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
OneSignal
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
OneSignal’s omnichannel customer engagement platform offers push notifications, email, in-app messages, and SMS. OneSignal’s automated customer Journeys and one-off campaigns allow users to create messaging strategies that convert, inform, and retain audiences, with little to no coding required for setup.
$19
per month
Salesforce Agentforce Service
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Service Cloud is a customer service platform that helps businesses manage and resolve customer inquiries and issues. It provides tools for case management, knowledge base, omni-channel support, automation, and analytics, enabling companies to deliver exceptional customer service experiences.
$25
per month
Pricing
Desk.com (discontinued)
OneSignal
Salesforce Agentforce Service
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Growth
19+
per month
Professional
999+
per month
Free
Free
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
Starter Suite
$25
per month
Pro Suite
$100
per month per user
Enterprise
$165
per month per user
Unlimited
$330
per month per user
Agentforce 1
$550
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Desk.com (discontinued)
OneSignal
Salesforce Agentforce Service
Free Trial
Yes
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Desk.com (discontinued)
OneSignal
Salesforce Agentforce Service
Considered Multiple Products
Desk.com (discontinued)
Verified User
Administrator
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Desk.com is comparable, on a smaller scale. We went with Desk.com because it provided the functionality we needed and was more affordable.
Desk.com was our previous foray into customer support, and it was functional and worked quite well. It was not exactly the most intuitive to update, but it got the job done and was reliable.
Freshdesk was our primary next decision, and we would have gone with them except we were …
Verified User
Analyst
Chose Salesforce Agentforce Service
Service Cloud is a step up from Desk mainly because of its reporting, but if you can integrate other Salesforce products together, I'd recommend looking at its other solutions and looking at its own integrated CRM case closer. Service Cloud isn't the perfect solution, but it …
We chose Service Cloud because of its deep, native integration with Salesforce, unified billing, and for the fact that we didn't have to learn or train on an entirely new platform. These other products were excellent, but for us it was more time and cost effective to use …
Salesforce has increased their traction in the SMB space for service with the acquisition of Desk.com. It provides a good entry level solution for customer service and knowledge for less complex organizations. Additionally, it gets them up and running quicker. Without Desk.com, …
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.
I think One Signal is very well suited for mobile app owners who want to be in touch with their user base more easily by sending push notifications and in-app messages. I'm not sure how well that works for SMS messaging as I haven't yet tried it. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it if your in-apps are very rare.
I think Service Cloud is best suited for medium to large operations that require both proactive and reactive service. It’s a great fit for post-sales support. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for very small companies because it can be quite costly, and many of the features may go unused. Salesforce also performs best when you have a capable team managing it, so it’s important to consider your organization’s size and readiness before starting. Once you do, I recommend exploring other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem—Service Cloud works even better when integrated with Sales Cloud, since it allows better visibility across teams.
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.
Email to case is an interesting piece of it. The threading is very strong, sometimes too strong, but it does very well at handling the incoming emails.
The omnichannel routing, using skill-based routing is really effective.
Pathing. So making the workflow and helping the team understand what it is that they're trying to do, what they have to accomplish, those step-by-step pieces. That's really helpful.
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
Is still in development: we know OneSignal is still in development and sometimes it takes longer to create or fulfill certain features.
Payment: payment menu is not at the glance, [and] is just difficult sometimes to find -it is a minor issue.
Send to certain custom segments through specific OneSignal IDs; you can do it though API doing a GET call with tools like Postman. If this can be done from OneSignal it would be great.
We had a principle initially to try and use Omni as much as we can from the user experience perspective, but have found that fairly restrictive. It was very difficult to actually get the right customer experience and customer engagement going. So we're actually on a journey at the moment to replace all of our Omni with Lightning web components that gives us that flexibility. That's probably one area where we've had some challenges in terms of how we've used the product out of the box.
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
Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.
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.
I give an 8 in this question mainly for 2 reasons: the products even if they look like complete and are highly customizable and usable, they are still missing some logical features. For example, send messages to a list of users - now days you can do it with postman and get calls. A second example is App messaging that is still in development and has many opportunities.
I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.
Working on an application that caters to customer needs requires a platform that acts as a mediator between the actual person and the client. This mediator handles the customer and resolves many of their doubts, helps them map through the entire process, and automates the processes. Such a platform is Salesforce Service Cloud. For queries that cannot be serviced by the platform, it creates a separate ServiceNow ticket for us, and it is assigned.
The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce
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.
Their customer support has been top-notch. They are able to assist you in getting through any problems that you may have and respond in a very timely manner. I've dealt with them on 4-5 instances over the years and my issues were always resolved within a matter of a few business days.
Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.
Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.
Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.
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.
I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations
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.
In my opinion, OneSignal documentation / API is more friendly [than] Firebase. Maybe because Firebase is already "too big," but OneSignal is focused on one solution that giving our notification through to our customer. In that case, OneSignal is chosen by our company. Several years after that, Firebase announced it supported [the] iOs platform too but our company already using OneSignal to our notification provider.
We selected this product because we already had some competencies in Salesforce. We own a Salesforce partner with expertise in this area, and on top of that, Salesforce purchased it — it was originally called Velocity. When Salesforce decided to acquire it, that finalized the decision for us.
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.
We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person