Kayako vs. Scratchpad

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.

Incentivized

Frankly, if I can do something in Scratchpad instead of Salesforce, I prefer Scratchpad because it's faster, easier, simpler, with a much more readable and useable interface. Salesforce has been getting requests to allow font size modification for over a decade and hasn't even done that. That's what sent me looking for something like Scratchpad. I sort of view it as a much more user-friendly UI to layover SF. It's faster and less frustrating than SF for frequent daily activities. It's great for creating notes and tracking tasks at a basic level in a much more user friendly environment than Salesforce. But it interacts w/ SF, which is great!

Incentivized

• 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.
• Nice dashboard view.

Incentivized

• Scratchpad notes are super easy to use and link to Salesforce Opportunities.
• Allows you to update all the necessary Salesforce opportunity fields without going into Salesforce.
• Easy to use Task manager that helps you stay on track through the day.
• Extremely easy to use and their CS team is always willing to provide training and help.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• When pulling in Salesforce reports, it doesn't have full ability to do grouping/sorting.
• When looking at pipeline view there's not an ability to expand the default view to see more than 5 people per group.
• It'd be nice if comments would go as a task rather than a buzz.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

I did not come from an IT background and I picked this program up quickly

Incentivized

So intuitive and user friendly

Incentivized

They are really good, but it takes a while to get back, because of the large time difference to the Eastern US. However, they are very helpful.

Incentivized

• We didn't have to use support too much, but when we did, they were able to assist us and help us make everything work.
• Mostly we used their Online KB and step by step instructions to get all of our issues resolved.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It doesn't. Scratchpad is more agile and much easier to use as a seller managing a large patch with lots of opportunities. SAP is robust but is far more complicated and involves a lot more inputs to get the same outputs that you can get with Scratchpad in half the time and effort.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• I save many hours a week using Scratchpad to simply manage my tasks.
• I no longer waste time waiting for SFDC to load.
• I can easily create opps, adjust the pipeline, and check to see if someone is already prospecting into an account.

Incentivized