Drift is presented as a human-centric, AI-powered buyer engagement platform, a platform that automatically listens, understands and learns from buyers to provide individualized and human experiences at every touchpoint of the buying journey. The platform helps businesses translate conversational data and buyer behavior into deeper customer relationships, and also modernizes the B2B website experience. According to the vendor,…
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Kayako
Score 1.9 out of 10
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Kayako is a help desk / ticketing product and is available is both SaaS and on-premise configurations. Is is built in PHP and uses my SQL. The product competes with HelpSpot, ZohoSupport, Freshdesk and Zendesk.
The Kayako Engage edition may be deployed as a live chat system without ticketing at a reduced cost, featuring click-to-call and site visitor monitoring for customer targeting and engagement.
It is recommended for any company; it is a comprehensive tool for teams interested in strengthening business management and improving efficiency. It allows you to automatically schedule support with customers, thus saving a lot of time. Large companies can establish a chat and communication between potential customers, answering their questions quickly; allow you to monitor and track your leads and new leads, to make it fully functional, it has a very affordable value so that it can be used in all companies, it will not affect their economic aspects.
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.
Easy to implement - we were up on our site in hours.
Increases the volume and quality of buyer conversations - visitors get to value faster and qualify themselves by chatting in.
Surfaces relevant experiences and content to people faster based on targeted use cases.
Brings your brand to the prospect experience to stand out in the market. For example, our mascot Ollie Llama welcoming visitors on the homepage with funny llama.
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.
Whenever there have been challenges with the product, the team has always been hungry to fix the issues that we raise.
In-platform reporting on conversion metrics can be improved. For example, it's not possible to report on business vs non business email capture rate (currently reported by our CSM every week), and to get the most detail about meetings that have been booked, you have to export data and review in Sheets/Excel. Drift responds quickly, and they're already working on this... so by the time you read this review, the reports will probably be fully functional in the platform.
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
The customer-facing usability is great, but managing drift from the back end can be challenging at times. This is mainly due to slow loading speeds when it comes to editing or viewing routing. Coupling this with no autosave function, changes are hard to make and can easily be lost.
The Drift team has been remarkably responsive to me. From support reps available in-app, to my account manager committed to my long-term success, to regular connections and interactions with their leadership team. They have been wholeheartedly committed to answering every question and solving every issue so that we can succeed as a team, and I can succeed as a marketer!
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.
I have used a few different chat platforms, the most popular one being Intercom. They both have some similarities in functionalities and features. I have had more success with Drift and the calendar link/automation. I love the fact that a prospect can easily find my calendar link and book a demo without needing to speak with me.
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.
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.
