TrustRadius Insights for Kayako are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Kayako Fusion has been widely adopted by organizations to improve their customer service operations. Users have found that the software allows them to efficiently handle support tickets and maintain a personalized approach to customer interactions. The canned replies feature has proven to be effective in addressing common issues, while still providing a hands-on feel in customer communications. The self-hosted version of Kayako Fusion has demonstrated its reliability even during heavy traffic spikes, ensuring seamless customer support. The software's email support ticketing system has simplified the process for customers to send support requests and has enabled easy tracking and distribution of work to employees. Additionally, users have leveraged the powerful API provided by Kayako Fusion to create tools that enhance and expand the functionality of the software. For example, websites built using the Kayako Fusion API display real-time ticket queue information and alert the help desk about new tickets, resulting in quicker response times. The ability to directly interface with the database has allowed users to customize Kayako Fusion by building modules tailored to their specific business needs, such as a billing module with customized billing rules. Users have also appreciated the ease of configuration modifications and file uploads within Kayako Fusion's database-centric architecture, eliminating the need for permissions on multiple directories. With features like the option to choose between storing file attachments in the database or on the file system, Kayako Fusion offers flexibility in managing the database footprint. Regular backups of both the webserver directory and database ensure data reliability and safety for organizations using Kayako Fusion. Overall, customers have expressed satisfaction with Kayako Fusion, praising its performance as a reliable and versatile system for managing support tickets and facilitating effective customer communications. The software has been utilized across various industries and departments, serving as a case management tool, workflow tool, and company-wide ticketing system. Whether it is used by managed service providers to track service requests across different client companies or by organizations for software issue support and tracking, Kayako Fusion has consistently delivered the desired results. Users have found Kayako Fusion to be easy to program and have appreciated its reliability and the availability of customer support. The software has proved valuable as a help desk system, efficiently routing trouble tickets to the appropriate IT professionals and improving overall efficiency and reliability compared to previous systems. Kayako Fusion has been utilized in many ways, including organizing customer issues, requests, and ideas, facilitating direct communication with clients, tracking user issues and resolutions in IT departments, serving as a ticketing system for clients to submit support questions or issues, and functioning as a knowledge base for self-help documentation. The versatility of Kayako Fusion is evident in its institutional-wide use for IT and academic technology support in educational institutions, benefiting students, employees, and faculty members. Moreover, Kayako Fusion has been utilized by customers and potential customers for various purposes, including sales, support, customer service, and accounting. The software seamlessly converts emails into tickets and organizes them based on their status, progress, source, time, assignee, and intended procedure. Integration with third-party apps and APIs allows for the automatic import of tickets from different channels, such as Gmail and the company's built-in support system. For IT departments specifically, Kayako Fusion serves as a comprehensive tool for tracking user issues and resolutions, managing change and patch management processes, as well as handling permissions requests and user access changes. In addition to its efficiency in streamlining support operations, Kayako Fusion also serves as a ticketing system that provides a paper trail and historic record of client communications. Users have leveraged this feature to maintain a documented history of interactions with clients. In summary, Kayako Fusion has proven itself as a versatile solution used in various industries and departments to enhance customer support operations, track service requests and issues efficiently, improve workflow management, facilitate direct communication with clients, and serve as an institution-wide tool for IT support in educational institutions.
Our entire organization uses Kayako to conduct business. It is used to transfer work from one person to another, escalate to another group and until just recently, track efforts in our Development Department. It is a very easy way to understand what issues a customer has, what the status of that issue is, who had it, what is the history of the effort on the customer's behalf and who has done what so far.
Pros
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.
Cons
I personally find the reporting a bit difficult. We are on an older version of Kayako and I am told that reporting on the new version is much improved.
There are some things missing in the new version that we were used to in the older version. Not sure how they came about what to keep or get rid of. Some of them are quite missed.
Would like to see reporting done in a way that you pick what you want to report on and hit generate. No special "Language" skills needed.
Likelihood to Recommend
We really like it to manage our customer interactions. It also has a chat feature (which we don't use yet) but understands that it is quite good.
VU
Verified User
Executive in Customer Service (Telecommunications company, 51-200 employees)
Kayako was selected to replace an in-house ticketing system. We transitioned our web-hosting platform to another vendor and Kayako was one of the recommended ticketing systems. Kayako was being used to handle all in-bound and out-bound email communication with customers as well as using their integrated chat program. Kayako allowed us to organize our customers' communications.
Pros
Kayako's chat system is very easy to use and set up. It integrates well with their control panel and organizes customer data.
Kayako makes it easy to communicate with your customers.
