Zendesk vs. Front

Omnichannel support means meeting customers where they are by providing their preferred communication channel and fostering consistent, convenient customer service.

Zendesk helps you deliver an omnichannel experience with our Agent Workspace. This interface allows agents to move across channels seamlessly, handling several live and continuous conversations simultaneously. Some channels include:

• Voice
• Email
• Live chat and social messaging (like WhatsApp Business and Messenger)
• Social media
• SMS

Shared inboxes, like Front's, are not an equivalent to dynamic and customizable customer support platforms. Front’s shared inbox lacks functionality and creates an inefficient agent experience. For businesses looking for a true omnichannel solution that focuses on CX, consider moving away from Front.

Zendesk has an efficient ticketing system that makes case management easy for agents to organize and track tickets from an omnichannel agent workspace. Within the single view, agents can access relevant customer data, prior conversations from across channels, and collaboration tools like side conversations. This enables agents to talk about the issue, brainstorm ideas about possible solutions, or get approvals from management without the discussion getting saved onto the main ticket.

Front’s case management runs through a shared inbox that doesn’t have the features or organizational benefits that Zendesk has. It’s been noted that Front experiences issues with communication, with messages often delayed or failing to send entirely.

Zendesk integrates with over 1,600 pre-built apps and integrations in the Zendesk Marketplace, such as marketing automation tools, billing systems, and sales CRMs. Our easy-to-use integrations enable teams to streamline data to build a 360-degree customer view and customize our software to their specific needs. This complete view helps break down data silos between departments and provides the context needed to personalize each customer interaction.

Front’s help desk offers a more limited selection of pre-built integrations, with just over 100 in its marketplace. One customer review discusses that many of their integrations must go through a third party that doesn’t offer high-level integrations. Another review mentions a lack of enterprise integrations, while yet another says their integrations do not have the capabilities to complete the desired task.

Zendesk features a robust set of advanced reporting and analytics tools that allow you to

uncover customer insights and key performance indicators (KPIs) to improve the customer experience and streamline operations. With Zendesk, you get reporting and analytics features like:

• Pre-built dashboards that work right out of the box.
  
• Point-and-click customizable dashboards allow you to tailor your experience to display only the metrics, charts, and filters you want to see.
  
• Real-time and historical data to see live metrics and compare them to past trends.
  
• Custom attribution and correlation for more advanced data discovery and visualization

Front also features analytics tools. You get basic reporting capabilities, like the number of messages sent and average reply time. However, it doesn’t support more advanced reporting functionality like custom attribution and correlation.

Zendesk continuously adopts the latest and most beneficial AI and automation technology to keep leading the charge in customer service. Zendesk AI offers features like:

• Intelligent routing to direct tickets to the appropriate agent to handle and prioritize the ticket based on predetermined criteria.
  
• AI chatbots, pre-trained to handle common issues for customer service. Plus, they work right out of the box, saving users hours of manual setup.
  
• Generative AI that acts as an agent assistant can detect customer intent, sentiment, and language of the interaction and suggest responses or recommend the best course of action to reach a resolution.

Front doesn’t offer native AI technology but recently introduced a few AI capabilities with an integration with the ChatGPT API (application programming interface). The add-on is limited, only using AI to draft responses using customer context and summaries of long conversations.

Zendesk features a powerful set of self-service software, such as help centers, community forums, customer portals, and chatbots that can help customers find relevant support articles.

Zendesk also has knowledge management tools to help agents create and update content. For example, Content Cues, is an AI-powered feature that can share relevant articles inside support tickets and flag outdated content and content gaps in your knowledge base.

On the other hand, Front’s self-service options are limited as it doesn’t have a practical way to manage knowledge base content, such as Content Cues.

The Zendesk Agent Workspace is an intuitive interface that provides everything the customer service rep needs to support the customer request, all in one place. The unified workspace allows agents to:

• Move seamlessly between communication channels.
• View customer context.
• Get AI-powered assistance from the context panel.
• Collaborate with internal teams.
• Track and respond to conversations with live updates.

In comparison, Front’s workspace doesn’t match the agent experience that Zendesk provides. It lacks some interface elements that can be frustrating to support agents, is not user-friendly, and doesn’t seamlessly sync with Gmail and Google Calendar.

Larger enterprises that manage multiple brands need to maintain their look, tone, and messaging consistency across channels, social media, and contact points.

Zendesk provides a customer service solution that allows you to manage multiple brands seamlessly across email, help center, live chat, and social messaging apps—like omnichannel support for WhatsApp, X, and Messenger. Agents can even set branding as a ticket value and add it to all tickets associated with the brand. They can search for and filter tickets by brand or set the brand in business rules to help streamline workflows in tools like pre-written responses, views, triggers, automations, and reporting.

Front lacks a multi-brand feature. With a shared inbox, agents may have to tag and sort emails manually to keep multiple brands organized, which can mean that agents dedicate precious time to this tedious task rather than focusing on the customer experience.

As the #1 ranked Best Software Product, Best Customer Service Product, and Best Product for Mid-Market of 2023 by G2, Zendesk is the software to beat. Zendesk is a trusted leader in customer service and the only software focused exclusively on CX, earning the top spot will be a challenge for competitors.

As WWE legend Ric Flair says, “To be the man, you gotta beat the man.” Good luck.

Rather than providing customers with a shared inbox—and the limitations of that feature—Zendesk offers a unified omnichannel workspace. This interface consolidates everything agents need to deliver an exceptional customer experience into a single view.

That includes customer context, history, interactions, personal data, ticket information, collaboration tools, and AI tools and capabilities, so your agents can focus on service instead of wasting time toggling between apps and systems.

Learn more about how to migrate your shared inbox to Zendesk.

TL;DR: Yes, Zendesk is built to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes.

Zendesk is an easy to use, agile system that scales with businesses of all sizes—from startups to enterprises. No matter your need, Zendesk has a proven track record of helping businesses achieve their goals and offers a plethora of customer success stories as proof.