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Kayako

Kayako

Overview

What is Kayako?

Kayako is a help desk / ticketing product and is available is both SaaS and on-premise configurations. Is is built in PHP and uses my SQL. The product competes with HelpSpot, ZohoSupport, Freshdesk and Zendesk. The Kayako Engage edition may be…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Kayako Fusion has been widely adopted by organizations to improve their customer service operations. Users have found that the software …
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Kayako knowledge base

8 out of 10
March 18, 2016
Incentivized
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 …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 13 features
  • Ticket creation and submission (11)
    7.0
    70%
  • Organize and prioritize service tickets (11)
    1.0
    10%
  • Ticket response (11)
    1.0
    10%
  • Email support (10)
    1.0
    10%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Inbox

$15.00

Cloud
Per User Per Month

Growth

$30.00

Cloud
Per User Per Month

Scale

$60.00

Cloud
Per User Per Month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $29 per month
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Features

Incident and problem management

Streamlining ticketing and service restoration processes

2
Avg 7.9

Self Help Community

Features that allow customers to self-service for support issues.

1
Avg 7.7

Multi-Channel Help

Features related to providing customer service and support via different communication channels. Communications are organized by ticket/customer/channel for the convenience of agents.

1
Avg 7.7
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Product Details

What is Kayako?

Kayako Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Kayako is a help desk / ticketing product and is available is both SaaS and on-premise configurations. Is is built in PHP and uses my SQL. The product competes with HelpSpot, ZohoSupport, Freshdesk and Zendesk. The Kayako Engage edition may be deployed as a live chat system without ticketing at a reduced cost, featuring click-to-call and site visitor monitoring for customer targeting and engagement.

Kayako starts at $29.

Desk.com (discontinued), Freshdesk, and HelpSpot are common alternatives for Kayako.

Reviewers rate Ticket creation and submission highest, with a score of 7.

The most common users of Kayako are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(46)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Kayako Fusion has been widely adopted by organizations to improve their customer service operations. Users have found that the software allows them to efficiently handle support tickets and maintain a personalized approach to customer interactions. The canned replies feature has proven to be effective in addressing common issues, while still providing a hands-on feel in customer communications. The self-hosted version of Kayako Fusion has demonstrated its reliability even during heavy traffic spikes, ensuring seamless customer support. The software's email support ticketing system has simplified the process for customers to send support requests and has enabled easy tracking and distribution of work to employees. Additionally, users have leveraged the powerful API provided by Kayako Fusion to create tools that enhance and expand the functionality of the software. For example, websites built using the Kayako Fusion API display real-time ticket queue information and alert the help desk about new tickets, resulting in quicker response times. The ability to directly interface with the database has allowed users to customize Kayako Fusion by building modules tailored to their specific business needs, such as a billing module with customized billing rules. Users have also appreciated the ease of configuration modifications and file uploads within Kayako Fusion's database-centric architecture, eliminating the need for permissions on multiple directories. With features like the option to choose between storing file attachments in the database or on the file system, Kayako Fusion offers flexibility in managing the database footprint. Regular backups of both the webserver directory and database ensure data reliability and safety for organizations using Kayako Fusion. Overall, customers have expressed satisfaction with Kayako Fusion, praising its performance as a reliable and versatile system for managing support tickets and facilitating effective customer communications. The software has been utilized across various industries and departments, serving as a case management tool, workflow tool, and company-wide ticketing system. Whether it is used by managed service providers to track service requests across different client companies or by organizations for software issue support and tracking, Kayako Fusion has consistently delivered the desired results. Users have found Kayako Fusion to be easy to program and have appreciated its reliability and the availability of customer support. The software has proved valuable as a help desk system, efficiently routing trouble tickets to the appropriate IT professionals and improving overall efficiency and reliability compared to previous systems. Kayako Fusion has been utilized in many ways, including organizing customer issues, requests, and ideas, facilitating direct communication with clients, tracking user issues and resolutions in IT departments, serving as a ticketing system for clients to submit support questions or issues, and functioning as a knowledge base for self-help documentation. The versatility of Kayako Fusion is evident in its institutional-wide use for IT and academic technology support in educational institutions, benefiting students, employees, and faculty members. Moreover, Kayako Fusion has been utilized by customers and potential customers for various purposes, including sales, support, customer service, and accounting. The software seamlessly converts emails into tickets and organizes them based on their status, progress, source, time, assignee, and intended procedure. Integration with third-party apps and APIs allows for the automatic import of tickets from different channels, such as Gmail and the company's built-in support system. For IT departments specifically, Kayako Fusion serves as a comprehensive tool for tracking user issues and resolutions, managing change and patch management processes, as well as handling permissions requests and user access changes. In addition to its efficiency in streamlining support operations, Kayako Fusion also serves as a ticketing system that provides a paper trail and historic record of client communications. Users have leveraged this feature to maintain a documented history of interactions with clients. In summary, Kayako Fusion has proven itself as a versatile solution used in various industries and departments to enhance customer support operations, track service requests and issues efficiently, improve workflow management, facilitate direct communication with clients, and serve as an institution-wide tool for IT support in educational institutions.

