It was only a few months that salesforce acquired Assistly (more here) but already we see the product relaunching under its new corporate overlords. Rebranded desk.com, the offering has been rebuilt from the ground up including an all new UI, a new HTML5 mobile app and a range of new APIs.
Given salesforce CEO Marc Benioff passion for all things social, it is unsurprising that desk.com has Twitter and Facebook integration out of the box and is mobile enabled via HTML5.
It would be nice if desk.com had its own landing page and didn’t just rediect to Assistly.com but such are the joys of blogging in real time!
MyPOV
This is a big move down the foodchain for salesforce. The salesforce core CRM product is an enterprise tool with a corresponding sales cycle – with desk.com salesforce is aiming for the sort of viral uptake they’ve achieved with Chatter. There is only a requirement of four fields before a company can register and get its own helpdesk up and running.
In a very interesting move salesforce is offering standards monthly pricing ($49/user) but also a casual agent price of $1/hour. It’s a great idea and really delivers on the “cloud brings agility” argument. It means that organizations with very spikey help desk requirements can have overflow agents on an ultra flexible basis.
Desk.com signals salesforce moving strongly down the food chain – the tool is very applicable to SMBs and I’m expecting to see significant uptake among that group. I’ll also expect to see a similar kind of lightweight offering from the Rypple acquisition coming out in the next few months.
(Cross-posted @ The Diversity Blog - SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategy)
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