The built-in reports that Kayako provides are a good start to being able to monitor the work performed by staff.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
We use Kayako for sales, support, customer service and accounting. Our customers and potential customers use this to communicate issues, advise of payments, and for troubleshooting technical issues.
Pros
Great visibility as far as how old a ticket is and how urgent the issue is. This aids in prioritizing.
Cons
The search engine could use improvement, it's very difficult to find things using the search engine.
Likelihood to Recommend
Kayako has been great for our business. We use this program across the company and find that it's a very efficient tool. The only issue we have with Kayako is the search engine, we find it difficult to use. Overall, it's a great system.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Sales (Computer Software company, 11-50 employees)
At StyleEase Software, LLC, we use Kayako as our Support Ticket system. This is mainly used in the support department, but it can also be used for wholesale questions.
Pros
It creates an easy interface for answering tickets from a regular computer screen.
It allows you to categorize well, so that you can create reports of common problems.
You can customize support ticket issues to get more detailed information.
Cons
Kayako needs to make it easier to use our ticketing system on the go. It is very difficult to use on an iPad or iPhone, for example.
They could make the system a little less clunky, and easier to manage from the Admin side.
I'd like to feel like the system is more up to date with other software out there.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Kayako works well for small ticketing systems, but maybe not for full CRM.
Kayako was used at a past organization for support tickets via email. We restricted use to email in most cases and did not expose the Kayako interface to our customers. We wanted a simple email address they could send support requests to that would allow us to track and distribute work to employees. Kayako provided this. We purchased and hosted Kayako in-house so there were not any 3rd party dependencies..
Kayako has an API that allowed us to build tools to interface and expand Kayako's functionality. We used the API to build a website that would show how many tickets were in queue and would alert the help desk to new tickets from a large display with an audible noise that had the website up 24x7. This allowed for us to have very quick response times to new tickets that came in as they had to be acknowledged to make the loud beeping alert stop.
Since Kayako runs on an open source database (mysql) and we had control of the infrastructure that it was hosted on, it allowed us to directly interface the database to further expand functionality. We built a billing module outside of what Kayako offers for billing that allowed us to pull the specific data we needed to bill our customers. This gave us the capability to apply different rules to customers and how they were billed based on defined rules we setup. The custom interface also put data in a format that was easier to work with for our billing department.
From a technical standpoint Kayako is versatile, but there are some oddities to the way they track certain things that may require internal business rules. For instance, they have the time worked and time billed as separate fields on a ticket. This can be very nice if used correctly, but seemed redundant to employees and sometimes they would not input data correctly. This was another reason we elected to write our own billing module so that we could have more insight into what data was pulled and highlight areas that may have been worked but not billed so that the differences could be investigated.
Kayako stores almost everything in the database. This is very nice for modifying things and not needing permissions on a bunch of directories for configurations and file uploads. For our organization (less than 10 users) this worked great and we never had any problems. I did worry about what response times would be from the database and if it would slow down in the event we were to have a large number of concurrent users. Every page load had numerous queries to the database. I would think it could benefit from memcached to assist in scaling to larger environments.
File attachment storage location was a configurable option as to whether they were stored in the database or on the file system, so that gave the option of keeping the database footprint much smaller.
Backups of Kayako were very straight forward. We backed up the directory for the webserver with rsync every hour, and the database was backed up daily with mysqldump and we also stored incremental backups every 15 minutes from mysql's binary logs.
Overall we were happy with how Kayako performed. It is not the cheapest system we evaluated, but it did work better than many of the open source solutions we evaluated.
Pros
Kayako handles email integration through pop very well
Kayako is very configurable
Kayako's API was well documented and easy to implement custom scripts against.
Cons
Kayako has a large number of queries to the database for each page load. This is fine for small installations, but I would think it could become a burden in large instances (this is for self hosted version only)
Kayako allows for so much information that it can take awhile to get it configured to just ask for what you need and not overwhelm you with options
Not necessarily a Kayako issue, but we ran into a problem where a ticket was "stuck in the queue" It turned out that there was an attachment larger than what the php was configured to support, so the ticket would be created, but because the attachment would fail to upload correctly, it would not remove the item from the pop mailbox and it would download it again and again and again until we figured out the issue. If they were to wrap the ticket creation into a transaction and not create the ticket prior to fully processing the message they could then check the error response code on file upload and maybe create a single message that indicated the real problem.
Likelihood to Recommend
Access to the API and to the raw database were the major pro's from my standpoint. Though it is more work to manage your own instance of Kayako, that was preferred for our installation. I wouldn't think you would get the direct database access to script against through their hosted version.
