Kayako vs. ServiceNow Customer Service Management

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

It is well suited for medium to large companies that manage different teams and need to communicate constantly and track progress in a timely manner. It is less suited for small enterprises as it will overwhelm users with the features and functionalities embedded.

• 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

• Allows for clear communication between help desk and end users.
• Provides a clean inventory option for both hardware items and software licenses.
• Navigation is very intuitive and user friendly.
• Many reporting features for all levels of the company.

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

• Adding in additional chat features would be nice
• Viewing where you stand in priority
• Having a way to automate more of the processes

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

Bottom line is that it does what you need it to do. We've been using Service Now as a ticket managing tool for a few years now. There's really not much it can't do when it comes to recording interactions. It has been nice using inventory tracking for software licenses and hardware as well.

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

Support has been very good. Any time there has been a real issue, the team has responded very quickly and identified the issue without a lot of repetitive questions that I've seen from other services. There is a great external community and internal knowledge base that covers pretty much anything you need.

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

Connectwise targets small to medium enterprises and kept things simple for cross-organizational communications. On the other hand, ServiceNow with users with more than 500 at least, tends to create lag and tension when all are using the app at the same time, especially getting reports in a timely manner.

• 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

• The negative impact for my team is the delay in team completing tickets but not a system issue.
• A positive impact for my team is we can easily view the status of tickets and the follow-up emails are beneficial to maintain records of tickets.
• Negative impact is that there is no user job aid or helpful tools for new users.

Incentivized