July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise cloud powerhouse Salesforce has added new tools to its Service Cloud that help address customer service problems while people are in mobile apps, making it possible to reach customers that are increasingly glued to phones and tablets instead of PCs.

“We’re doubling down on mobile and this is no exception,” Alex Bard told VentureBeat. “This is an Apple-like experience for collaboration and solving your issue.”

Salesforce and its CEO Marc Benioff have been betting on mobile apps and experiences for a long while. The outspoken Benioff even suggested back in October that Windows 8 would be “the end of Windows,” because mobile devices had become the go-to devices for workers and consumers. And in this case, Salesforce is betting further on mobile by making Service Cloud way more usable with smartphones and tablets.

So let’s say you spot a suspicious bank charge on your account while you are inside your bank app on the iPhone. Salesforce’s update makes it so that the bank can easily add some HTML5 code to the app and you can talk to customer service rep via chat with one click.

“We provide the best platform that can be integrated into your company’s apps,” Bard said. “These can be integrated easily into an app or a mobile web page.”

Chatting with customer service via your app isn’t the only new feature to Service Cloud. The update today also include three other big updates:

• Co-browsing for sales associates: Co-browsing tech lets you and a customer associate browse on the same screen. Service agents can collaborate with customers about how to use an app by working directly with them. Input from either person registers on the screen.
• Mobile Service Communities (forums): Salesforce’s Communities are essentially forums that allow an app’s users to communicate with each other and let the company moderate those communities. If you have an answer about how something works in an app or a game, you can simply go to the community and ask.
• Service Cloud Touch for mobile devices: The company’s Service Cloud Touch app, which helps engage with your customers and leads, has been optimized to support the iPhone, iPad, Amazon Kindle, and Android devices. Ideally, this will make service agents more mobile.

The feature on here that sticks out the most here is co-browsing. Bard told VentureBeat that this is the first real use of the co-browsing tech it wanted when it bought GoInstant for $70 million in July 2012. It’s particularly cool because you’ll be able to simultaneously move the screen with an associate to show them the problem. Then the customer rep can address the problem faster.

“This creates a much better experience for answering questions and doing things inside a mobile app,” Bard said.

Salesforce says co-browsing will be generally available in the second half of 2013, while the other three features are now available today.

Service Cloud has more than 34,000 customers including GE, Chipotle, Comcast, Activision, KLM, Yamaha, and TED. It claims that its clients see a 37 percent decrease on average in first call resolution time and a 36 percent decrease in support costs.

Photos via Salesforce

In the future, sitting on hold for hours listening to a robotic-sounding “customer-support rep” tell that you your call “matters,” will be a thing of the past.

Today’s tech startups are already setting themselves apart by offering fast and headache-free customer support. As a result, the online helpdesk business is growing with companies like Beetil (acquired by Citrix this month) and Gripevine (a customer complaints service) offering new services.

The next contender in the space is SupportBee, a startup founded in 2010. Launching today, its service should make it easier for companies to answer customer support tickets via email in record time. SupportBee functions as an online helpdesk for Gmail support. The customers that are already using the beta are tech startups and small to medium-sized businesses. It does not support Outlook, typically used by larger companies.

SupportBee is already in use by over a dozen customers. It replaces complicated ticket states, audit trails, and many other complexities. Any member of a team can access the web app it at any time to help customers or learn more about product issues and feature requests.

Companies can get started by forwarding their support email to SupportBee and/or by installing a widget on their website. They then add their entire team to the desk and start replying to customer email. The team can customize their helpdesk further by setting up signatures and autoresponders and can automate ticket routing using filters. For companies looking for more functionality, SupportBee offers an API and supports webhooks.

The founders are experimenting with a new pricing model for their service. SupportBee does not charge customers on a per-seat basis; instead, it bases fees on the volume of tickets a company receives. This means that if a problem requires the support of an entire team, SupportBee’s customers won’t have to worry about escalating costs. Pricing starts at $19 per month.

