Kayako

One of Kayako’s merits is the full spectrum of analytical tools giving a possibility to track the metrics that are usually hard to spot. The great possibilities for vast e-commerce integrations and customization make it easy for your business to migrate to Kayako and grow.

Agents who like to stay productive on-the-go will benefit from Kayako’s apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and Blackberry. Unlike other mobile versions of help desks, the Kayako app doesn’t pick up the slack but offers the best, off-the-shelf full-stack features.

The new Kayako is cloud-hosted help desk software that puts all your customer service channels in one place, the better and more efficient way to address customer concerns (the classic on-premise Kayako is still supported). Trusted by over 50,000 organizations worldwide and used by 131,000 support pros serving 100 million customers, the software can serve many customer service needs, from small businesses to the largest companies. Among those customers trusting Kayako to provide their help desk services include NASA, De Beers, Peugeot, and the American Motorcyclist Association.

Among others, it supports live chat, tickets, web, email, calls, or self-service support to help businesses further extend their help to their customers. Moreover, Kayako helps you look for insights based on customer queries, such as sales trends and opportunities, performance metrics, and support bottlenecks. You can also put your support in autopilot to fast-track replies to standard queries or repetitive tasks so your agents can focus on addressing more pressing issues or organize and route emails for easy sorting.

Through help desk and live chat solutions, Kayako helps companies manage customer requests and conversations over any channel, support customers better, and stay personal as they grow.

Through robust API or eCommerce platform integration, Kayako provides strong support to eCommerce by displaying every page view and purchase history of the customer and syncing it with the marketing or sales teams for more potential business from customers.

Kayako features a mobile app for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry so that you can provide customer service on the go. It’s also scalable that can match the pace of any growing business.

There is no such thing as a perfect help-desk for everyone. Customers tend to prefer certain features over others. Yet, there are things that each support team would like to have, and these are the benefits Kayako offers to its customers.

Customization

Every customer support specialist has experienced this way too often: a customer has some needs, but you don’t know how to put them into the system. Your conversation has a limited time-span, and as you can’t tackle all preferences. As the air gets heavy with a missed opportunity, the communication spirit fades. With Kayako it’s different. They allow every user to make their way to the app that best suits their needs. You can adjust all chat forms, customer profiles, and ticketing. As for customer profiles, you can add specific fields at the moment you create an app. That means an endless possibility to spot, grasp and translate your customer thoughts and dreams into a trackable digital footprint.

You can add brands, customize templates and add custom fields to improve interactions with your customers

Bonus: automatic ticket routing through different channels. In reality, it looks like a customer sends a X reminder to a question earlier escalated by phone. Kayako makes it sure the ticket gets to the right agent with multichannel conversations connected.

Kayako takes on customization as never before: it allows support teams to customize a ticket and live chat forms so these can be tailored to their specific workflow.

Customer profiles can also be updated with custom fields, allowing for the entry of additional information the moment a support request is made.

Customer engagement

Live communication opens ways for learning unheard-of things about customer preferences and also leaves the door open for a drastic failure if something goes wrong. Customer engagement through different channels and streamlining of services makes Kayako a love-winning help-desk. An agent can see all customer history without cat-and-mousing and give the needed info in real-time. This creates unprecedented ease of building a stronger relationship.

Launch live chat across your website and address customer concerns fast or turn them into opportunities. The live chat gives you real-time, proactive support to possible prospects.

Advanced reporting

Lack of information may sabotage your success. Kayako creates more than 100 reports for tracking performance deadlines, customer satisfaction and many more. It’s not just about following the performance, but also using Kayako Query language to measure your relevant metrics. Checking trends has never been so easy.

A report that shows statistics on Conversations

Scalability

Atomization blocks out the nasty bits and pieces of the repetitive issues. The support agents have a handful of ready-made solutions for routines and thus, they unleash time to process sophisticated high-end problems of customers with the proficiency of Jedi.

Ways you can streamline the support workflow in Kayako

While automating frees your agents from repetitive tasks, it also helps them keep a high-level customer service standard by focusing on issues and concerns that need more attention. Even if the number of repetitive tasks increases a hundredfold, Kayako’s automation can handle them, so you can focus on reinforcing support for high-level customer calls. Furthermore, automated ticket routing ensures your customers are connected to the right agents fast to address issues quickly before they escalate.

Self-service

The help center in Kayako is pretty easy to work with. Both on the agent and customer side. It doesn't take a lot of effort to add new sections and articles. The interface is very friendly and allows dealing with large amounts of content. Another great thing about the help center in Kayako is that you can customize the look and feel of it. You can apply some minor changes like upload your logo, change the favicon and colours. Or you can go full ham and customize the look using CSS.

