Kayako vs. Oracle Beehive Enterprise Collaboration Server

When it works, It's without a doubt a great help desk solution. It is perfect for our usage, and have rolled it out company-wide. It's great if you have multiple departments. We have it set up so most items come through a single desk that then hands out tickets to their proper department. There may be cheaper options for smaller organizations but for one that is as service-driven as ours, we really think Kayako is a great fit.

Incentivized

The software is well suited in most areas of messaging. The communication features it contains and the messaging quality it utilizes provides for standards, like scalability, manageability and, most importantly, secure communications. Again, the software is well suited for scenarios where an organization is aimed at making use of a centralized management. it is built to provide a unified collaborative platform characterized by a single object model and also has a database storage for almost all communication records.

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.

Incentivized

• Video conferencing - The features it provides is apart from any standalone.
• Mail messenger `
• Instant messaging

• 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.

Incentivized

• The only area that the software has room for improvement is in the mail part. To a large extent, the email capabilities to the Oracle Beehive Enterprise Collaborative Server is not user-friendly. My opinion is that if the mail option was made in a more separate appearance to that of the calendar, task management, and address books it would appear more user-friendly.

Incentivized

• We are grandfathered in on their old Software-assurance pricing and our continued use costs us only a few hundred dollars a year (excluding hosting expenses)
• Our team's processes are now heavily ingrained in the system
• We have not been shown a more compelling option that is more cost-effective while still offering all the features we've come to expect

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

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

We were using Spiceworks for a few years before switching to Kayako but found that it wasn't as customizable or as user friendly for our customers. The SNMP scanning and inventory features with Spiceworks was nice but we needed more of a Help Desk that would allow us to scale our services to more companies.

Incentivized

The only feature that makes Beehive Enterprise Collaborative software stack up against similar software is unification. It is wholly unified. Basically, it allows IT to function as one platform providing services like email, team workspace, and conferencing. Uniquely, this results in saving time and cost related to managing separate systems

Incentivized

• Tickets were definitely responded to faster once we implemented the audible alarm that would go off when new tickets came into the queue. This was possible because of the API.
• Since the system was email based we could set our monitoring software up to generate tickets automatically via email for customers when it found something out of the ordinary.

Incentivized

• If one uses all its features to its optimum, I think they can go for break-even within around 1 year. We were able to achieve it. It helped us grab many projects.