Salesforce Starter

Salesforce is great because you can work to keep track of real-time user and purchase analytics, customer support, customer complaints, and a variety of other CRM functions with the ease of storage and access in the cloud.

We'd migrated from Zendesk, which is a system I will never ever have complaints about again after using Desk.

As for some of the things I couldn't deal with:

#1, and most egregious limitation: Only one agent can be working on a ticket at a time, and there's no way to kick out that other agent. Someone opens a ticket, then goes to lunch? Guess that customer isn't getting a response for the next hour. Just hope it doesn't happen over the weekend, which it totally did! This was a deal-breaker.

#2: Sessions were weird. You could be logged in to one session at a time, so if you went from home to work, you'd have to log in again. Not a huge problem given the browser can remember your password, but that "Remember Me" checkbox on their login page is a placebo at best.

#3: The "rules" system for routing tickets.
Tasks that should have been simple (like routing emails after hours) are left up to these weirdly complicated "Rules," including "Time Rules."

#4: Two agent interfaces. One old, one half-baked. We were sold on the "Next Gen Agent" interface since it looked and felt more like Zendesk, but it was messy. It felt contrived, like the product of deadlines and misapplied research. The Classic interface worked much better, though it was certainly showing its age.

But there were things I really liked:

#1: Chat! The chat system was really nice, everything came in as a ticket and it was very intuitive. The chat system in Desk was definitely better than Zendesk's weird implementation of Zopim.

#2: The ability to forward tickets out to an external address. This is probably because Desk operates a bit more like an inbox.

#3: The support and help articles. This product would have way fewer stars if not for its Support team. They were always patient and helpful, even when my frustration started showing about their product. They come off as the kind of people who enjoy what they do. Additionally, the documentation was generally well-maintained.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend Desk before any other platform I've used (including Zendesk, OTRS, and Tender...except, maybe Tender) unless you're starting totally fresh and also expect to have tight Salesforce integration. The people really make the product, which is good 'cause they have a lot to make up for...