Changing the settings of your help center. Log into Kayako, open the help center and click the Customization button to view this menu

Customers will search for answers independently if you provide them with the means. Kayako offers 24/7 customer service via a brandable support portal, knowledge base, or intuitive answers as customers type in their questions.

Streamline

Kayako automates repetitive and standard customer service processes with auto-ticketing, macros, notifications, and easy sorting so your agents can focus on delivering personalized support to high-level and more urgent concerns. Quickly check high-level issues or get all critical and relevant information so your agent can provide more accurate feedback.

Insights

Kayako helps you check for trends and bottlenecks with its 100 out-of-the-box reports. You can also track performance and use the Kayako Query Language to create custom fields that measure your relevant metrics.

Branding

Customize Kayako based on your corporate logo and colors. It also allows multi-brand support for large companies.

Mobile

Take your customer service on the go. Kayako is accessible via its iOS, Android, Windows, and Blackberry mobile apps.

Key Features

• Support ticketing with email integration
• Fully featured live chat for your customer service portal and website
• Real-time visitor tracking
• Real-time messaging for the help center and website
• Set SLAs to keep on top of customer conversations
• Phone call tracking and recording
• Enhanced self-service portal
• Advanced ticket workflows, rules, and automations
• Customizable tickets, chats, and customers
• Custom fields to collect all information needed
• Enhanced customer and organization profiles for CRM
• Multiple-plan support
• Ticket reply and resolution deadline management
• Set business hours for accurate performance tracking
• Slack integration
• Automatic escalation rules to prevent unaddressed customer queries
• Mobile apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and Blackberry
• Mobile live chat with the Jabber gateway
• 100+ out-of-the-box help desk reports
• Custom reports via Kayako Query Language
• Schedule reports are automatically sent to your inbox
• Multi-lingual customer support and localizations
• Customizable look and feel of the help desk
• Strong support for eCommerce to increase sales and improve loyalty
• Intuitively designed Help Center enables customers to help themselves
• Rich customer and organization profiles
• Simple webhook integration to push customer data into Kayako
• Shared inbox enhances collaboration

1) Slow customer connects response time.

Kayako’s solutions instantly connect with customers with a human touch.

2) Costly licenses for your business need to grow.

Kayako offers payment solutions and support levels to scale your growing business.

3) Losing track of the conversation.

Kayako connects to multiple platforms and devices, so your conversation can pick up across your customer’s media usage.

• Devices Supported: Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone/iPad, Mac, Web-based
• Deployment: Cloud Hosted, On-Premise
• Language Support: English, German, Hindi, Spanish, French
• Pricing Model: Free, Monthly payment, Quote-based
• Customer Types: Small Businesses, Medium Businesses, Large Enterprises

The ability to integrate with hundreds of apps and what is more important, with the custom-made ones, brings Kayako to the top charts of software-recommendation services like Software Advice, Capterra G2 Crowd or Gartner.

Why do people care about integration that much? As Kayako say on their website, it helps to not only save time but let customers use the apps they’re used to when implementing Kayako into their business environment.

The integration with Zappier, an intra-platform matchmaker, means that all you need is to choose an app, you want to integrate with, the rest is done automatically.

The 10 top popular integrations Kayako offers are Shopify, Google Sheets, Slack, Jira, Stripe, Gmail, Trello, Pushover and many more, not to mention Salesforce.

Kayako calls themselves “A platform to grow with,” and that is because their open API makes any development process fun and ease. They share free access to developer docs and have a bright community founded together with Kayako experts, developers and integration partners. By joining this, you gain new powers to make your services even better.

Although, even the best have their slightest flaws. For example, Kayako doesn’t integrate with HubSpot Marketing.

While some people measure success in ratings and points, Kayako has also started a journey of collecting awards. Kayako is a winner of FinanceOnline Expert’s Choice Award for delivering customer service in a powerful, seamless, and scalable way. According to Financeonline.com, it’s been trusted by over 50 000 organizations all over the world.

Since online environment tends to get more and more regulated, it is very important for companies to run transparent business ready to comply fast with the slightest law change. Kayako develops services in compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and other legal norms.

How to get started with Kayako?

Kayako has a great feature in their interface which is called “Take a Tour.” If you opt for it, you’ll get a great user lesson explicitly explaining the main properties and the structure of the service including instructions on the agent area, admin area, and Help Center.

In the Welcome tab, there are also basic steps you need to take to start using Kayako.

The steps Kayako finds essential to help you get started

At first, you need to set up an email for receiving and answering customer questions. Then, Kayako offers linking your social accounts to capture requests from Facebook, X and other social networks. Then, you need to enable Kayako Messenger so your customers can contact you via live chat. And last but not least, invite the rest of the gang.

