Gartner disrupts the traditional analyst model with new FrontRunner Help Desk quadrant

I recently attended a Gartner event in Las Vegas. It was designed to support the business and IT professionals who focus on customer initiatives for their organizations. At lunch the first day I sat with the VP of customer service at one of America’s oldest food companies. Curious, I asked, “What’s of most value to you when attending a conference like this?”

He replied quickly and without hesitation, “I’m here for the advice. This is my opportunity to talk one-on-one with a few analysts and ask all of the questions on my mind. I have a prepared list of questions and we bang through them. I never make a strategic purchasing decision without running it past Gartner.”

Clearly, Gartner matters to large enterprises. And Gartner plays an important role helping decision-makers within enterprises identify, evaluate, and select business software vendors. When transparency is such an important part of a purchase decision, can the traditional analyst model work for decision-makers at smaller-sized organizations?

Proponents of software review platforms advocate for the collective power of trusted peers when evaluating software technologies. To them, the current approach to buying business technology is broken. Buyers spend too much time sifting through spin, reading outdated analyst reports, and sitting through endless meetings. After all this, buyers still lack confidence in their choice of technology and most projects fail to meet their expectations.

That idea of capturing collective wisdom is not foreign to Gartner either (a traditional but not slow-moving firm). In 2015 Gartner bought three internet sites (www.SoftwareAdvice.com, www.Capterra.com, and www.GetApp.com) that assist small businesses in finding and buying business software. We know small business software buyers highly value user reviews in their decision making. It makes sense that sites trying to help businesses buy software will look to accumulate reviews as part of their content.

And to help make sense out of all those reviews, Gartner launched a new type of quadrant called FrontRunners. It’s a sister quadrant to the Magic Quadrant and it targets smaller businesses ($50 million and below in revenue). Front Runners is

• for small business leaders who are looking to buy business software

• completely data-driven with no analyst interpretation

• heavily influenced by user reviews

The FrontRunners for Help Desk software products was recently updated for January 2017. Zendesk is in the Leaders quadrant with the top overall spot based on high Value and Capability scores. This type of data-driven assessment identifies products in the help desk software market that offer the best capability and value for small businesses, and positions products relative to peers in the market. It’s another way to help small business buyers avoid hidden risks, get an accurate picture of the likelihood of success, and start the vendor selection process.

Download the full FrontRunners for Help Desk Software report.

The content for the FrontRunners quadrant is derived from actual end-user reviews and ratings as well as vendor-supplied and publicly available product and company information that gets applied against a documented methodology. The results neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or any of its affiliates.

Check out Zendesk’s help desk software, and get your ducks in a row.