Kayako vs. Symantec Asset Management Suite

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

If your organization has more than 50 computers and you have a dedicated IT Staff to manage the software then Symantec Asset Management Suite would be a great fit for your organization. The IT Staff can customize and configure the software and console to fit your organization's direct needs. It will speed up software installations and help to keep your computers running smoothly by applying patches and other necessary software updates in a timely manner. It will also help you manage your asset inventory so you know exactly where each computer is located, its IP address, and the users logging into the machine. If your organization is small and only has around 20 computer users then I would not recommend investing in the Symantec Asset Management Suite. Managing 20 computers is a task that is pretty easy to manage even if you do not have a dedicated IT Staff within your organization.

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

• Asset tracking - Very important in a business
• Reports - Keep track of what programs are installed, who has which computer, etc.

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

• Ability to tie into and be supported by RHEL, CentOS, and any other Unix based OS. I know that they could tie into some different systems, but weren't truly supported.
• Altiris was how we deployed to multiple computers all at once, Altiris Agent sometimes stops, and can be an issue to have it update in the Console.

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

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

We compared a lot of products Pulseway, Asset Panda, GoCodes, Service Now, BMC TrackIT, Sysaid, Landesk. After checking all these, found Symantec is the only one which fulfills all my organization's requirements. Glad to find a great choice by doing a proper survey. I would suggest others to go for this too.

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

• Increased productivity by PC Support
• Faster compliance in a zero day situation
• Reporting and visibility that lead to tangible action
• Implementation can be cumbersome and technical support may be required.

Incentivized