Depending on your subscription there will be a certain number of agent accounts allowed. In the first stage, you’ll have to add user accounts for the staff, and if the number of accounts doesn’t suffice, you can create extra ones at additional cost.

After setting all the conversation channels, you can start actually using the broad possibilities of Kayako in everyday work. Your team will be happy to use the unified timeline of customer interactions and a powerful toolbar for replying, assigning, and categorizing conversations.

Now it’s time to customize the software to suit the team’s needs better.

As your team's experience of user cases grows, you can start filling your Help Center. The content management tools of Kayako help you edit and organize the content without leaving the Help Center’s interface.

As you get ultimately used to the software, it’s time to make a go for the new steps, like organizing teams, customizing forms, working with automation, setting and managing deadlines and much more.

What do Users Say?

Kayako is boasting about its substantial list of clients including Peugeot and NASA, and that means a lot. Yet it’s quite exciting what customers share about the pros and cons of working with Kayako in real life.

According to customer surveys on platforms like Software Advice, Capterra, and G2 the services provided by Kayako are rated from 4.1 to 4.7 which is not bad at all. Favorite features include light and minimalistic design, email-based reporting, and custom insights.

Customers find it great that Kayako makes internal and external communications easy. Also, flexibility is another winning point. For example, apart from ticket, incident, problem and complaint types of data entry, there can be created some custom fields as well.

The other most praised feature is the integration without coding and atomization of communication and tracking processes.

There are also things customers prefer to have. For example, users would like to get more customer feedback, improve linkages on tickets and add some colors.

As for the cons, they include the need to switch between admin/staff panels as the agent performs different roles, some missing features, and some crowdedness on behalf of small teams.

Support Details

Kayako calls its workers “support heroes” and the company feels proud of their active and responsive customer support. You can get in touch with them directly on the website, by filling the standard contact form, enhanced by a couple of tags, and also or through X, or other social accounts. Their support page has mountains of useful information, and their team is reported to be fast-helpers when it comes to bug and issue handling.

Kayako’s Alternatives

When comparing with other live-chat services, Kayako recommends taking into account the following features: native live chat, social media integrations, free collaborations, intelligent self-service, workflows, collision prevention, customer journey (ability to visualize it), SLAs, time tracking, mobile SDK.

• Freshdesk
• LiveChat
• Reamaze
• Zoho Desk
• Help Scout
• Zendesk
• Intercom

Kayako vs. Zendesk

Zendesk is the most similar to Kayako according to the above-mentioned criteria, and what it’s missing so far is a visualization of the customer’s journey and free collaboration. Yet, Zendesk offers more flexible prices and is also available to freelancers, while Kayako starts with the small teams. Kayako supports more device types, including Windows and Linux. Zendesk has received the Expert Choice 2018 Award from FinanceOnline. Also, Zendsek features pre-built Salesforce and Sugar CRM integrations.

Kayako vs. Help Scout

If we compare Kayako to the amiable simplicity of Help Scout we’ll also see that the latter misses some features, like native live chat, social media integrations, and customer journey visualization. Kayako also has more integrations available. Yet, Help Scout creates the personalized feel some customers adore and creates a home-friendly environment perfect for small and growing businesses.

Kayako vs. Intercom

The Intercom alternative to Kayako misses features like free collaborations and intelligent self-service, customer journey, time tracking, and in-app SLA. Yet, Intercom also has Facebook and X integrations, native live chat, collision prevention, and mobile SDK. Intercom features simple CRM, help center and knowledge base and a shared inbox. However, their pricing starts at $49 a month which is $40 more than the cheapest Kayako option. Also, Kayako offers a free version to small teams of less than 3 clients, while Intercom offers only 14-day free trial. Intercom doesn’t support Linux and Windows Mobile. Being available for freelancers, it’s not available with big enterprises.

Kayako vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud features a plentiful of handy features like omnichannel support, smart routing, telephony integration, analytics and many more. It has a broader language base compared to Kayako, but also considerably higher prices starting from $25 a user monthly. It is available with the same range of devices as Kayako, with both platforms excluding Windows Mobile integration. Also, Salesforce is suitable primarily for medium and large businesses.

Kayako vs. HappyFox

HappyFox offers some great features like native live chat, collision prevention, and in-app’s SLA’s. It also has a mobile SDK. They have features missing from Kayako, like round-robin assignment, clone tickets, ability to mark comments and answers in the forums. Among Kayako’s benefits missing at HappyFox, we have Facebook and X integrations, customer journey visualization and time tracking. Although HappyFox also has a free version, their minimum price starts at $29. All devices, including Windows Mobile, are a la carte.

As we see, the rat race in the pursuit of features never stops. Integrations, customizations, flexibility, price options are advertising a life-long mantra of modern culture: the more, the better. In fact, the secret of success lies in finding your thing. Good, that market includes a lot to choose from.