Based in India and Vietnam, the founders are working remotely on the company. This isn’t their first startup — cofounders Prateek Dayal and Nithya Rajaram developed Muziboo.com, a free music upload tool, and AboutMyBrowser.com, a service to help customer support agents debug browser issues. Dayal also hosts HackerStreet, a tech news site for entrepreneurs in India.

While working on Muziboo, the founders told me they first experienced the pain of doing customer support for a user base of half a million and growing. “We could not keep up with the interactions using Gmail,” said Dayal, who said that existing tools were “slow, complicated and impersonal.”

SupportBee is primarily a bootstrapped effort — company has only raised a $40,000 equity grant from Startup Chile.

Top Image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Salesforce’s Desk.com has partnered with notable incubators Y Combinator, TechStars, 500 Startups, FounderFuel, and more to give a ton of startups six months of free software designed to help with customer service and support.

As we wrote when Desk.com launched in January, the service competes with Zendesk and TalkDesk to give small and medium-sized companies cloud-based customer support management. With the desktop or mobile apps, business can field queries through phone, email, web, Twitter, Facebook, and other channels.

Basically, Desk.com is the sort of critical software that can make sure your startup is actually being responsive to precious early customers. Y Combinator, FounderFuel, and other incubators/accelerators that partnered with Desk.com already give their startups perks like seed funding, mentoring, and space to work, but they also toss in things like software to make their programs more attractive.

Montreal’s FounderFuel, for example, gives startups a $25,000 investment for 6 percent equity. It also has partnerships with Rackspace and Amazon Web Services for free cloud hosting and SendGrid for free transaction email support. Now it can add Desk.com to that list.

“We see great value with the partnerships we have in place,” FounderFuel general manager Ian Jeffery told VentureBeat. “It’s difficult to get into accelerators like ours. These companies are carefully selected.”

Desk.com, which was previously Assistly, knows about the challenges of being a startup. While it wasn’t part of an incubator, the company saw the things that could go right or wrong as a small San Francisco-based company.

“Even though we are part of Salesforce, we still consider ourselves to be a startup in many ways,” Desk.com vice president and general manager Alex Bard told us. “We had a lot of help from the community and now we’re giving back. Sometimes we give talks to incubators, and we do webinars for startups.”

Of course, Desk.com has self-serving reasons for giving away six months of free software. First, it wants to create paying customers from an elite group of startups that have already been vetted. And second, giving away the service creates goodwill and word-of-mouth with the influential and talkative startup scene.

On a related note, Desk.com is also a sponsor of The Startup Pizza Fund, cash dedicated to events hosted by cool early-stage startups. The Startup Pizza Fund gives a pizza party to one group a month.

Check out some of the other incubators Desk.com will provide its software to below:

Photo credit: Desk.com

The automated customer service representative annoys all of us. We have all navigated numerical menu options (press one for ‘I want to bash your product against the wall’) that make us wait for a solution until we yell, “Can’t I just speak to a human?” We’ve also dealt with customer service over e-mail, watching threads of miscommunication go on for days. Built up frustration and unsolved problems often lead a user to complain on social media – the same digital place that companies are trying to promote themselves.

According to an infographic created by Zendesk, Facebook is the top social network for people looking to interact with a specific brand. People spent 53,457,258 minutes on Facebook last May. That’s over 890,000 hours of pure social media. Facebook’s main goal is to get people to share their interactions and content across the Web. Thus, it provides tools to help people be brand promoters without even knowing it. For example, the company recently launched “actions,” which allows Facebook users to do more than just “like” something, but rather “want,” “bought,” or “ate” that item. This creates a more engagement-friendly way to say, “I want the latest Big Bang Theory DVD set more than I want proof of String Theory!”

Big name brands are using Facebook to promote through its applications interface as well. For example, Ticketmaster created an Facebook application to allow friends to share where they are seated at an event, and suggest future events that user would like.

People generally “become a fan” of a brand on Facebook to get discounts, be the first to receive news about the brand, and more. So, why wouldn’t they also air their grievances to the brand in the same place? Around 73 percent of people say that if they were supplied the right tools, they would be happy to interact with customer service on the social level. Currently, the majority of customer support requests have been in the retail sector, with telecommunications following in second place.

