Zendesk terminology for Freshdesk users

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.


What's my plan?







All Suites

Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus










Support

Team, Professional, or Enterprise









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.
This article has the following sections:

People
Tickets
Tools



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 each of the
channels where you engage with customers. 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



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 run when a time event occurs. See About automations and how they
work.






{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "TechArticle",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408823158426",
"url": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408823158426",
"headline": "Zendesk terminology for Freshdesk users",
"description": "You can use this article to understand the equivalent terminology between Freshdesk and Zendesk Support, helping you adapt to the new system's roles, ticket features, and tools during onboarding.",
"articleSection": "Zendesk basics",
"datePublished": "2021-10-16T03:43:09+00:00",
"dateModified": "2026-05-15T23:23:05.380589+00:00",
"inLanguage": "en",
"mainEntityOfPage": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408823158426"