping more than 8000 businesses with its support, operations, and account management.

The company had been rated as one of the best time-saving customer conversations software on Capterra, g2, and getapp. Advanced analytics gives your overall integrated customer reports. The pricing starts from $19/user per month onwards.

Helpdesk (Final Winner: Front ⭐4.7/5)

Dashboard

Zendesk dashboard brings all your multiple channels (email, SMS, chat, social media) conversations in one place for your agents’ understanding of the customer’s history. Lets you create either group or individual views, add categories, etc. Yet, it requires you to follow the guides/demos in order to explore it thoroughly.

Front’s easy-to-use interface features a comprehensive dashboard that connects and displays all your channels (email, SMS, Whatsapp, social, etc), teams, and the shared inbox in one single window. Your agent just needs to click on it to access the customers’ conversations.

The software records the previous agent’s identity and maps with the tickets giving the other agents the information about who handles the conversation. SLA (service level agreements) alerts show up on the same dashboard window prompting your agents to attend to those conversations with high priority.

Winner: Front

Team Collaboration

Team collaboration within the helpdesk software allows you to communicate with your teams on customers’ conversations or tickets. Helps you with assigning them, following the status of the conversations, and sharing knowledge for faster resolution.

Zendesk’s AI-enabled workflow auto assigns the tickets to your teams, but you won’t be able to access your agent’s workspace, track or check the individual status of the customer cases. This makes it difficult for you to jump into any customer conversation if required.

Using Front for team collaboration makes it easy as it lets you work with multiple coworkers on one email. It is very helpful to be able to communicate with coworkers or leave messages about a customer’s conversation, without actually responding to the customer. Also, displays a timeline of all the conversations for easy follow-up.

Winner: Front

Shared Inbox (Final Winner: Front ⭐4.7/5)

Inbox

Zendesk shared inbox enhances the customer service agent experience. It enables them to collaborate and arrive at a solution together and faster through intuitive assigning tools. Since Zendesk converts these emails into tickets, the agent who attends the conversation needs to solve it and close the ticket.

Shared team inboxes of Front give you the ability to give multiple employees access to a shared inbox, along with shared templates and other useful features for a clutter-free workspace. It helps you track your employees’ workspaces. Comes with a “snooze” function that alerts you on your set calendar schedule.

Winner: Front

Email (Final Winner: Front ⭐4.7/5)

Email User Interface

Most of the helpdesks today come with email as an integral part of the omnichannel or multi-channel support system. These email conversations can be organized and customized depending on the helpdesk software. Let us see what Zendesk and Front have to offer.

Collaborations with Zendesk are made pretty easy with a click. One such integration is email. But, it provides very less room for customization and custom-rules adaptation. Every email is converted into a ticket and assorted automatically across teams using manually set rules.

In the case of Front, it comes with a regular email-like interface. Here all the customer conversations from different channels are visible on the same screen. Every customer’s communication is recorded as an email leading to personalized conversations.

Winner: Front

Team Collaboration

While Zendesk allows you to check, assign, respond, and incorporate help articles, with the emails, it comes with limited customizations though. You can initiate and follow customer-company email conversations but cannot include your team members in the loop.

On the flip side, Front allows absolute team engagement within the same inbox using tags, comments, and ccs. You can add or unsubscribe members to the email conversations at any time and also integrate the comments from teams.

Winner: Front

Data Integration

Tight integration with the help center and all the other related information from all channels proves to be very useful to provide complete knowledge of the customer to your agent.

The Front email software can gather all the required data in one place seamlessly and avoids the requirement of downloading them manually. This saves a lot of system space for you.

Winner: Zendesk

Chat Support (Final Winner: Front ⭐4.7/5)

Chat Widget

AIs and chatbots are integrated within the helpdesk software to help you offer instant and automated service solutions to your customers at any time.

Zendesk provided chat software that is less customizable and the configuration is pretty complicated as it takes place on two different dashboards. Most recently customers have complained about chats being unresponsive. The chat allows you to send attachments and screenshots for a clear understanding.

Whereas, there is a provision in Front to add or loop in your teammate or member from another team in real-time, depending on the customer’s requirement, to share knowledge and provide the best experience. That means, Along with the general customers’ chat widget, you also get an additional chat widget for internal conversations.

Winner: Front

Omnichannel Support (Final Winner: Zendesk ⭐4.3/5)

Omnichannel

With Zendesk, you can deliver cohesive conversational experiences connected across email, web, mobile, and social channels, and your customers never have to repeat themselves. And thereby providing a satisfying omnichannel experience to your customers.

