Desk.com (discontinued) vs. Sparkcentral (discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Desk.com (discontinued)
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
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
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product has since been discontinued.N/A
Pricing
Desk.com (discontinued)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Desk.com (discontinued)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Desk.com (discontinued)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Desk.com (discontinued)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Small Businesses
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP Service Cloud
SAP Service Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Desk.com (discontinued)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(38 ratings)
10.0
(16 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.4
(14 ratings)
8.7
(4 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(19 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
1.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(21 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Desk.com (discontinued)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Discontinued Products
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.
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Discontinued Products
Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential
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Pros
Discontinued Products
  • 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.
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Discontinued Products
  • The biggest advantage of the Sparkcentral platform is its "inbox zero" philosophy. With this, our customer support requests are queued within the app, and agents need to work down the queue to keep it empty.
  • The app is designed from the ground up for customer care - instead of taking a generic social platform, and sprinkling in some customer care tools. Everything about Sparkcental is designed for helping our customers.
  • Sparkcentral allows us to do much better CRM. We can make customer notes, see recent interactions, determine who helped the customer (and when).
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Cons
Discontinued Products
  • 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
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Discontinued Products
  • In the beginning our team had the option to see what another user was typing as they responded to a post. With the latest update, this was taken away. That feature was key for us to shadow agents remotely who are still in training to provide real time feedback.
  • Our company has a number of different brands that we manage. Having a truly unified queue would be a great addition for us!
  • The bulk resolve should allow the option to select on the posts that you wish to resolve instead of selecting a time frame for bulk resolve. Often we find that marketing posts generate more volume in the evening. However, there are sometimes posts where the customer needs assistance during that time. So, if we were to bulk resolve for a certain number of evening hours we would potentially miss a customer's concern through that option as it is currently. But, if the option was to go through and select on all marketing posts and then bulk resolve you would ensure that you are not missing a post where a customer needs assistance.
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Likelihood to Renew
Discontinued Products
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
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Discontinued Products
Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.
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Usability
Discontinued Products
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.
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Discontinued Products
The system meets all my expectations.
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Reliability and Availability
Discontinued Products
We've never had a problem with Desk.com's availability.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Performance
Discontinued Products
Fast, responsive, gorgeous, and fun. It's always run like a thoroughbred for me.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Discontinued Products
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.
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Discontinued Products
Incredible customer service team that replies back very quickly, follows up on the reported issue till it's resolved in a very timely manner.
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Implementation Rating
Discontinued Products
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.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Discontinued Products
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.
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Discontinued Products
Sparkcentral does what it has offered to do, where other software made empty promises, Sparkcentral delivers. They also inform us, anytime they are undergoing maintenance or when Twitter or Facebook has an API change, where in previous cases we would have to discover this ourselves.
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Return on Investment
Discontinued Products
  • 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.
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Discontinued Products
  • Customers appreciate fast responses to the things they post on social media. This tool allows that to happen.
  • The dashboard allows us to keep up with how many are waiting in our queue so we can keep up with how busy we are during the day and manage it.
  • Customer satisfaction has seemed to increase while using this tool.
  • Being able to add notes with the customers address and phone info is awesome as well.
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ScreenShots

Desk.com (discontinued) Screenshots

Screenshot of Desk.com ConsoleScreenshot of Desk.com Issue ScreenScreenshot of Desk.com Reporting and Analytics