Salesforce.com intros Desk.com Business Plus for SMBs

Desk.com, a customer service-minded app under the Salesforce.com umbrella, is coming out with a new platform aimed at small businesses.

Dubbed Desk.com Business Plus, the service is being pitched toward service managers and agents at both startups and SMBs.

On top of the features already available through Desk.com, some of the Business Plus-specific amenities outlined for better customer service and retention include a "customer health monitor" automatically sending messages about potential dissatisfaction and suggested remedies and other custom controls for managing agent access, assignments and editing capabilities.

Desk.com Business Plus is also pitching itself as friendly to other platforms, touting both a user interface that supports embedding third-party apps directly into the Desk.com console as well as a mobile SDK for baking in mobile support into any app.

Salesforce first unveiled Desk.com in early 2012 as an online social help desk platform that integrates social networks (Facebook and Twitter) with email, phone and web on a single desktop agent.

Among some of the more familiar clientele using Desk.com for customer service and outreach include online home retailer One Kings Lane, gourmet meal delivery startup Munchery and cloud collaboration provider Asana.

Since then it has been bolstered with a bevy of different analytics and reporting features as well as customizable dashboards specific to customer service agents and additional APIs for integrating data from other apps.

Desk.com began reaching out to small businesses in particular recently, including last fall's debut of a one-stop shop for SMBs looking to integrate various customer support tools to their service cloud.

Business Plus is rolling out into general availability today, starting at $125 per user per month.