Accounts within Front represent the companies or organizations that your team works with. Each account contains contacts, which are the individual people that your team communicates within that account or organization. After you’ve created or imported accounts within Front, you’ll be able to use account data to drive better customer communication experiences. Accounts allow you and your team to:

1. Automate assignment and routing using account-based rules. 

2. See all conversations with an account at-a-glance in Contact Details.

3. Understand your team’s performance through the eyes of your customers with account-based analytics.

This guide will walk through three steps to starting to using accounts within Front. For an in-depth explanation of accounts, check out this article.

Accounts in Front have default fields including name, description, domains, and externalId. More on default fields can be found here.

Your team may also keep track of additional important properties for your accounts; such as revenue, industry, or account manager. For any of these non-default properties you want to track, you can create custom fields following this guide. Creating account custom fields in Front for these properties will allow you to display this account information in Front and use these account properties in rule automations.

It’s important that you create any required account custom fields before importing account data so that your imported data can be matched to your custom fields.

After setting up account custom fields from Step 1, you can begin importing any existing account data you have. Front supports seven methods of importing account data, each described in detail here:

1. Manually create accounts

2. Importing accounts with a CSV

3. Salesforce accounts sync

4. HubSpot companies sync

5. Microsoft Dynamics 365 accounts sync

6. Using the API 

7. Using the Zapier integration

One important account property that we recommend you include in your import is the account email domain. If you specify an email domain on an account, such as example.com, Front will automatically associate all past and future contacts with a matching email address to that account. This makes it simple to link all contacts to the correct account without needing to do so manually. Click here to learn more about associating contacts to accounts.

After you’ve imported your account data, you can start using it to automate workflows. Check out this guide for instructions and example workflows.

You’ll also notice helpful account information and conversation history in the Contact Details plugin when viewing your inbox.