Check out the infographic to find out more about customer service going social.

Customer service image via Shutterstock, Infographic via Zendesk

TalkDesk lets businesses set up a customer support center in minutes, all from a browser. When a call is placed to a customer service number, that person’s information is automatically pulled up in a browser window along with call history and any information that may help resolve their problems. The real genius of TalkDesk is its interoperability with popular customer relationship management services (CRMs) such as Salesforce and Zendesk. With a clever use of their APIs, TalkDesk pulls customer information from Salesforce, Olark and other business tools, so users can quickly see if the caller has outstanding tickets using these other tools.

“When you have all the information about the customer — a 360 degree view of the customer — you can better take care of his problems,” TalkDesk co-founder Tiago Paiva told VentureBeat. “You don’t even have to ask his name.”

TalkDesk also pulls in information from sites such as Linkedin and Twitter, which might seem strange at first, until you consider how valuable it might be to know if you’re talking to a customer who is trashing your product on popular social media sites.

Co-founders Paiva and Cristina Fonseca of Portugal have been working on web applications for a number of years, but their journey to the U.S. came in a flash. They were notified one day before this year’s Twiliocon that they were selected to present, and they were subsequently chosen as the winners. The duo were admitted into the current class of the 500 Startups accelerator and had to return to Portugal to get their visa situation in order before returning to California to get cranking on their company.

The two have been so busy building their product since arriving in the U.S., that they’ve not even had the chance to buy themselves cell phones. This is especially funny given the fact that their whole product revolves around helping other businesses provide customer support over the phone.

“When you come to Silicon Valley you have to focus a lot on raising money, and maybe because we are from Europe we really want to build a sustainable business based on customers, and grow from the revenue we make every month,” said Paiva.

On Sunday Paiva and  Fonseca had dinner with Portuguese President Anibal António Cavaco Silva, who is on a tour of Silicon Valley to learn how to bring some of California’s startup energy to his country.

TalkDesk was recently chosen as one of the 10 finalists of the CloudBeat Innovation Showdown and will be presenting at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat conference at the end of the month.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!

[Image Credit: Cloud via ShutterStock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Zendesk operates a Web-based help desk service that lets companies track customer complaints across most of the web. It’s one of a number of startups that are trying to bring the ideas behind consumer-facing technology like Twitter and Facebook to the enterprise space. And today it’s launching a mobile version of its app for the iPad.

The Zendesk iPad app feels a whole lot like Twitter and Facebook. Customer-support workers can quickly browse active tickets and flag specific tickets they need to access later. They can jump into active threads and respond to customers and other employees or respond to employees specifically within a thread.

The whole interface is streamlined like most micro-blogging applications to make it easy to manage. The idea is to help customer support employees do their job at home or sitting in bed, said Zendesk chief executive Mikkel Svane. Or anywhere else, for that matter, now that tablet computers have basically turned every employee into a field operative, he said.

Svane said he only gets his iPad back after his two daughters are done playing games and have gone to bed. Then he gets straight to work. “It’s kind of crazy — your productivity machine is also a kid’s toy,” he said. “It just makes it so much easier because you aren’t tied to a desk or a computer.”

Zendesk already has an iPhone app, but the company decided to build the iPad app from scratch, Svane said. iPhone users have downloaded Zendesk’s mobile application around 80,000 times, he said. The iPad is quietly becoming a supergiant in the enterprise space — around 80 of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 100 list have either deployed an application on the iPad or are testing one. It was a natural next step to develop an application for the tablet, Svane said.

Zendesk is part of a number of new-age venture-backed enterprise startups that are bringing consumer tech to the enterprise. The company recently closed its third round of fundraising worth $19 million. It also closed a $6 million fundraising round in August 2009. Yammer, another startup in that generation, recently announced a funding round worth a whopping $25 million. Huddle raised an extra $10.2 million in its second round of funding earlier this year in May.