Complete support solutions related to customer support, sales, and other customer communications from all channels are an easy breeze in Zendesk using its integrations.

Customer communications from different channels are compiled in the Front dashboard as email conversations and provide a smooth experience.

Winner: Zendesk

Ticketing Management (Final Winner: Zendesk ⭐4.3/5)

Tickets Interface

The software makes it effortless to customize and optimize even a huge number of conversations by using effective ticketing management. It automatically sorts and assigns the tickets to respective teams for faster resolution and avoid unnecessary escalations. The ticketing setup requires you to watch/read their guides to complete the setup.

No cases, no tickets, only personalized emails like conversations in Front. Very easy to set up and use. Thus it scales your customer engagement on a very personal level giving them the human experience.

Winner: Front

Ticket Creation

Auto-ticket creation via email and calls is a unique feature of Zendesk. Zendesk Talk integration receives calls from clients and automatically creates a ticket number. It saves a lot of time by enabling the customers to select their call intent from the well-organized menu along with a solution. Manual ticket creation is also possible.

Unlike Zendesk or any other helpdesk, the Front’s Ticketing system works more like personalized email conversations. So every conversation is a ticket that is auto-enabled with snoozes and alerts so that your agent attends to it timely. It also works efficiently even if you are working with remote teams and staff.

Winner: Zendesk

Collaborations

If you’re a larger company with a ton of integrations and special one-off solutions, Zendesk allows you to triage work seamlessly between several different teams that have different skill sets. The API connection options are helpful with more complex integrations.

Native Front collaborations are useful in organizing customer conversations that come from different sources, allowing the team to have access to all the information in a synchronized way, and making required edits before sending the responses.

Winner: Zendesk

Self-help center

Ticket deflection saves a lot of time through the help center, knowledge capture, and answer bots with Zendesk. Building a help center and finding it at the time of requirement is quick and easy with the Flow Builder tool.

Front software turns out to be a letdown when it comes to self-help. There is neither a self-help portal integration nor a builder tool available. The company needs to seriously fix this flaw.

Winner: Zendesk

Workflow (Final Winner: Front ⭐4.7/5)

Workflow tools and automation

The avid personalization and optimization functionality of the workflows in Zendesk adds a superiority over its competitor here. Powerful workflow creation tool, that allows you to reduce the volume of requests and enhances the support environment.

Front provides the ability to invite certain individuals or teams to a conversation using automated workflows. Tags help you keep track of particular conversations and retrieve them easily as and when required. The snooze function enables you to choose to snooze or reopen the conversations.

Winner: Front

Automation (Final Winner: Zendesk ⭐4.3/5)

Automation Tools

Predefined responses, called macros of Zendesk, help solve common problems faster and automatically by issuing a pre-planned response. Your support agents can create and share their own macros. Assigning SLA rules helps in ticket prioritization, even so, there are a few customization limitations on the overall automation setup.

Canned responses, customizable and automated workflows to assign conversations to agents, set SLA rules, and design self-help services are a great plus for the Front.

Winner: Zendesk

Integrations (Final Winner: Zendesk ⭐4.3/5)

Native/third party Integration

It is possible to connect with knowledge articles, apps, and other third-party tools that you use currently including 1000+ built-in integrations on Zendesk. You can even create or design your own custom integration to manage the tickets.

Coherent native and third-party integrations with Front like calendar, Pipedrive, SMS, social media, etc make your work easy by allowing you to work from one single window. Absolutely not required to toggle between windows or applications.

Winner: Zendesk

Customer Support (Final Winner: Zendesk ⭐4.3/5)

Support services

Though you use Zendesk or Front to improve your customer services, there will be times when you would need to avail their customer support. Let’s see how they help.

Zendesk offers support to its users via live chat and email.

Whereas Front offers only email support.

Winner: Zendesk

Analytics and Reports (Final Winner: Zendesk ⭐4.3/5)

Reporting

The comprehensive Zendesk analytics and reports give you in-depth information into your teams’ and channels’ performances to help you optimize and improve your overall services. It is also easy to create these reports from scratch.

Analytics seems to be a bit of a downside for Front users. If you require detailed analytics with complete data, then it is available only with the Enterprise plan.

Winner: Zendesk

To Conclude

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, we have thoroughly dissected Zendesk and Front and brought you their distinguishable differences. We hope now you can identify which is best for your business.

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