Kayako vs. LiveAgent

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

I think [LiveAgent] is great from a customer service perspective, though I don't know that I would recommend it for B2B purposes. It has so many features that are fantastic as far as creating a great customer experience goes, I just think it is far more geared toward B2C than B2B.

• 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

• It's a complete OMNI channel. You can configure all communication medium for your customer with LiveAgent i.e. Ticketing, Social Media, Phone, and Chat.
• Low on pricing.
• You can easily setup LiveAgent for your organization. You don't need to be a technical expert to implement this.
• The user-friendly application.

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

• Occasionally when "resolving" a ticket, the page will not load the full list of remaining tickets. However, the moment you scroll, the tickets appear so it's not too big of a deal, but I'd like to see that cleaned up. It does not always happen.
• When dialing a phone number, the format needs to be specific, i.e. +15125555555. We often receive phone numbers in the more traditional format, i.e. (512) 555-5555. The outgoing call will not work when pasted this way. I think it will get fixed. These little things seem to get sorted out after enough people complain about it.
• The mobile version has a few bugs, but when on the run, it at least allows you to read and respond to email. Examples of bugs include not being able to transfer the ticket to another department (on iOS the drop down menu functions like a text field for some reason so clicking into it selects the text as if you are going to copy and paste it). Also, the ability to add an admin note would be nice on the mobile version.

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

I am giving this rating as Live Agent is a very good software that is essential to any small or big business that provides customer support services. It gives you the possibility to manage any of your clients issues, answer questions and keep a good relationship with them by providing quick solutions.

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

Incentivized

The initial setup, onboarding and training is easy. The system provides 2 graphic version of interfaces in black or white default colors. I would appreciate, if there were more. Some of the setup forms are not correctly resized. Overall, I'm always able to find what I am looking for in LiveAgent.

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

The one time that I contacted the customer support at LiveAgent, they were very quick to help me out and the customer support representative walked me through every thing that I needed to know to set up what I needed. Over all, the support staff at LiveAgent were perfect.

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

Implementation was quick and when not counting a bug on our website, it took a couple hours. It was mostly done on our end or with the assistance of LiveAgent's live chat support team. We recommend to check out LiveAgent's tutorial videos on their youtube channel or browsing their knowledge base - we've almost always found answers to our queries there.

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

bold360 worked for our basic purposes but it was pretty bare bones. It didn't give us the option to get sales or to translate from Spanish to English and it made things a bit more difficult. LiveAgent has the features that we needed and it has many of the similar options that we also still use.

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

• We are generating more sales by having sales representatives online chatting with customers.
• The customer service team is able to avoid answering the same guest on a number of platforms (ie. when a guest emails in, fills out a "contact form," and chats with a representative in live time in the span of ten minutes) because LiveAgent enables us to have all of our communication in one platform.