Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review ManageEngine, A Div of Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd
ServiceDesk Plus is very easy to configure at the start, and then adjust the categories and rules as the implementation is refined. Its greatest strength is the ability to program without requiring a full time administrator. There is very little jargon involved. Reporting not so much. The canned reports are useful but do not always cover some of the basics. Fortunately, the user groups freely share report definitions so one could springboard from something close to your desired result.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review ManageEngine, A Div of Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd
Ticket logging for end users, so they can see the progress on their help requests Asset management; it has an agent that can be installed on machines which can then feed back information on installed software, active times, logged on user etc Project management; larger projects can be managed within ManageEngine ServiceDesk as well as end user help tickets, where progress/milestones etc can be recorded Active Directory import of users, so that it automatically updates when users are created/deleted and links their accounts in ManageEngine ServiceDesk with their email address as well to enable email alerts Read full review Cons 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. Read full review ManageEngine, A Div of Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd
When trying to select the top row ticket, you have to be careful not to select all tickets. Happened to us twice and we assigned all open tickets to one technician. Took a few minutes to correct. Site is sometimes a bit sluggish to respond. Don't know if that is an issue with our network infrastructure or the program itself, though. When users send emails to the help desk, we sometimes experience delays until the tickets appear on the site for the technicians. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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 Read full review ManageEngine, A Div of Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd
we are looking at other tools like
Zendesk which may replace ServiceDesk. We are currently evaluating both tools to see which one would serve our needs better
Read full review Usability I did not come from an IT background and I picked this program up quickly
Read full review ManageEngine, A Div of Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd
It is still very cumbersome, lots of data entry on the back end to build how we want it but it is still not completely user friendly. Many functions still dont work and contacting someone for help isnt always easy or we get told solutions for issues we have just arent built yet.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review ManageEngine, A Div of Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd
Support Rating 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. Read full review ManageEngine, A Div of Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd
Our network administrator usually gets a good response when contacting ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus customer service. They are quick to respond and so far have been able to eliminate most of our issues. We have been through several upgrades of the software over the years and have no issues to report in regards to customer service.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review ManageEngine, A Div of Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd
Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review ManageEngine, A Div of Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd
Compared to Cherwell, SDP is much much faster, and easier to deploy, set up, and use. But it does not have automation, and has limited customization. Since it is smaller and easier, it does not require any development effort. On the other hand, it is far more expensive, considering its lower capabilities, and its licensing model is not concurrently based (each technician uses up a license, even if the technician is not actively logged in and using the tool).
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review ManageEngine, A Div of Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd
ServiceDesk Plus has helped our organization see what issues we face on a more global picture and we are able to take the time and resources to correct them in a timely manner. The only negative part about ServiceDesk Plus is it can become costly when you see and use all the features it has to offer. Read full review ScreenShots