Kayako vs. TeamSupport

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

TeamSupport is a great ticketing/help desk platform for small companies. It gets the job done and allows for multiple teams to manage workloads. It is not best for bigger organizations as there are lots of lacking features (mobile app, integrations, robust Jira/Confluence like system). The support for TeamSupport is great too. They usually get in touch with customers quickly when the system is down and they resolve issues quickly as well.

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

• There were other customer support software companies that I looked into at first, however TeamSupport provided exceptional customer service themselves. I paid close attention to how they handled me as a customer to see if they were a company that would understand my desire to give exceptional customer service to my clients and if they had the tools to make the experience easy. Every interaction with them was very positive.
• Since we needed TeamSupport's software embedded into our software application to give our users easy access to the support tools, the staff at TeamSupport needed to answer many questions and work with our developers to make this possible. They were always willing to take the extra step to ensure a smooth set up.
• As we continue with TeamSupport, I am especially impressed with the sincerity of the CEO, Robert C. Johnson, and his commitment to us so that together we can deliver exceptional customer support.

Incentivized

• 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

• We would like to see a structure to the ticket numbering system. In a previous system we had a numbering system like this mmddyy-xxxxxx This was very easy to see when a ticket was created based on just it's number. Currently with TeamSupport they assign a random number to tickets that is not very informative without a created date field.
• Reports are nice but lack some rollup capabilities that are needed. Any given report can only work against two data tables at max. This is a limitation that we had to create custom contact fields to get around. They store phone, address and base contact info in separate tables. This makes it impossible with a standard system to create a report of all tickets along with the ticket and contact information in one report. The previous system we were on, allowed you to tie as many related data tables together that was needed to create one high level report.
• Need Ability to notify external users of ticket activity in regions. So what I mean is we have FAE's in the field that want to know what their customers are asking for their region. They don't want or need a TeamSupport account but want simple e-mails of activity. This has been a lost feature for us going to a new system. I have to create a manual report each week and forward to the people that want this kind of information.
• Ticket Automation rules will only run against a ticket one time. I understand why they did this to prevent uncontrolled loops but it would be nice to be able to set a limit that was greater than one. This limitation often causes us to have to write multiple rules to handle certain ticket cases.

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

We are very likely to renew. We have been using TeamSupport for years and have tested a few other ticketing software solutions. We utilize several project management solutions to date and are always looking for better more efficient ways. Team Support is great at working with us and allows us to report issues well.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I think some things could be a little more user-friendly: specifically the dashboard. Although it's fantastic and makes life so much nicer, I'd like to have more control on it's customization. I'd like to be able to default what's collapsed and what's expanded...instead of everything expanding by default each time I load it. But the portal offers great tools and guides on workarounds.

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

Again while most of the time I CAN access your server, it's offline enough that I can't count on having the software available to me 24/7

It is a feature heavy web application, thus speed can be compromised sometimes dependent on availability of a quality internet connection

• 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

TeamSupport's ease of use and the way it benefited our company overall. From cost improvements, ROI, and overall management of team members it gets high marks. We are better able to support our customer base by providing improved support in a more timely fashion. The End User view of IT Support overall has improved just through using this platform in our company.

Incentivized

Able to get hands on training and ask questions.

Not much training was offered, but it was always provided when we requested it

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

Data import was the most difficult hurdle for us to get over. The mass import was handled through an Excel spreadsheet. TeamSupport doesn't use Microsoft Office products for the most part so they were relying on Google Docs which has limitations over Excel. Special characters and html in import cells can be a issue with importing. When creating a data export from your current system, special care needs to be taken so that the data is able to be processed into TeamSupport without issues.

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

TeamSupport is a much more modern, intuitive and user-friendly version of NetSuite with many additional bells and whistles. NetSuite has a business only facade with a rather clunky interface and system. TeamSupport compares favorably and meets business needs while being a much more advanced and modern solution.

Incentivized

TS keeps adding new features without making sure the program is reliable as-is. The program is frequently offline which makes for significant frustration on my part

• 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

• TeamSupport has improved our team's response times. We are able to address all requests within a short time of receiving them.
• TeamSupport allows us to effectively manage workflow.
• The program provides us with a certain level of accountability, and requires that we be meticulous in our work.

Incentivized