Salesforce launches Desk.com, slick social customer support software based on Assistly

Enterprise cloud powerhouse Salesforce has launched Desk.com, a savvy customer support application that connects agents with e-mail, phone calls, and social channels, the company announced Tuesday.

Desk.com provides small-to-medium-sized companies with cloud-based customer support management to help for field queries through phone, e-mail, web, Twitter, and Facebook. It will join a crowded field of smart customer support startups including Zendesk and TalkDesk.

“This is an underserved market, and we’re handling it a different way,” Desk.com vice president and general manager Alex Bard told VentureBeat. “The help desk must connect on social channels to be effective.”

The debut of Desk.com has many similarities to the launch of Do.com, which was first shown off in November. Do.com re-made Salesforce-owned social productivity application Manymoon into a more polished product with an easier-to-remember name.

Desk.com, on the other hand, is based on the customer service support app Assistly, which Salesforce acquired for a reported $80 million back in September. All current Assistly customers — including big names like Instagram, Spotify, Pandora, Vimeo, Rdio, Grooveshark, and 37signals — will be transferred over to Desk.com’s refined and re-imagined interface starting today.

“While this is based on Assistly, this is a different product because we’ve built this from the ground up using new assets, a new API, and a new mobile client,” Bard said.

As you can see from the photo above, Desk.com makes managing customer questions and feedback fairly simple. With minimal setup, companies can begin tackling questions from phone calls, e-mails, and social networks. And there’s even integration with your customer support knowledge base for fielding frequently asked questions.

“It’s easy to get a new system up running quick,” Bard said. “Bonobos, for example, had this set up and ready for their agents in a single weekend.”

For mobile support, Salesforce has built an HTML5-based site for Desk.com that conforms well to mobile browsers on the iPhone and various Android phones. This can come in handy for managing important customer issues even when you’re not at the office.

Desk.com pricing starts at $49 per agent per month. It also offers “flex pricing” that runs $1 per part-time agent per hour, which could come in handy for managers who occasionally need to step in or a small company that only fields queries a few times a week.

You can look at a gallery of Desk.com screenshots for desktop and mobile versions below: