Desk.com

Boosting the efficiency of your customer support

Desk.com is an app aimed at boosting the efficiency of your customer support system… something that it does using an innovative self-service support centre. The app looks professional, sleek, and it can be fully customised to match your brand. What’s more, extensive mobile optimisation allows your users to run the app on whatever desktop, tablet or phone they’ve got in front of them.

It’s also massively scalable – while Desk.com provides support applications to big-name companies such as Instagram and Square, it could just as easily be used to provide customer support on behalf of your independent coffee shop.

In addition to dealing with your customers though, Desk.com’s back of house admin screens provide a valuable feed out of stats and analytics. Here you’ll be able to monitor recurring issues, highlight frequently asked questions, or even track the performance of your own agents within the system.

Given its wide range of features – not to mention big-name clients and supporters – Desk.com certainly seems to have a lot going for it. We wanted to try it for ourselves though, and break down what we felt were the very best (and the very worst) aspects of the Desk.com experience.

The Best Things About Desk.com

We’ll start off with the positive points, of which Desk.com is able to boast a great many.

The range of features and functionality here is truly impressive, and Desk.com provides a wealth of powerful tools for building, customising, managing and reviewing your help desk system. You’ll find features like case tagging, supervisor controls, advanced filtering systems and customer records. Provided you can learn your way around the complicated interface, there’s a lot of freedom here to run your support department the way you want to.

In terms of ongoing service, Desk.com seems to be a fairly safe investment. The platform has been backed by the giants at Salesforce, which doesn’t just mean a full integration with Salesforce modules but also gives us hope for a secure future ahead of Desk.com. Compatibility is good, with the potential to integrate your third-party apps from Olark, MailChimp, Zapier, Campfire and others.

desk.com tickets - ticket support system

The automatic ticket creation tool is another smart feature. If you’ve ever tried managing a system that deals with incoming queries via phone, email, web forms, social media and others, then you’re bound to appreciate just how helpful this feature is! With Desk.com, all incoming channels will automatically be converted to tickets and placed in order within your workflow.

Desk.com’s ‘Business Insights’ tool also stood out as a powerful feature for managing and improving your support service. The availability of rich reporting and statistical analysis of incoming (and resolved) leads offers a useful stream of information that’ll be invaluable as you refine and develop your customer help desk.

Desk.com’s ‘Business Insights’ tool

Things We Didn’t Love So Much…

There’s a lot going on in Desk.com, and one of our main concerns is that perhaps it’s a little bit too much. With this many features packed into the platform, the resultant learning curve is rather steep and you might find yourself baffled by the range of buttons and commands available to you.

The same issue arises when it comes to customising the look and feel of your support features. Desk.com makes use of the templating language known as Liquid, which was originally created for Shopify. While it looks good on the page, there’s a chance your in-house web designers will be out of their depth as far as building on or modifying the script.

Desk.com also seems to miss a few tricks, with a couple of handy features that just don’t appear in this platform. Support feedback would have been a good idea, for instance – ZenDesk includes just such a tool, and it certainly makes it easier to grade the effectiveness of your support team. Another issue is that knowledgebase URLs can’t be edited, instead coming out as strings of letters. This is bound to annoy any web masters keen on growing the in-page SEO value of their site.

Conclusion

You can find out more about Desk.com on the official website at www.desk.com. The platform comes with a flexible pricing scheme, allowing you to modify the available workforce as and when you need it – so for example, perhaps at busy times you might want to add more users, and get additional staff working on your help desk.

A standard subscription starts at $30 per month per agent, and includes the full customer support package. Weightier packages – featuring increased capabilities and more scope for customisation – start at $35, and move on up to the ‘Enterprise’ package billed at $135 monthly.

Pros

Cons

A huge range of features allow you plenty of flexibility.
Smart data analysis and powerful business insights.
Some clever initiatives, and a good platform for integration.

If anything, Desk.com might just have too many features. As a result it’s easy to feel lost while navigating these extensive control panels.

Bottom line

Desk.com is offered at a flexible range of reasonable pricing options, which should allow any business to find a solution that neatly scales to its needs. Given the number of features included, it’s an absolute bargain – although if you were expecting to start using it right away then you may be disappointed. Desk.com is not the simplest piece of software to pick up, and the steep learning curve means that you might have to try out a few tutorials before you feel you’re really getting your money’s worth.

About the Author

Richard Morten - Richard Morten is a freelance writer and self-confessed geek. His interests include travel, coffee, and spending way too much time on the Internet.

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