The future of customer service is just a button-press away.

That’s the promise of a new tech offering from Salesforce called Service SOS. The company’s Salesforce Service Cloud already offers a strategy for giving users access to help when they need it. But Service SOS takes things further, allowing users to hit a button within an app and get a little help from a live person, videoconference-style.

It’s a riff on Amazon’s Mayday service, a proprietary system the retail giant offers to users of its Kindle HDX tablet. But unlike Mayday, Service SOS allows other companies—say, enterprise users—to apply it to their own customer support systems through an API that works on iOS- and Android-based devices.

Your support demands probably should be at a certain scale or pricing level before you jump in with both feet.

The system, which works through both 3G and 4G wireless networks, allows for customer service to annotate or highlight something that’s happening on a screen—but only within the app where the service is provided.

“It’s really the Mayday experience brought to market for any company,” Service Cloud’s vice president of product management, Larry Robinson, told ZDNet. “Most apps don’t have customer service integration. We want any company to play like Amazon does.”

But before you get hopping onto those webcams to give your members some help, the concept may require some adapting. For one thing, Amazon tends to answer its Mayday calls in 10 seconds or less, which might mean higher staffing needs if you plan to follow suit. As a result, your support demands should probably be at a certain scale or pricing level before you jump in with both feet.

But the Service SOS platform helps with this, allowing the videoconferencing platform to turn on and off on the fly as support is available, and making it easy for organizations to target the service, with data such as call logs made available to staff, according to an IDG News Service report.

Pricing for the Service SOS platform hasn’t been announced yet, but Salesforce’s Service Cloud starts at $65 per user per month.

(via ZDNet)