Salesforce Desk.com vs Service Cloud – Part 2

The all-in-one customer service application specifically designed for the needs of small and fast-growing companies.

In the beginning…

Desk.com was originally known as ‘Assistly’ and was created with a vision for an application that would revolutionize how companies deliver customer service in a social world where Twitter, Facebook and mobile phones were just beginning to be recognised as potential support channels along with the more traditional channels of email and phone.

Assistly was acquired by Salesforce in September 2011 and was re-launched as an all-in-one customer service application specifically designed for the needs of small companies.

Small and fast-growing companies often have some very unique customer service needs. They are often literally overrun with customer service requests, may lack the processes and systems needed to act on these requests and often have limited resources to solve this problem.

And ultimately, this results in unhappy customers.

Introducing Salesforce Desk
Desk has some pretty cool out-of-the-box features to assist your agents in providing speedy customer support. Some of these features include:

• The Agent Console: Everything that you need to resolve the case is in one place – no need to jump between tabs
• A Universal Inbox: The inbox pools all of your support cases from all channels in one place.
• Case filters: Filters are great for organising or grouping similar cases together.
• Macro’s: I just love Macro’s, they’re such a time-saver. Macros are essentially shortcuts that enable an agent to perform multiple actions with just one click.
• Bulk updating: Update multiple cases at once with a response, field change or even apply a macro. This means you can work many cases simultaneously.
• Workflow engine: Build some simple automation like case escalation, notifications or automatic assignment
• Case routing: Route the case to the right person to solve it in the shortest possible time
• Knowledge: Desk provides a basic multi-channel content management system of Knowledge articles allowing consistent and accurate responses.
• CTI: Desk.com supports the Salesforce open CTI platform (requires an external vendor) so when a call comes in, Desk automatically screen pops the customer record & phone call with the case.
• Analytics: Desk’s reporting tool is called Business Insights and comes with a suite of pre-configured reports and dashboards
• Mobile: Desk.com is available on mobile devices for both Apple and Andriod

But going fast is only one piece of the equation.

How can you be sure you’re catching every customer interaction from every channel?

Desk.com’s answer is the Universal Inbox which pools all of your support cases in one place, allowing agents to interact with all of these channels in the same place and ensuring every customer interaction is being captured and nothing falls through the cracks.

Desk.com also offers multiple integrations with partners like Salesforce.com®.

You may already be using Sales Cloud® to manage your sales process – and Sales Cloud does include case management functionality that’s pretty awesome. However, setting it up to capture incoming email as well as any required automation or custom configuration does require a Salesforce System Administrator so unless you have someone in-house with that skill level or you utilise a Salesforce Partner to set it up for you, it may not be a viable option right now.

One solution is Desk.com with Salesforce integration. This will provide the simple, easy out-of-the-box case management solution you need with visibility of desk.com cases within the Salesforce CRM interface.

Some of the benefits of the integration with Salesforce:

• View customer information from Salesforce.com when in Desk.com.
• Run business rules in Desk based on information in Salesforce.
• Allow sales and support to work tightly together to provide better service to your customers.
• Within Salesforce you can view current and past Desk cases by the customer.
• Within Salesforce you can create support cases in Desk.
• Within Salesforce you can add notes to cases, allowing collaboration between the two teams/systems.
• From Desk, you can push leads and contacts from support cases into Salesforce.
• From Desk, you can view accounts, contacts, and lead information from Salesforce.

As your business grows, your support needs will too and the additional features, customization and integration capabilities of Salesforce Service Cloud® may need to be considered.

Service Cloud gives you the support basics included in Desk and additionally, delivers the full power and flexibility of Salesforce Sales & Service Cloud to your business. Having sales and service on a single platform gives you a true 360-degree view of the customer. It’s a great choice for companies looking for a robust, customizable, integrated approach to service.

Part 3 of this series will feature Salesforce Service Cloud.