Users commonly recommend thoroughly researching and testing different helpdesk products before choosing Kayako. They advise evaluating the organization's needs and comparing them to the features offered by Kayako. However, they think Kayako is overpriced for the features it delivers.

Users suggest trying Kayako to experience its usefulness, emphasizing that it is user-friendly and intuitive. They also recommend not being afraid to use Kayako and suggest it for small and mid-sized companies as it helps save time and efforts in organizing emails and messages. Proper training and defining processes are advised to avoid struggles with ticket creation and information retrieval.

Additionally, users recommend exploring other options like Salesforce Essentials or Agile CRM for integrated helpdesk features. They believe Kayako is an excellent product for basic customer support but may not be suitable for advanced functionality or robust custom fields. They recommend trying out the demo and contacting support for any questions.

Users find the knowledge base feature of Kayako great and easy to set up. However, they think the live chat and support platforms may be better in other products. They mention that customer service is easier and faster with Kayako compared to live chat.

Overall, users appreciate the ease of use, simple setup, and customer satisfaction of Kayako. They suggest reading the documentation for better understanding and utilization of the software. Furthermore, they recommend Kayako for companies in the beginning stages with budget constraints and basic support needs.

Lastly, users suggest adding more custom reporting options and introducing collaborators to the Inbox plan. They recommend using the cloud version of Kayako to avoid purchasing hardware but also mention that the self-hosted version can be considered as an alternative option.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-22 of 22)
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Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Ticketing system.
  • Multiple departments/groups.
  • Ease of use for all users.
  • Insight and reporting.
  • SLA Management and visibility.
  • Price continues to increase.
  • There are some quirky errors, sometimes a response isn't recorded properly and an SLA is missed because of it. Sometimes an error message pops up that doesn't actually affect anything.
  • Could always use more reporting.
  • Macros could be a little more configurable.
  • The performance has been really bad lately. Minutes to load tickets, or the inability to log in.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Easy to use interface.
  • All support channels in one place (except that Facebook didn't work).
  • Mobile app for incoming notifications (that didn't work).
  • Their support team is worthless (no support at all).
  • Very aggressive sales team (but doesn't support their customers).
  • Core features do not work and they have no intention to fix them.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
  • I personally find the reporting a bit difficult. We are on an older version of Kayako and I am told that reporting on the new version is much improved.
  • There are some things missing in the new version that we were used to in the older version. Not sure how they came about what to keep or get rid of. Some of them are quite missed.
  • Would like to see reporting done in a way that you pick what you want to report on and hit generate. No special "Language" skills needed.
Zane Lucas | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Customer Service Tickets
  • Live Chat Functionality
  • Terrible Customer Service
  • Overpriced Support Charges For Existing Customers
  • Many Bugs - Requiring An Expensive Support Agreement
Joshua Tobiansky | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Kayako's chat system is very easy to use and set up. It integrates well with their control panel and organizes customer data.
  • Kayako makes it easy to communicate with your customers.
  • The built-in reports that Kayako provides are a good start to being able to monitor the work performed by staff.
  • 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.
Jericho Fulgencio | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Automated workflows. The workflows and email parser rules in Kayako are versatile and easy to set up, and saves you the trouble of having to create reoccurring tickets and manually assigning technicians for each ticket.
  • Custom fields. Without custom fields there would be no way for us to effectively keep track of our 30+ different client companies. They can be added on the fly as well so you'll never feel 'trapped' within the set fields that come with the program.
  • Reporting. The report builder that uses 'KQL as a query language (based on SQL) is easy to learn and allows you to pull relevant information/statistics from your help desk using specifications that you set yourself -- and ties back into automation via scheduled generated email reports.
  • Custom fields. Although we love the custom fields in Kayako there is still some room for improvement regarding them. For instance, while browsing tickets, you cannot sort/search display columns via custom fields you have created. You can only sort/search by pre-programmed fields in Kayako.
  • Email parser rules. This ties back to some of the limitations with custom fields. At the time of this writing we cannot create email parser rules using custom fields we have created as a criteria.
  • The built-in chat feature. While the chat feature is great for interfacing with outside customers, it could do better in terms of being more convenient for internal staff. We wish we could have a 'technician group chat' that stays open on a continuous basis so that our technicians can communicate via Kayako more effectively. But at the moment, when you close a chat, it stays closed and you cannot 'reopen' it.
March 18, 2016

Kayako knowledge base

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Easy to use ticketing system for support requests.
  • Easy ticketing tracking system for our support techs to monitor and assign tickets as needed.
  • Nice knowledge base for self support documentation.
  • Easy to tag self support documents, however not clever enough to bring most used documentation to top of search list.
  • We have not found a way to get numbers on most searched tags.
  • Inexpensive compared to other knowledge base platforms.
June 03, 2015

