Desk.com was a helpdesk, ticketing, and customer support product offered by Salesforce, and oriented towards the needs of small businesses. It is no longer sold and support has been discontinued. Salesforce recommends its modern Service Cloud as a replacement.
N/A
Fin
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Fin is an AI Agent for customer service. It automates complex queries, improves resolution times, and delivers consistently high-quality support at scale.
$0.99
one-time fee per outcome
Pricing
Desk.com (discontinued)
Fin
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Fin with your current helpdesk
$0.99
one-time fee per outcome
Copilot add-on
$35
per month per user
Pro add-on
$99
per month For analysis of 1,000 conversations
Fin with Intercom’s Helpdesk
from $39 + $0.99 per Fin outcome
per month per seat
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Desk.com (discontinued)
Fin
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Fin comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Here's how it works:
Intercom states that users who sign up for the Fin Guarantee Success Program and do not achieve at least a resolution rate of 65% will be paid $1M. This program is designed for high volume customers.
Eligibility criteria:
High volume customers (over 250k monthly conversions) in North America and Europe. Intercom states that phase one of this program will admit customers on Intercom Helpdesk or Zendesk.
Desk connects directly with Salesforce with many other teams in the business use. This tool did take longer to set up because of all the customization possibilities. There is a good amount of customization that needs to be completed in order to make it function correctly and …
In my opinion, Intercom is more customer oriented, using chat and real time marketing features. Desk.com is a more old school solution focused on tickets and cases. Desk.com does not have much integration capacities with your platform, Intercom has lots of features around this, …
We used Desk.com for a little while but never really dove into it because the initial set up and learning curve was too much. I wish we would have given it more of a try, but based on our needs, Intercom was just more user friendly and easy to use.
Compared to most of the competitive market, Intercom seems to be the most human/personable approach to customer success, customer service, and technical support. The alternatives are primarily built on an archaic approach - "take a ticket and wait in line" - that we worried …
Once I had to search the logs to find cases and data on a particular keyword, but I was not able to do so as there was no search tool available, nor was there a sort or filter tool. I was totally frustrated as I had to skim through the data to complete my task manually.
Fin is fantastic at answering simpler inquiries, where the range and types of questions are easier to categorize. Thereby reducing the subset of possible answers. Where it has shown great improvement - but still needs more improvement - is by becoming a true Agentic AI support engineer that is capable of answering more technically nuanced questions. Our product has a lot of variables used for troubleshooting that cannot be adequately captured in documentation. Even though we provide thousands of pages of spec docs, each issue is unique. Training and empowering Fin to be as good as a Level 1 support engineer is still very challenging.
Desk.com automatically tracks analytics on all cases coming in and going out.
Desk.com helps prevent multiple people from working on the same case. However, it does allow us to assign the case to someone else if we feel that person is more qualified to address the case.
Desk.com has very few bugs or server issues that we've seen. This helps prevent any delays in communicating with our customers.
Internal knowledge tools are clunky and annoying to access, outside the regular workflow of everyday staff
Arbitrary and confusing limitations in business rules and custom fields
Arbitrary and confusing limitations in case handling - for example, if you begin a case as a phone call you CANNOT email the customer from the case. As though no one working at Desk has ever sent a follow-up email...?
Not very good for B2B, mid-to-large businesses. Difficult to set business rules based on company information (for example, service level/tier) and nearly impossible to track key stakeholders and get clear insight into the relationship at a high level
Reporting tools are clunky, slow, and just all-around pretty useless
It seems some users really struggle to figure out how to escalate to a human (especially through email).
Not excited about how "soft" resolutions still count as resolutions and are paid for. Though some abandoned cases appear to be able to be concluded as "the user got the answer they needed", there are others where they clearly didn't, because they just open up another chat (or even more), trying to get more info. This pads the resolution stats and makes it seem more effective than it actually is.
Cost -- Fin is quite expensive. It helps us with scaling coverage, but we're not really saving money.
We will be very likely to renew our contract with Desk.com. It is easy to use, and provides us with everything we need to keep our customers and employees happy. They have also been very helpful in catering the application to our specific and unique needs, including working across brands and adding specific content for our products
We have been and will be continuing our journey with Intercom and nothing too concerning has happened that I have experienced or heard of that has us on the edge yet. If it ever happens it will be something along the lines of "Outgrowing" the use of need of the platform.
Desk.com and Salesforce Service Cloud's usability is seamless to get up and running, administer, and scale across the organization. It allows us to get up and running in days rather than weeks and has transformed our customer support teams globally into efficient, world-class teams. The best practices that the Salesforce and Desk.com teams provide are also very valuable, as we have the right case studies and tips to implement right away in our organization.
The platform is overall clear and intuitive. As with any new platform, there's a learning curve, but that wasn't an issue for our team (and it shouldn't be an issue for others). Fin options are scattered across several submenus, and I'd like them grouped together, but I also like having all those training-related tabs open at all times, so it's not much of a real issue for me.
Their support leaves much to be desired. They do not respond quickly and do not follow up with feature requests. There is also a lack of on-demand or live training available for the teams to use as they learn a new tool. Because there is so much customization, a lot of questions do come up regularly.
I can get help by asking Fin questions about itself. It answers accurately, citing its own Help Center resources with visuals. It can reason and dialogue well. But when it comes to getting human support for Fin, it is not as quick. It can sometimes take a few days. They are polite and well-meaning. Some things aren't their fault (product limitations), but there was one occasion where something took a long time to resolve with lots of back and forth but it was I who found out the error in the end that they missed, so they didn't really help resolve it.
As I stated earlier, implementation of Desk.com went more smoothly than most. The resources in the "Support Center" are fantastic, and I never ran into anything that left me stumped, angry, or disappointed.
Overall, it performs a lot better than all three combined, with a lot fewer glitches and a lot more user-friendly and user experience efficiency. Any new link that needs to be done, takes a lot less time to execute on desk compared to the three others. Simply advanced when it comes to execution this platform is.
There are so many AI platforms available, and you could theoretically build a system using the available AI API's from any of the big platforms. However, I dont think it's as easy as this. Intercom is deliberately built for customer service, the features they are releasing a based on providing the best customer experience. If we were to build this ourselves or to use another platform we would be taking on the upkeep, using Fin is just much simpler as it's also our chosen ticketing platform so anything that Fin is not able to answer yet and escalated directly to our team with no extra effort required from our side.
Better customer service and employee efficiency when dealing with cases
It's so universal, meaning that everyone can use it and it's easy to understand.
The only negative impact is that our IT department who is assigned tickets has responded to customers instead of to the local reps and we have to ensure they know to change the email if it's assigned to them.
New role opportunities — Using the “Fin-first” approach has reduced the workload for our Tier 1 team, giving them more time to focus on their own career growth. It’s also opened the door to a dedicated, AI-focused role, where a team member regularly reviews Fin’s answers and makes updates to help it perform even better.
Enabling Fin has also reduced our response time and allowed us to meet SLA's.
