Salesforce targets SMBs with Assistly helpdesk acquisition

Salesforce has acquired helpdesk application firm Assistly for around $50m, in a move designed to round out its help desk and social media offerings for small and medium sized businesses.

Assistly is a two year-old company that specialises in providing instant access to customer service help desk capabilities.

The application integrates with social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, so that helpdesk co-ordinators can engage with customers in real time and track their online conversations.

Flexible pricing means that Assistly customers can pay by the hour to increase helpdesk teams at peak times. Full-time use of the application costs $49 per person per month.

Salesforce explained that it will integrate Assistly with its Service Cloud offerings, and use the new purchase to increase its presence in the SMB market.

"We are committed to making Service Cloud number one for the smallest to the largest companies in the world," said Alex Dayon, Salesforce applications vice president.

"We are excited that, with Assistly's innovative technology and business model, the Service Cloud will now enable even the smallest company to become a social enterprise."

Salesforce announced its intention to create the "social enterprise" at the annual Dreamforce customer event, and made a number of updates to Chatter, as well as social enhancements to the rest of its portfolio.

The company also revealed that it will focus more on the SMB market.

Gartner analyst Jenny Sussin told V3 that the Assistly acquisition will help Salesforce's ambitions in the social space.

"Gartner has a lot of customers asking about how customer service can be made social. I imagine Saleforce is seeing a lot of that as well," she said.

"Assistly is particularly strong in integrating Twitter and Facebook with contact agent dashboards, and bringing posts made on social networks right into agents' dashboards. This particularly is what a lot of start-ups want to do at the moment."

Freeform Dynamics analyst Tony Lock added that the majority of businesses want to improve their IT management tools, and that this clearly applies to the helpdesk.

"Often SMBs do not have a helpdesk at all but a couple of employees managing customer queries. Anything that will help them to improve helpdesk processes is great," he told V3.