Kayako Supports

Marie McCourt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It creates an easy interface for answering tickets from a regular computer screen.
  • It allows you to categorize well, so that you can create reports of common problems.
  • You can customize support ticket issues to get more detailed information.
  • Kayako needs to make it easier to use our ticketing system on the go. It is very difficult to use on an iPad or iPhone, for example.
  • They could make the system a little less clunky, and easier to manage from the Admin side.
  • I'd like to feel like the system is more up to date with other software out there.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Kayako handles email integration through pop very well
  • Kayako is very configurable
  • Kayako's API was well documented and easy to implement custom scripts against.
  • Kayako has a large number of queries to the database for each page load. This is fine for small installations, but I would think it could become a burden in large instances (this is for self hosted version only)
  • Kayako allows for so much information that it can take awhile to get it configured to just ask for what you need and not overwhelm you with options
  • Not necessarily a Kayako issue, but we ran into a problem where a ticket was "stuck in the queue" It turned out that there was an attachment larger than what the php was configured to support, so the ticket would be created, but because the attachment would fail to upload correctly, it would not remove the item from the pop mailbox and it would download it again and again and again until we figured out the issue. If they were to wrap the ticket creation into a transaction and not create the ticket prior to fully processing the message they could then check the error response code on file upload and maybe create a single message that indicated the real problem.
Douglas Deitle | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It is flexible to allow multiple departments to use Kayako for their own needs such as a Help Desk for our IT department and Workflow/Case Management for our Admin and Calculations Departments. It also allows permissions to be set to allow employees access to only their departments information or it can allow an employee access to multiple departments.
  • Kayako will allow our SQL program access to develop reports that KQL is unable to do.
  • Kayako is cost effective for our needs at this point and appears to be able to accommodate our future needs.
  • I have not tried to use the actual Workflow function for awhile so this issue may have been resolved. When we tried to use it, it was cumbersome and did not offer much flexibility as to meeting the needs of different departments.
  • This may no longer be an issue but if someone was knowledgeable about KQL and knew how another department was set up, they could write a report accessing their data even though they do not have permission to view/edit that departments data.
  • Perhaps adding the function of "Read Receipts" to end-users when opening a ticket.
  • When a ticket is closed, automatically include information from the initial creation of the ticket so the end user knows at a glance what issue has been resolved without looking up the Ticket ID.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Great visibility as far as how old a ticket is and how urgent the issue is. This aids in prioritizing.
  • The search engine could use improvement, it's very difficult to find things using the search engine.
December 20, 2014

Kayako Review

Derrick Green | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Easy to use
  • I have never had a failure
  • Has great reporting features
  • Great interface
  • I have had only one issue with selecting different views. This is a pretty solid product.
August 05, 2014

Kayako in a Nutshell

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Organization of workflow
  • Easy and concise communication
  • Reporting is accurate and easy to use
  • Search capabilities for tickets and users is less than appealing
  • Merging users with more than one account could be easier
Marc Vila | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Easy to learn
  • Tons of features
  • Good support
  • SAAS went down on us a handful of times but I hear servers are stronger now
  • Ability to call and talk to someone. Mostly all email and chat
  • Custom builds for you rather than all self programmed
Nathaniel Bannister | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Over the years they've continued to enhance the product and user experience on all fronts. Changes have always felt well thought out and purposeful and the UI has only gotten easier to use over time.
  • Kayako's mail parser allows you to easily sort, prioritize, and present the information needed by your staff to easily tackle an onslaught of customer tickets.
  • The system has scaled very easily over the years. We use it for one of our Retail sites that has anywhere from 10k to 15k unique views a day and it has never felt sluggish or degraded even under a heavy load.
  • Adjusting the templates can be very tedious as each update includes a manual reversion process. While it isn't a big deal if you're using a mostly vanilla design I can imagine it would become tedious for a more involved UI change.
  • The update process is easy enough but could obviously take some pointers from Wordpress in terms of making them more streamlined.
  • The price has gone up substantially since we originally bought in, while I feel that we'd still have gotten our money out of it either way it is definitely much more of a hurdle than it used to be.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Customer service while installing and troubleshooting the application was excellent.
  • Plenty of customization options while still retaining a simple to use and easily understandable UI for the end users.
  • Very fast and reliable response time from the application.
  • Customizing the UI is difficult to accomplish.
  • The transition from SupportSuite to Fusion was difficult for the users initially, even though Fusion is the upgrade for SupportSuite.
  • Learning curve was a bit steep for non-technical users.
July 23, 2014

"Catchy Title"

Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • The ability to switch between the desktop app and the web-based app is nice.
  • The call and chat function of Kayako is pretty useful
  • The ability to define categories, and subcategories, and exclude them from general search criteria is a nice touch
  • The Desktop app constantly loses contact with the server, requiring multiple logon requests.
  • The search parameters are overly sensitive, and I was unable to see any defined wildcard characters.
  • The section for defining user permissions has some pitfalls that need to be addressed when setting up a new user.
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