Citrix GoToAssist Integrates With Salesforce.com

Citrix Online is making its GoToAssist remote support service available as a plugin to the Salesforce.com Service Cloud.

Announced Wednesday at Salesforce's Dreamforce user conference, the integration allows service and support agents to launch a GoToAssist session from within the Service Cloud user interface and initiate a screen-sharing session with the customer's PC or Mac. Customers join the session by either clicking on a link, or going to a website where they enter a code supplied by the agent, and downloading a plugin.

Technical support issues can then be resolved using remote diagnostics, remote control, and other tools, while the agent and customer communicate over the phone or through text chat. Once the support session has ended, the GoToAssist session details such as agent notes, chat transcripts, and PC diagnostic data are stored in the Salesforce case record.

The GoToAssist integration app is available in the Salesforce.com AppExchange. It is free with a GoToAssist subscription, which is $69 per month or $660 per year for up to eight simultaneous sessions.

Citrix senior product marketing manager Jackie Murphy said the increased acceptance of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model popularized by Salesforce is driving the need for support of those SaaS applications--which works best if the remote support is also delivered in a SaaS mode.

"Citrix Online has always been a software-as-a-service model," she said. "This is no longer just the early adopters out there. This is becoming accepted by IT."

Citrix Online is the SaaS division of Citrix, built on the 2003 acquisition of Expertcity, and is best known for its online meetings product GoToMeeting and desktop remote access utility GoToMyPC. Murphy said Citrix Online is itself a Salesforce customer, although parent company Citrix also uses other customer relationship management systems.

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