Desk.com

Desk.com, previously known as Assistly, is a Salesforce-owned helpdesk platform whose stated goal is to revolutionize customer service in a social world – specifically for the new “social, mobile, global consumer.”

Assistly was founded in 2010 by Alex Bard, Gary Benitt, Jeremy Suriel and Brad Birnbaum. In 2011, it was bought by Salesforce, which was an investor, and the brand became known under its current name of Desk.com. The acquisition of Assistly expanded Salesforce’s customer service solutions for small businesses, and complemented Salesforce’s existing platform, Service Cloud.

Desk.com Pricing and Services

Intended Customers

Small to Midsize Businesses

Free Trial

14-Day Trial on Any Plan

Features

• Ticket Management

• Multichannel Integration

• Helpdesk Management

• Customer Self-Service

• Customer Relationship Management

• Reporting & Analytics

• Free & Paid Extension Marketplace

• Security

• Service & Support

All Available Plans & Services

Editor’s Bottom Line of Desk.com 

Desk.com is Salesforce’s small business customer support platform. It provides a unified inbox for customer support cases originating from multiple channels. These channels include email, live chat, phone, Twitter and Facebook, with the capacity to monitor social mentioning on the latter two networks.

Agents can filter their case inbox, attach labels, apply macros and respond to cases from within the platform. Administrators can get more particular with settings, and add custom fields for cases, customers and companies, create and configure rules based on specific events or passage of time, manage integrations, create new inbox filters, write knowledge base articles, add flex agents and so on.

Various helpdesks take different approaches to the concept of ‘light agents’. Some allow a certain number depending on your subscription. Others allow the purchase of day passes. Each solution grants light agents a varying degree of autonomy in the platform; in some solutions, they can only make internal notes and work collaboratively, while in others, they can communicate with customers. Desk.com’s approach is ‘Flex time’; users who are not full-time agents can participate in the support experience, and their access is billed by the hour – currently, Flex usage is accrued in 5-minute increments and billed at $1.75 per hour. Free Flex hours are earned when users set up their Desk account. Account owners can create as many Flex accounts as they like and the billing reflects cumulative Flex usage; Flex ‘bundles’ can be purchased at discounts.

The ticketing features available to support agents feels somewhat limited. Agents are able to alter case properties – status, priority, group, agent assignment and so on – while responding to the ticket as normal. They can alter the contact or company properties as well. There aren’t really any built-in collaboration features aside from internal notes, nor access to a reporting dashboard (which is available to the admin).

One very nice feature is that the case inbox updates automatically with cases from all channels. Customer service agents for a company with active social media accounts could feasibly spend the bulk of their productive time within the platform. And perhaps the lack of options granted to individual agents keeps them focused on their core discipline out of necessity.

There is a discernable lack of CRM-like features within Desk.com. Moreover, the only CRM with which Desk offers an official integration is Salesforce, which isn’t terribly surprising. On the other hand, Desk enjoys a fairly diverse library of popular apps for collaboration, reporting, live chat, email marketing, productivity, multichannel integration, analytics and more. Naturally, we’d like all of our business applications tightly integrated, so if you’re an existing Salesforce customer, or considering becoming one), Desk.com is a competent, well-featured helpdesk with great social media monitoring. On the other hand, if you currently rely on another CRM, and aren’t lookiing to switch over, you’re probably better off finding a helpdesk that integrates with your CRM of choice.