Salesforce Gives Help Desks A Social, Mobile Twist

Salesforce.com continued its social enterprise mission Tuesday with the launch of a customer service play, dubbed Desk.com, that the SaaS giant said injects social and mobile capabilities into the help desk.

According to San Francisco-based Salesforce, Desk.com lets businesses offer personal customer service via a social and mobile help desk and enables businesses to work with customers over major social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, or over e-mail, the phone or the Web.

Desk.com Mobile, meanwhile, "allows companies to carry a help desk in their pocket and answer customers on the go," according to Salesforce.

[Related: Dreamforce: Benioff Shines Light On Salesforce's Social Enterprise ]

“We built Desk.com so that every company can deliver personal customer service in a social and mobile world. Desk.com is social at its core; its mobile app instantly lets any employee, anywhere, deliver awesome customer service; and it can be deployed quickly and easily,” said Alex Bard, vice president and general manager of Desk.com, in a statement.

Salesforce said Desk.com taps into the growing social revolution in which the number of social networking users has eclipsed e-mail users and roughly one-quarter of the time spent online is spent on social networks.

Salesforce's Desk.com adds a social help desk that integrates social networks into other support channels such as e-mail, phone and Web into a single agent desktop. The Facebook and Twitter integrations are standard in Desk.com and accounts can be linked quickly to the Desk.com agent desktop.

Desk.com Mobile leverages HTML5 to let employees respond to customers from mobile devices, including iPhone and Android. The mobile version lets users access the same information as the standard version and respond using the same filters as the desktop client. Mobile users can also reassign, change groups, change status, change priority of cases and modify customer information, Salesforce said.

According to Salesforce, Desk.com can be deployed companywide in a weekend and offers easy sign-up, speedy deployment and easy reporting.

Desk.com is available now, starting at $49 per full-time agent per month with flex pricing available for $1 per part-time agent per hour. The mobile version is also available at no extra cost for full-time agents. Reporting for Desk.com is scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2012.