Desk

Desk.com, originally established as Assistly in 2009, operated as a comprehensive customer support platform tailored for fast-growing businesses. The founding team, including CEO Alex Bard, possessed substantial prior experience in the customer support sector, having previously built and sold two other companies in the same space: eShare Technologies and eAssist Global Solutions. This deep-rooted expertise in customer service dynamics shaped the core philosophy of their new venture. The founders identified a market opportunity to create a unified interface that would empower small businesses to manage customer interactions across all channels, with a particular focus on the emerging influence of social media.

The company's platform was designed as a Software as a Service (SaaS) tool, providing a centralized hub for managing customer service channels like email, phone, chat, and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Its primary function was to log, manage, and track customer support cases from initiation to resolution. A key benefit for clients was the ability to consolidate all customer conversations, regardless of the channel, into a single view, enhancing agent productivity and ensuring quicker response times. The business model was subscription-based, with a flexible pricing structure that included a per-agent monthly fee and an innovative per-hour 'flex' pricing option for part-time or 'casual' users from other departments, such as product managers or executives.

Assistly gained traction, securing a $1.7 million Series A in April 2010 and a $4 million Series B in January 2011, which included an investment from Salesforce. The company's growth and innovative approach to social customer service culminated in its acquisition by Salesforce in September 2011 for approximately $50 to $80 million. Following the acquisition, Assistly was rebranded as Desk.com in early 2012 and rebuilt on an HTML5 platform while retaining the core workflows. Positioned as Salesforce's entry-level customer service application for small to medium-sized businesses, it served as a more accessible alternative to the more complex Service Cloud product. Over the years, Desk.com was utilized by thousands of companies, including prominent names like Fitbit, Vimeo, Squarespace, and Bonobos. However, Salesforce later decided to discontinue the Desk.com product, consolidating its services into Service Cloud Essentials in March 2018 and ceasing to onboard new customers, with full shutdown occurring around March 2020. Keywords: customer support platform, help desk software, SaaS, customer service automation, Assistly, Alex Bard, Salesforce acquisition, multi-channel support, social media integration, case management, ticket management, small business tools, customer relationship management, cloud-based support, service desk, Zendesk alternative, Service Cloud, unified customer view, agent productivity, flex pricing