Keep customers coming back with Kayako
August 01, 2014
Keep customers coming back with Kayako
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Other
Overall Satisfaction with Kayako
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.
- 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.
- Customers get an immediate reply even when our team is backlogged with requests
- Customers who wouldn't normally pick up a phone can get quick access to a rep for help with purchasing decisions. Reps can address multiple customers at a time over live chat assuming that they are not being overly demanding.
- When compared to our old methodology of using Outlook to handle a high volume of customer requests Kayako is not only more efficient but gives the CS Manager a lot more accountability for her reps.
- Zendesk,LivePerson
We went with Kayako at the time of purchase because there was a much more cost effective self-hosted option that we have been able to leverage to our benefit. That option has become much more expensive now, but we feel like we'd still make the decision again.
Using Kayako
8 - Our customer service team accounts for the bulk of our Kayako usage.
1 -
- Familiarity with Linux and the LAMP/LEMP stack is essentially if you are using the self hosted version
- We don't use the SaaS offering but I imagine it would be a lot more hands off
- Live Chat for customer facing support
- Handles all inbound email for our customer service team
- Provides reporting to our Management team re: the efficacy of the CS Team
- We continue to add ticket parsing and filtering as a way to make sure the right people see the right tickets
- As new issues develop we continue to add canned replies to aid our team
Kayako Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled - Cutting them off from their old solution cold-turkey was very important to user adoption. There was some initial resistance at first but we managed to overcome it over the course of a few weeks.
- Users dragged their feet and did not want to change their very broken workflow
Kayako Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | Escalation required |
Yes - Yes, and within less than 10m from start to finish.
Kayako support went above and beyond by helping me work out kinks with what at the time was a technically unsupported configuration (we had accidentally upgraded to too new of a version of PHP)