No matter what business you are in, no matter what domain you work on, no matter how big or small scale you operate on, the ultimate way to make your business successful is to make your customers happy. And indeed customer satisfaction has a lot to do with getting quality products which are backed by quality services. Capitalizing on this concept of making customers happy to increase returning customers, Salesforce launched a series of cloud based products focused on improving customer relationship management. Out of them the one focused on improving customer support service capabilities is Desk.com.

Desk.com is an all-in-one customer support application which is completely cloud based and which gives you the ability to buy services on per agent basis. It has the capabilities to allow you to manage multiple brands from a single setup, provide you a platform to share your products’ knowledge base and self-help documentation, a single cloud based platform to allow your customers to give you feedbacks, and to top it all, give you some pretty nifty analytics features to analyze everything.

And since this is a Salesforce product, yes, it is a very easy way to integrate with your Salesforce product.

Desk.com Multi-brand Support

Most companies nowadays as well as service providers maintain multiple brands. So instead of getting different support setups for different brands, you can use Desk.com for managing all your brands from a single portal. But that doesn’t mean you can’t track your brands individually or provide separate help center. Desk.com allows you to create separate help centers for each brand you operate on the same platform. And you can run customer support with different look and feel for each brand.

Case management like a pro

The main reason why Desk.com is famous is because of its intuitive and user-friendly interface. And you can realize the power of efficient UI while managing cases on Desk.com. You can easily manage every individual case based on business priority, through an easy to use interface from your desktop or even from your mobile. The app automatically collects customer interactions from every communication channel to give you a complete picture of the case.

For Administrators, the cloud software allows you to assign specific cases to specific agents and track everything and analyze everything through intuitive analytics interface. You can label and categorize each case for faster filtering, and define auto-responder macros to fast-track your customer response times. Also you can organize your cases and track them faster using intuitive filters.

Business insights are good but can be better

Alright till now we have been only praising Desk.com, but here is one feature that may put you off- the analytics and reporting. Now Desk.com analytics is good and intuitive with good-looking graphs and easy to understand tables, but it is not as robust as Salesforce Analytics Cloud or custom Salesforce Analytics Tools. Desk.com is not very flexible, you can create you personalized analytics reports but in a very limited capacity. For something more robust you shall be required to either create custom app to extend functionalities, or import your Desk.com data to some other platform like Salesforce.com and analyze it there.

The application allows you to track performance of each agent as well as the performance of your company as a whole. You can analyze areas with more customer support requests and areas where customers grieve! And since everything is integrated with your mobile app, you can view all this info on your mobile as well.

Add CTI integration enhancements

In our previous post we talked about CTI integration with Salesforce cloud, and highlighted why it is awesome. But in no other Salesforce product is it more important than Desk.com. It’s understandable, Desk.com is all about customer support and what’s a customer support without a phone line? CTI integration is not available in standard Desk.com plan. You would have to opt for premium one which costs around $60 per user per month, which is twice the cost of standard Desk.com version.

Integrating CTI with Desk.com application is also not very difficult. The best part is that it utilizes Salesforce.com’s OpenCTI technology- which means if you are familiar with the APIs you can integrate your telephony easily.

But big companies opt for Salesforce.com

Well Desk.com is good and awesome but as we said earlier it’s not at customizable as Salesforce. It is easy to setup. Combined with its easy-to-use interface, the product makes it an ideal support solution for startups or small enterprises. However as you company grows its limitations may began to surface.

The ideal solution is an integrated Desk.com and Salesforce solution in which Desk.com handles customer communication and Salesforce handles the rest, but this solution means you shall pay for Salesforce edition as well as Desk.com editions. This cumulative price is the reason why most opt for a single Salesforce solution and then customize it to give Desk.com like features. Nasty workaround but when does comes such a need, why shed extra bucks?

If you are not yet a medium scale large scale company and having doubts whether you should go for Desk.com or Salesforce Service Cloud or both, don’t hesitate to contact us for free consultation. Besides, I have started working on my next blog which goes in further depth exploring the user-base for each Desk.com and Salesforce Service Cloud based on various parameters, so stay tuned.