When moving across to Zendesk from Freshdesk, part of the onboarding process is becoming familiar with the terminology used. This article correlates Freshdesk terminology to Zendesk Support.
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People
In Freshdesk and Zendesk, the main user roles are administrators and agents. They can be assigned to a role or a group to help manage your support workflow. There are also customer roles which are the people who create support requests. In Zendesk, they can be configured as external or internal based on their access to Support. The table below provides a list of terms used in Freshdesk and Support.
| Freshdesk term | Zendesk term | Description |
| Administrator | Admin | An agent with additional privileges to configure and manage your ticketing system. |
| Agent | Agent | A person in an organization who interacts with customers. They can provide information about products or services and handle and resolve customer requests. |
| Agent role | Agent role | What an agent can do in the ticketing system. Support provides a number of default agent roles such as Advisor, Staff, and Team Leader plus the ability to customize roles. See Understanding Zendesk Support user roles |
| Agent group | Groups | A collection of agents. Groups are set up to help manage your support workflow. See About organizations and groups. |
| Contact | Customer / end user | The person who raised a support request from a channel. |
| Company | Organization | A collection of agents and customers. In Support, organizations can be used to manage ticket workflow and monitor activity. See Creating organizations. |
| Custom agent role | Custom agent role | Customizing your agent roles and assigning those roles to agents. This is available on the Support Enterprise plan. For more information, see Creating custom roles and assigning agents. |
Tickets
A ticketing system is the mechanism for agents to resolve support requests from customers. The following table shows terminology relating to ticket features and functions used in Freshdesk and Support.
| Freshdesk term | Zendesk term | Description |
| Due by time | First reply time | When a ticket needs to be responded to or resolved as defined by the SLA policy. |
| Merge tickets | Merge tickets | Merging one or more tickets into another ticket. This is performed when there are multiple requests about the same issue by a customer. See Merging tickets |
| Multi-channel support | Zendesk Agent Workspace | The Zendesk Agent Workspace provides a unified agent interface. Regardless of which channel the agent is serving, they have access to tools and data, the ability to manage multiple tickets, and apps to extend the functionality all in a single browser tab. See About the Zendesk Agent Workspace |
| Ticket | Ticket | A ticket is the interaction between an agent and a customer. Tickets are received as requests from channels where you engage with customers. In Support, this includes email, social media, embeddables, apps, Help Center, Chat, and Talk. See Working with tickets to learn more about tickets |
| Ticket status | Status | A label to indicate the state of a ticket. Freshdesk statuses include Open, Pending, Resolved, and Closed. In Support, there are six status values: New, Open, Pending, On-hold, Solved, and Closed. For more information, see About ticket fields |
| Ticket watcher | CCs and followers | A ticket watcher in Freshdesk is an agent which follows tickets that aren’t assigned to them. The CC and followers feature in Support provides this functionality. See Using CCs, followers, and @mentions |
Tools
Freshdesk and Zendesk provide business rules to help automate and manage your support workflow. They also provide metrics to measure customer service performance and the ability to report customer feedback. The table below correlates Freshdesk terminology to Support.
| Freshdesk term | Zendesk term | Description |
| Automation rule | Triggers | When a ticket is created or updated, an action is automatically performed based on predefined conditions. A trigger is a type of business rule. To learn more about triggers in Support, see About triggers and how they work |
| Business rule | Business rule | Business rules are directives to help streamline and manage your ticket workflow. In Zendesk, you can implement automations, macros, SLA policies, triggers, and views. See Streamlining your support workflow |
| Canned responses / ticket templates | Macros | Macros in Zendesk allow you to apply a prepared action or response to a ticket. In Freshdesk, this functionality is partly provided using Canned Responses which are ticket response templates, and ticket templates which only apply for new tickets. To learn more about Zendesk macros, see Creating macros for tickets |
| Happiness report | Zendesk Benchmark report | A report about customer feedback on their support experience. You can create a benchmark survey and view the results in Support. To learn more, see Measuring customer satisfaction with the Zendesk Benchmark |
| Support benchmarks | SLA policies | Metrics to measure your customer service experience. In Support, you can set up SLA policies as business rules to help your agents meet service level goals. See Defining and using SLA policies |
| Time trigger (for an automation rule) | Automations | Conditions and actions that modify ticket properties. They are actioned when a time event occurs. See About automations and how they work. |