Salesforce.com unveils Desk.com mobile, social customer service

Salesforce.com is well known for its interest in pursuing and promoting social and mobile platforms, and now it is continuing along those lines with the debut of Desk.com.

Touted as "revolutionizing customer service for a social and mobile world," Desk.com is a new, online social help desk platform that integrates social networks (Facebook and Twitter) with email, phone and web on a single desktop agent.

The point is basically to offer customer service in almost any way at any time with the utmost simplicity and convenience.

Essentially, the platform receives customer service requests from all of these channels and organizes them nice and neat in an inbox. This way, everything is streamlined and you can keep track of when cases in the order that they were received.

One customer already signed up for Desk is Instagram, which supports over 10 million customers primarily via Twitter, described as "the new style of small business" by Alex Bard, vice president and general manager of Assistly (the Salesforce-acquired company that developed Desk.com).

To make things even more flexible for customers, there is also Desk.com Mobile. Basically, you get all of the above on virtually any smartphone or tablet thanks to HTML5 mobile browser support. All information is promised to be delivered with "airtight case management."

Coincidentally, a recent report from Javelin Strategy & Research argued that social media is replacing traditional customer service channels (at least at financial institutions), slowly but possibly surely. Thus, Salesforce might really be on point here.

Targeted towards small businesses and startups, signing up for the platform and training are boasted to only require a few steps. As an example, Bard pointed to Boloco, a small but growing burrito chain in New England, that didn't have a large IT department and needed a solution very quickly.

Salesforce is also introducing a Desk.com Reporting feature, which gives companies a snapshot of metrics that might be useful to them, such as customer service case activity and response times.

Desk.com is live starting today. Pricing starts at $49 per full-time agent, per month, for unlimited usage. Flex pricing is also available for $1 per part-time agent, per hour. The mobile version is also available now at no additional cost for for full-time agents.

Existing Assistly customers, such as Pandora, Spotify and Square, will be automatically migrated over to Desk.

The Reporting client will launch at an later point during the first quarter.

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