Desk.com (discontinued) vs. Kayako

Desk.com and the Salesforce Service Cloud provide a sophisticated suite to easily create and track cases coming in, along with automatically routing and escalating issues as they arise. It allows me to configure my own workflows and customizes consoles with easy drag and drop functionality. It is the perfect help desk software, which integrates with the Salesforce Sales and Commerce clouds seamlessly. The in-app and mobile support is also very expedient and helpful.

Incentivized

Kayako is suited for a small company that is just getting started. We are in the web-hosting industry and it was very hard to fully adapt the system the way we would have liked to. Kayako would be very good if you were hosting an ecommerce shop or customer service business where you can look at each customer interaction as separate and not over a long-term period.

Incentivized

• Help Center. Desk has worked endlessly with us to perfect our Help Center. They are dedicated and willing to work in order to make your product right.
• Customization. Though we exceeded the rule limitation for Desk, they have still allowed us to take their product and make it our own. We have our own labeling, and priority system which help us hit important SLAs.
• User education. Whenever there is a new feature released, I feel like I'm in the know about it which is extremely important when we've been requesting certain features for a long period of time. Their communication is on point.

• 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

• Internal knowledge tools are clunky and annoying to access, outside the regular workflow of everyday staff
• Arbitrary and confusing limitations in business rules and custom fields
• Arbitrary and confusing limitations in case handling - for example, if you begin a case as a phone call you CANNOT email the customer from the case. As though no one working at Desk has ever sent a follow-up email...?
• Not very good for B2B, mid-to-large businesses. Difficult to set business rules based on company information (for example, service level/tier) and nearly impossible to track key stakeholders and get clear insight into the relationship at a high level
• Reporting tools are clunky, slow, and just all-around pretty useless

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

We will be very likely to renew our contract with Desk.com. It is easy to use, and provides us with everything we need to keep our customers and employees happy. They have also been very helpful in catering the application to our specific and unique needs, including working across brands and adding specific content for our products

Incentivized

I am no longer with the company that was using this, and they were recently bought out by a larger organization that uses an internally developed software suite. It is unlikely for that reason that they will renew or keep any service with Kayako.

Incentivized

Once it is fully set up with all of the unique and necessary customizations for your organization, it becomes easier to use, but before that, it is not very user-friendly and there are not a lot of training resources available. You likely need a Salesforce admin for initial set-up who is experienced with customization.

Incentivized

I did not come from an IT background and I picked this program up quickly

Incentivized

We've never had a problem with Desk.com's availability.

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

Fast, responsive, gorgeous, and fun. It's always run like a thoroughbred for me.

I always get the support and needed answers in a timely manner. Whether by email, ticket, or call. There's always a solution available or a potential one available. Everything is clear and straight to the point in customer support from Desk. I didn't face any difficulty so far with that.

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

As I stated earlier, implementation of Desk.com went more smoothly than most. The resources in the "Support Center" are fantastic, and I never ran into anything that left me stumped, angry, or disappointed.

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

Wix Answers was much better compared to Desk.com. It had more excellent and much better and more tools and was very customizable. Luckily it also had a search tool and also the sort and filter tools. The only thing better than Wix Answers on desk.com was that we could keep internal communication records by adding notes on tickets, and it saved a lot of time.

Incentivized

Kayako is way more scalable than Spiceworks' helpdesk offering. We had trouble visualizing our current layout within their environment. Zendesk was priced quite a bit higher than Kayako while offering similar functionality. It didn't make sense to want to migrate to a new platform. We have also evaluated various Sharepoint-based help desks, but their speed and reliability did not match our standards for what a help desk should be.

Incentivized

• It has definitely had a positive impact by helping our team quickly address issues people are having with our product.
• Desk.com has helped our team and company get better by addressing customer and tester issues faster, and tracking data so that our team can improve the quality and speed of all of our outgoing communications.

Incentivized

• Kayako has helped our business to grow by allowing us to scale our help desk to accommodate more client companies in an efficient manner.
• Kayako has allowed our customers to have more direct control over their help desk tickets and has made it easier for them to interface directly with our help desk staff.
• The built-in chat features in Kayako that tie to our main website has allowed prospective customers to chat with our sales teams right away, resulting in more business.

Incentivized