Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Assistly Extends Customer Service to Facebook Walls

When something breaks, we users ask for help wherever we think we can find someone responsible. Or maybe we just stand up on our social media soapbox and whine.

Either way, Assistly helps companies deal with our problems by providing a Web-based customer service and support platform that combines more traditional methods like email, chat and phone with Twitter and, as of today, Facebook. The idea is to make support more efficient and coordinated.

So now, if you post about your problems on the Facebook walls of Assistly customers like 37signals, Vimeo, Rdio, Grooveshark and even Twitter, you might get a quicker and better-delegated response from employees there. (Though the new Assistly Facebook option just rolled out today, so they may not be using it yet.)

There are many (so, so many) social media management tools, but Assistly is more competitive with customer support providers like Zendesk. (Both Zendesk and Assistly already offer Twitter support, but Assistly is first to offer Facebook. Twitter itself uses Zendesk for customer support via email and Assistly for customer support via tweet.)

Assistly CEO Alex Bard and members of his team have been working on customer support software dating back to 1996 with eShare Technologies, followed by eAssist Global Solutions, founded in 1999. More recently they made the Goowy widget analytics platform that was bought by AOL in 2008. Their current company has raised about $5 million from investors True Ventures and Social Leverage.

For its own customers, Assistly starts at $39 per month per full-time user, but it also has an hourly rate so companies can spread the responsibility for customer support across all their employees.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald