Salesforce.com Inc. launched a new application catalog for its Desk.com service that aims to make an unprecedented amount of information available to support-desk employees via its AppExchange platform. The service is aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) customers.

The Desk.com App Hub gives customer support representatives (CSRs) access to data in other Salesforce.com apps that can be useful for improving the customer experience. That integration enables small businesses to do things that were once nearly impossible with conventional customer relationship management systems. For example, a help desk agent could view the status of a package handled through a third party shipping service without leaving the Desk.com console and update a customer on a live phone call.

The service also gives Salesforce.com a way to complement its help desk service with value-added features without having to build anything. Many partners will be happy to gain new revenue opportunities for the relatively meager cost of plugging their offerings into Desk.com.

The strategy is similar to what Salesforce is promising to do for the marketing department with the new iteration of its Social Studio that rolled out a days ago, but the value proposition is almost inverse.

Salesforce.com also says that the new catalog allows businesses to close the loop on multi-channel support by adding telephony tools from partners such as Five9 Inc., NewVoiceMedia Ltd. and RightScale Inc. into the same view . That’s in addition to time-tracking software, e-mail services and everything that else that partners can come up with.

The telephony integration is available on launch in the Desk.com Plus plan for $50 per agent per month together with a feature called Desk Connect that automatically syncs data on support cases to the Salesforce Service Cloud. The Canvas technology that it makes it possible to display third party features available in the native interface is set to become available early next year.

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