Front

This page describes how to use Census with Front.

🏃‍♀️ Getting Started

In this guide, we will show you how to connect Front to Census and create your first sync.

Prerequisites

• Have your Census account ready. If you need one, create a Free Trial Census account now.

• Have your Front account ready.

• Have the proper credentials to access to your data source. See our docs for each supported data source for further information:

  • Azure Synapse

  • Databricks

  • Elasticsearch

  • Google BigQuery

  • Google Sheets

  • MySQL

  • Postgres

  • Redshift

  • Rockset

  • Snowflake

  • SQL Server

1. Connect Front

• In Census, navigate to Destinations

• Click the New Destination button

• Select Front in the dropdown list

Follow the OAuth flow to connect Front. Your end state should look something like this 👇

2. Connect your Data Warehouse

Please follow one of our short guides depending on your data warehouse technology

• Redshift

• Postgres

• BigQuery

• Snowflake

After setting up your warehouse, your Census Destinations page should look like this:

3. Create your first Model

Navigate to the Models

Here you can write SQL queries or select dbt models that contain the data you want to see in Front. Here are some ideas of data you should select:

• The Lifetime Value of a customer and add it to a contact

• The end of their trial

• The date they became active in your product

• The number of key activities a user did in your app in the last 7/30 days

Once you have created your model, click save.

4. Create your first Sync

Now head to the Syncs page and click the Add Sync button, which will take you to a step-by-step wizard for building a data mapping.

In the "What data do you want to sync?" section

• For the Connection, select the data warehouse you connected in step 2

• For the Source, select the model you created in step 3

Next up is the "Where do you want to sync data to?" section

• Pick Front as the Connection

• Pick Contact as the Object

For the "How should changes to the source be synced?" section

• Select Update Or Create

• Pick the appropriate mapping key, it could be email or a custom unique ID

Finally, select the fields you want to update in the mapper in the "Which Fields should be updated?" section

• For each field in your Front instance, you can choose a column from your model.

Click the Next button to see a preview of what will happen when you start the sync. You can check the "Run Sync Now" checkbox to kick off an initial sync and pick a schedule afterwards.

5. Confirm the data is in Front

Now go back to Front and go view a Contact that should have been updated. If everything went well, you should see your data in Front.

That's it, in 5 steps, you connected Census to Front and started syncing customer & product data from your warehouse to Front 🎉

If you have any questions or if you have any issues getting started, please contact us via the in-app live chat in the bottom right corner or send us an email at [e-mail]

🏎 Sync Speed

The Front API is pretty slow with a default rate limit of 10 calls / minute. If you are on the Enterprise plan, this can be boosted to 200 calls / minute.

Rest assured that Census will manage that API rate limit for you and ensure that all your syncs are successful.

Service	Public API rate limit	Records sync / Minute
This Service (Front)	100 calls / minute	~40
Front Enterprise	200 calls / minute	~80
Salesforce (as a reference)	20,000 (default)	10,000

Please note that you can contact your Front Customer Success Manager to increase your API rate limit temporarly which will increase the number of records we can sync per minute.

🗄️ Supported Objects

Front has many objects available via their API, from Contacts, Conversations to Tags. These are the objects we currently support in Census.

Object Name	Supported?
Contact	✅
Conversations	🔜
Tags	🔜
Teams	🔜

Contact us if you want Census to support more objects for Front

🔄 Supported Sync Behaviors

Learn more about all of our sync behaviors on our Core Concepts page.

Behaviors	Supported?	Objects
Update or Create	✅	Contact Only
Update Only	🔜

Contact us if you want Census to support more Sync behaviors for Front

💡 Things to know about our Front connector

• You can use email as the matching key for a Contact or any "user handle" that Front supports out of the box such as Twitter, Facebook, Phone, Smooch ID, etc. See Front's doc here

• We support syncing to multiple phone numbers

🚑 Need help connecting to Front?

Contact us via [e-mail] or start a conversation with us via the in-app chat.