Kayako

Kayako is used as a ticketing system for our clients to submit tickets for support questions or issues. We use this software to keep a paper trail and client communications. It addresses issues of getting feedback from clients, keeping track of questions and issues, and letting us have a historic record of client communications. This is currently mainly used by the support department and some people in development.

We currently use Kayako as a company-wide ticketing system. We have multiple departments set up, and the whole experience is quite seamless. It's great being able to transfer tickets between departments. Once we started rolling this out, more departments asked to be added on, because they were impressed with the system. We also have a huge network of external users who communicate with our support departments almost exclusively through Kayako.

I wanted to use Kayako as a less complex replacement of Zendesk for customer support. It included the support channels I required, like Email, Chat, Facebook and Twitter.

Kayako is being used to manage incoming communication from clients in the form of emails converted into tickets. These are then compartmentalized into views based on their status, progress, source, time, assignee and intended procedure. Using APIs or other third-party apps, the tickets can be automatically imported from several channels as needed (i.e. Gmail, company built-in support/helpdesk system).

Our entire organization uses Kayako to conduct business. It is used to transfer work from one person to another, escalate to another group and until just recently, track efforts in our Development Department.
It is a very easy way to understand what issues a customer has, what the status of that issue is, who had it, what is the history of the effort on the customer's behalf and who has done what so far.

The download version is excellent software and has many great features for supporting customers via email, telephone, and live chat.

Kayako was selected to replace an in-house ticketing system. We transitioned our web-hosting platform to another vendor and Kayako was one of the recommended ticketing systems. Kayako was being used to handle all in-bound and out-bound email communication with customers as well as using their integrated chat program. Kayako allowed us to organize our customers' communications.

I work for a managed service provider (MSP). We've found Kayako to be a powerful tool for keeping track of service requests and trouble tickets across our 30+ different client companies. It keep the workflow of the day-to-day help desk organized via automated tasks and custom widgets. We mainly use Kayako for our internal staff of IT technicians, but it does have functions that tie into the heart of our other departments as well, including our marketing and sales teams. For instance on our main website there are chat functions that tie into Kayako that allow prospective customers to interface with us right away while browsing our website.

We are currently using Kayako as a knowledge base and ticketing system. Users can login and create support tickets for IT as well as find self help documentation. Kayako is being used across the institution for student, employee, and faculty support for IT and academic technology needs.

At StyleEase Software, LLC, we use Kayako as our Support Ticket system. This is mainly used in the support department, but it can also be used for wholesale questions.

Kayako was used at a past organization for support tickets via email. We restricted use to email in most cases and did not expose the Kayako interface to our customers. We wanted a simple email address they could send support requests to that would allow us to track and distribute work to employees. Kayako provided this. We purchased and hosted Kayako in-house so there were not any 3rd party dependencies..

Kayako has an API that allowed us to build tools to interface and expand Kayako's functionality. We used the API to build a website that would show how many tickets were in queue and would alert the help desk to new tickets from a large display with an audible noise that had the website up 24x7. This allowed for us to have very quick response times to new tickets that came in as they had to be acknowledged to make the loud beeping alert stop.

Since Kayako runs on an open source database (mysql) and we had control of the infrastructure that it was hosted on, it allowed us to directly interface the database to further expand functionality. We built a billing module outside of what Kayako offers for billing that allowed us to pull the specific data we needed to bill our customers. This gave us the capability to apply different rules to customers and how they were billed based on defined rules we setup. The custom interface also put data in a format that was easier to work with for our billing department.

From a technical standpoint Kayako is versatile, but there are some oddities to the way they track certain things that may require internal business rules. For instance, they have the time worked and time billed as separate fields on a ticket. This can be very nice if used correctly, but seemed redundant to employees and sometimes they would not input data correctly. This was another reason we elected to write our own billing module so that we could have more insight into what data was pulled and highlight areas that may have been worked but not billed so that the differences could be investigated.

Kayako stores almost everything in the database. This is very nice for modifying things and not needing permissions on a bunch of directories for configurations and file uploads. For our organization (less than 10 users) this worked great and we never had any problems. I did worry about what response times would be from the database and if it would slow down in the event we were to have a large number of concurrent users. Every page load had numerous queries to the database. I would think it could benefit from memcached to assist in scaling to larger environments.

File attachment storage location was a configurable option as to whether they were stored in the database or on the file system, so that gave the option of keeping the database footprint much smaller.

Backups of Kayako were very straight forward. We backed up the directory for the webserver with rsync every hour, and the database was backed up daily with mysqldump and we also stored incremental backups every 15 minutes from mysql's binary logs.

Overall we were happy with how Kayako performed. It is not the cheapest system we evaluated, but it did work better than many of the open source solutions we evaluated.

Kayako started out being used by our organization as a Help Desk for our IT Department. We are now also using it as a case management/workflow tool for tasks within departments as well as between departments. It allows us to track the calculation process for a distribution request and if the calculations are completed within service level standards.

We use Kayako for sales, support, customer service and accounting. Our customers and potential customers use this to communicate issues, advise of payments, and for troubleshooting technical issues.

We would not be able to do our job without Kayako. In the old days, we managed our customer issues in a Gmail inbox. This caused for double work, employees tripping over each other, and accidentally deleting information. This caused pain for ourselves and our customers when their issues would slip through the cracks.

With Kayako all those pains are gone. We love Kayako!!!

We use Kayako as our online support interface for all issue affecting our software. In the support department this is the only outside tool we use. This is used across our whole organization as a way to support and track software issues.

We use Kayako on a daily basis to organize our client issues, requests and ideas, as well as to communicate directly with them.

I would have to say I was surprised on how much I enjoyed working with Kayako. Fairly easy to program (learned it 100% self taught), reliability was nice, customer service/support was always great. Check the hours their support is open. Make sure you know "emergency contacts" for them. If using SAAS remember it's a shared server and someone you share it with could cause downtime through overuse or attacks on system. This only happened a few times but they are pretty good at being reactive to servers being down.

We implemented Kayako Fusion (download) as a way to streamline the relationship between our Customer Service team and our customers. It allows us to use canned replies for common issues while still maintaining a very hands on feel to our customer interactions. We elected to use the self-hosted version and have had a great experience with it even during our heaviest traffic spikes.

It is being used as the US HQ help desk system. All trouble tickets for all departments go through this system to the appropriate IT professional to resolve. The previous system was poor at routing the trouble tickets to the appropriate person to resolve it, and Kayako Fusion ended up being far more reliable and customizable.

Kayako is currently being used in our IT department in a few different roles. For the IT Support Side: This is being used to track user issues and resolutions. For the IT Infrastructure Side: This is being used for change and patch management tracking. For the IT Security Side: This is being used to track permissions requests, and changes in user access. Currently, Kayako is being used in the IT dept only, with no plans to expand further.