On Using Desk Everyday

The other Chase is leading the charge on customer support app reviews but I wanted to chime in with the one on Desk since I use it every day. Free app trials gives you a chance to check it out but using it day in and day out for two years gives me time to take a deep look at it.

Desk has a ton of features but I’ll only focus on the ones our team uses everyday. And like with all big choices, a pros and cons list helps out. So here’s my pros and cons of working with Desk.

Pros

The universal inbox is great. Twitter, Facebook, email, chat, and phone cases all appear in one single inbox for reps to work from. No digging through Twitter searches or installing other apps for chatting. Everything’s in one place.

Case management is solid. With all those in one inbox, having a good system to manage the cases is critical. Each interaction with a customer becomes a case. Cases can be transferred between agents to get second opinions. You can leave notes on them to ask questions from other team members. And each case tracks a history so you can see previous interactions with the customer. Everything you need for that customer is in one place.

The mobile app is good. While most of my work happens at my desk, there are definitely times when I want to check in from my iPhone. I might be on a road trip or just out for the day. But I don’t want my customers to sit waiting for an answer for me. Desk has apps for all the major players (iOS, Android, Windows phone, and even BlackBerry). It’s easy to use and lets me check in on my cases when I’m away from the desk.

Cons

The Twitter tool is pretty slow. Desk pulls each Tweet in as its own case. But pulling those in, opening them, and responding can be pretty slow. It gets the job done but when you’re aiming for fast support, it can be frustrating. We actually don’t use it anymore in favor of a custom-built Twitter tool.

Contacting Desk support can be kinda confusing at first. They do have a central support site, with links to the right email/phone/Twitter channels. But they’ve got three separate Twitter channels – @desk / @desk_ops / @desk_support. When their app goes down (or any app really), the first place I check is their Twitter handle. I love Twitter support and always go there first. But with Desk, I don’t really know which one to tweet at and such.

Good news though – they’re getting way better at the support side. They’ve made huge strides in the past few months.

Searching through cases is pretty rough. If I know that this email address contacted us, that’s an easy search. But anything beyond that gets complicated and often results in me just giving up on the search tool. Google’s spoiled me in that regard and I know first hand how tough getting a search tool right is. But I’ve still gotta put that in the con column.

Overall

At the end of the day, I’m okay with Desk. Like with any app, I get frustrated with it at times. But it does the job our team needs it to do – answer customer emails fast. And as long as it can do that, I’m good with it.

This is part of the Customer Support App Review series. Read more articles in the series.