ChatBeacon (formerly SightMax) is a live chat tool from SmartMax Software headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
N/A
Kayako
Score 6.2 out of 10
N/A
Kayako is a help desk and customer support platform that helps businesses automate workflows, improve agent productivity, and deliver personalized customer experiences across email, chat, and social media.
$79
per month
Pricing
ChatBeacon
Kayako
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Kayako One
$79
per month
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ChatBeacon
Kayako
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ChatBeacon
Kayako
Features
ChatBeacon
Kayako
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
ChatBeacon
-
Ratings
Kayako
2.0
11 Ratings
122% below category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets
00 Ratings
1.011 Ratings
Expert directory
00 Ratings
1.05 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications
00 Ratings
1.08 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation
00 Ratings
1.07 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission
00 Ratings
7.011 Ratings
Ticket response
00 Ratings
1.011 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
ChatBeacon
-
Ratings
Kayako
1.0
9 Ratings
156% below category average
External knowledge base
00 Ratings
1.09 Ratings
Internal knowledge base
00 Ratings
1.08 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
ChatBeacon is a decent choice for on-premises chat support, but the clunky agent UI sparks no joy. If your organization can use a cloud-based solution, there are plenty of other fish in the sea
When it works, It's without a doubt a great help desk solution. It is perfect for our usage, and have rolled it out company-wide. It's great if you have multiple departments. We have it set up so most items come through a single desk that then hands out tickets to their proper department. There may be cheaper options for smaller organizations but for one that is as service-driven as ours, we really think Kayako is a great fit.
Gives a very good report on an individual level of what is being done for a customer or corporate issue.
Easy to understand who has what, what the tickets are about, how long they have been opened and how many times the customer/employee have gone back and forth with each other.
Departments need a bit of work. Even though you can have multiple departments, the only changes that can be made are globally. If you want independent queues within the departments, you have to do a lot of work that can be very confusing.
Survey system is not up to speed. Kayako really needs to add Net Promoter Score into their system. Also, if a staff user removes their name from an incident ticket, it removes them from the survey so you really can't even get a good estimate of how well your staff is in the eyes of the customer.
Very difficult to implement when you already have a customer base. Setting them up in organizations is difficult. Also, the sign-up for new customers is quirky. If you send an email to Kayako, it will say you are not an authorized user, however, it will store your email address. If you try to send an email a second time, it will go through. This is one of many reasons why we decided to move from Kayako to Oracle Service Cloud.
We are grandfathered in on their old Software-assurance pricing and our continued use costs us only a few hundred dollars a year (excluding hosting expenses)
Our team's processes are now heavily ingrained in the system
We have not been shown a more compelling option that is more cost-effective while still offering all the features we've come to expect
Support is a strong point for ChatBeacon - their support team is small, but you definitely get white-glove service. Zero complaints about ChatBeacon support!
Three years in we are about as happy with Kayako as we could be. We've had several employee's leave and on-boarding new hires was easier than it has ever been as things are uniform and consistent across the entire application.
Before using SightMax (now ChatBeacon), we used AliveChat, which was an OK SaaS product, but the team operating the service would frequently restart the servers after maintenance and forget to start our instance back up. ChatBeacon(SightMax) as on-prem software eliminated this concern. We've been evaluating ChatBeacon vs. other products lately, and we really like how DeskPro stacks up vs. ChatBeacon - ChatBeacon is purely a chat product, and DeskPro does web chat/phone/email ticketing.
We were using Spiceworks for a few years before switching to Kayako but found that it wasn't as customizable or as user friendly for our customers. The SNMP scanning and inventory features with Spiceworks was nice but we needed more of a Help Desk that would allow us to scale our services to more companies.
Using website chat (often with an agent:customer ratio of up to 1:3 or more ) vs. phone support (with an agent ratio of 1:1) has greatly reduced support costs in every business unit.
Providing realtime feedback and links (vs. phone calls) has greatly improved the turnaround on the sales and customer inquiry processes.
Tickets were definitely responded to faster once we implemented the audible alarm that would go off when new tickets came into the queue. This was possible because of the API.
Since the system was email based we could set our monitoring software up to generate tickets automatically via email for customers when it found something out of the ordinary.
