Salesforce Essentials

Pros

If you are thinking about choosing Desk.com as a help desk software solution for your company then this article is for you. Our B2B experts prepared a thorough review of Desk.com pros and cons and analyzed what it has to offer to help you make an informed decision before you spend your money.
Email to Ticket Conversion
Knowledge Base
Self Service Portal
Multiple Service Level Agreement policies
Automations – Ticket routing, scenario automations
Multi-channel support, including Facebook & Twitter
Community Portal with Idea Management & Voting
Multi-product/multi-brand Support
Integrations: Freshbooks, Google Apps, Harvest, CapsuleCRM
Multi-language & multi-time zone support
Satisfaction Surveys
Leaderboard & gamification
Support Channels

Both services use various channels for customer interaction and support such as email, Facebook, Twitter, and community forums. The messages from all these services are gathered in a combined queue of support work. Freshdesk is better than Desk.com in this area as it offers ticket support in addition to phone support, while Desk.com offers only phone support.
Canned Responses

Both Freshdesk and Desk.com provide a way to use a library of snippets that can be re-used. If you need to describe certain features regularly to users, you can use canned responses to speed up writing the responses. This can help your agents save time and focus more on query resolution.
Third-Party Integrations

Both Desk.com and Freshdesk offer a range of integrations with other services like CRMs, bug tracking, e-commerce and more. Top integrations for Desk.com include Salesforce, MailChimp, CampFire, and TalkDesk. Top integrations for Freshdesk include SugarCRM, Capsule, Harvest, and JIRA. Both apps also offer REST APIs to integrate your own apps.
Devices Supported

Both Freshdesk and Desk.com support a range of devices including Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone/iPad, and Blackberry.
Customizations Available

Freshdesk beats Desk.com in this category as it offers a wider range of customizations including templates, fonts, button images, fields, and backgrounds. In comparison, Desk.com offers customization of fields only.

Cons

Desk.com’s new analytics dashboard lacks some basic functionalities and is not an upgrade compared to the older version. The company can also improve its customer support, and the Salesforce integation also needs some fine tuning. Freshdesk customers say the product is mostly good, but it can improve by extending multi-language support to the Solutions pages.

Pros

We use desk.com for all support interactions. It was priceless for the support team to be able to route support requests to support members, and keep track of all interactions for each client to spot issues with our support team, or issues with the client being too much of a drain on our support resources. The statistics are neat too. We had some healthy competition with some of the support stats (how many emails, calls taken, etc.) Being able to see how many positive rated interactions was the ultimate statistic to have. Their API is essential to integrating notes and other issues into 3rd party solutions.

Cons

This had a learning curve. They were also going through completely switching the UI at the time, so having a beta was nice, but some features were only available in the classic interface. The new one is much better and pleasing to the eyes.

Pros

Desk is extremely customizable. We have a bunch of different inbound emails that automatically tag and assign tickets which saves us a lot of time. You can set up almost any combination of rules for inbound tickets to make sure your most important customers get prioritized and the right people get assigned to help.

Desk also has an API that you can use to build a help center experience on top of their platform. We use it internally for bug reporting and feature requesting and our portal creates tickets right in desk.

Cons

Desk isn't very user friendly. Once it's set up it's works really well but it takes a lot of time to learn all the nuances of the configuration.

The analytics have issues. Some of the metrics like last log in will show that I last logged in a month ago when I've logged in every day and am in fact logged in at the time. We don't use the metrics but if your customer service department relies on them that could be problematic.

Pros

As a helpdesk case tool, it works. Great for simple troubleshooting and just general inquiry cases where by correspondences are kept to a minimum.

Cons

Sold as having great integration with Salesforce, but the integration is extremely difficult to setup and not all fields are integrated. Everyone needs to have a Salesforce license to be able to use the desk tool properly and that gets very expensive. DO NOT try to use the tool as a task manger or PM supplement as it does not work well for these functions. There is also no place to store Client level notes in the tool itself so if someone was backing you up, there would be no place for them to reference client preferences or standard operating procedures for a specific client from Desk itself.

Pros

Creating leads and contacts in Salesforce is a breeze with this tool. I love that I can instantly add a customer and log their email in Salesforce. I love the ability to add meeting invites or email templates to an email with a couple of clicks. Salesforce IQ has saved me hours of data entry into Salesforce. I don't know what I would do without this tool now that I have used it for close to two years.

Cons

In the last few months something changed in the way that it pulls the data when you go to add a contact. The previous version use to pull all of the information automatically and now I have to manually add a lot of the information. It is still quicker than adding new contacts into Salesforce but it does require a few more steps. I also wish there was more insight into who opened an email or web link when you include multiple people on an email.