Best software for internal and external email communication

I love using kayako as it has been the best communication platform which not only allows me to communicate but also provides me reports on any urgent email that I need to act on immediately which saves me from delayed tasks and replies. Since we switched from outlook to kayako software for inter-team and client communication, kayako has provided the best communication platform which allowed us to to have an organized, easy to refer to and not only use but also can view any sent/received email from any location via any device.

Pros

Kayako has been the best communication platform for professional communication that I have used so far. Kayako is recommended for both inter-team and external - client communication. The best feature of kayako is that it allows you to organize your emails into folder based on departments, status and the nature of the email content. Also using other type of email platforms has been a worry at times and time consuming when trying to find all the back and forth communication happened on one email thread by multiple people, but kayako provides the best solution by capturing all the communication happened on one subject/email which is sent and received by one or many, in the same email thread which we call a "Ticket" Interface of kayako can be designed and created as per the user's requirement and preference. Also referring to an email has been very convenient as each ticket carries its own unique Ticket ID. It also provides reports on emails based on its nature. ex: overdue, received within 24hrs and etc based on rules we set which allows to the user to be more organized, effective and proactive.

Cons

Understanding and using the software is essential as it doesn't function like other email platforms but has its own organized interface. Inter team communication The software is mainly build for professional communication however I wish it could have few other options like adding colors, tables and etc but apart from that no other cons to mention.

Expensive for small companies, and sometimes buggy, but a great customer experience

Generally great experience for the end user, but could use some occasional polish.

Pros

Really easy and streamlined customer experience. The support for a JWT-based sign in for customers into the help centre means that people have a single account to sign in to everything, rather than creating separate accounts like you'd have to do with Zendesk or similar, and it just makes life a whole lot easier overall. The widget is nicely-designed, neat and unobtrusive.

Cons

For a single agent, the plans are quite expensive, especially if you want functionality like customer SSO. I also find the notifications it provides are very iffy, sometimes not being delivered - and for some infuriating reason, there's no option to deliver emails for replies only when you're not already online!

Kayako - Can be better!

I have been using Kayako for more than five years. This has been the software we use for all internal and client communication. As mentioned earlier it is a simple tool which takes only a few times to practice, thereafter you get the hang of it. However after using other email softwares, Kayako's limitations regarding formatting, inserting images and capturing the entire thread has always been a hassle for me. Additionally we are only given admin rights to our own teams. If a ticket generated by me is moved to an internal team I do not have access for, I cannot view the updates on the ticket.

Pros

Kayako helps me organize my tickets into as many folders I want, thus making me work on those tickets conveniently and effectively. If I am an admin or have admin access to my staff folders I can also access all of their folders to get an update on tickets. It's easy to learn and use. I love the reports feature on Kayako. We can create as many reports we want and automate them. The follow ups feature is also great to keep track of pending tasks and serves as good reminder.

Cons

There are a few issues I encountered as I worked on Kayako. Kayako doesn't allow us format the font or content, so underlining, italicizing etc is not possible in an email. We cannot include images, charts or graphs in the body of the email. When you hit reply on a ticket, the original email thread is not included. So if you need to know the previous conversation, we need to copy and paste the email.

Kayako Classic (On-Premise) is a solution that covers all areas of support and more.

Customer Service Improvements resulting in winning a German Golden Stevie Award 2018.

Pros

It covers many areas of daily conversation handling activities: Ticket, Incident, Problem, and Complaint handling situations. If the basics do not suffice, custom fields and tracking options help iron out missing pieces. It contains a Knowledgebase that allows you to record Articles and information. Survey system (very handy for Event-Driven Surveys); Reporting options and quick access to tickets. One of the KEY FEATURES is that the tool is FAST and keeps a focus on the work area for staff, rather cluttering everything with detail fields. Finally, the web-interface is fully customizable and very useful in granting options to access the conversation handling tool. Did I mention Kayako Services being great in helping to resolve questions and issues when contacted? They do this very well!

Cons

It lacks a few items that I wish would be included (software is always under constant development, and Kayako customer service is very responsive and friendly): proper comprehensive auditing when tickets are handled (like automatically submitted communications recorded with date and time); Complaint Handling structures based on tickets; improved linkages between tickets (though possible it is not done in a single click); KBA link to tickets; Reporting is nice though it lacks options to customize charts, colors and the way detail can be presented (formatting through configuration rather customization). Another drawback in a recent release is that a lot of browser cell padding has been introduced causing the display of elements unnecessarily spread out across a regular HD monitor. Luckily this can be customized using CSS injection or system-wide CSS manipulation.

Support makes the difference when comparing this to other competitors

Kayako helps keep all of our customer communication centralized into a single support suite. It allows our customers to engage more frequently with self-serve help (knowledgebase), chat, and email. Kayako makes it easier for our staff to troubleshoot and resolve any issues.

Pros

The new interface is very modern and much more exciting than the other interface. It is much faster and friendlier to use. The support is available for questions and bugs, whereas some competitors do not offer support of implementation. The price of the software is a little steep when comparing it to competitors that offer more, but being a Kayako customer for 10+ years on a perpetual license granted us a pretty steep discount that made the pricing make more sense for us.

Cons

I wish they had more features such as ability to get more customer feedback which would help our product development. There are other software similar to Kayako that have a feedback component that allow users to voice their "opinions" and then other users can vote on that. I would like to see this in Kayako and have been asking for about 10 years now.

Long Time Customer - Very Dissappointing Final Experiences

Pros

The software was ahead of its time when my company started using it in 2011. Easy to organize. Nice ticket merging. Accountability with being able to assign tickets to staff with notifications, etc. When the new version of Kayako came out there was a lot of confusion on merging, upgrading, and it never ended up happening for my business.

Cons

The utter lack of respect I was given as a long time customer was frustrating. I asked to get out of contract in the middle of a year long term for a partial refund. It took over 2 months to get a final 'no' answer. When the contract was up, it auto-renewed, even though I'd made it perfectly clear I had another system in place and no longer needed Kayako. I asked for a refund immediately and was told it wasn't possible. I had to do a chargeback on my card to get the refund, and THEN Kayako agreed to the refund. Why leave such a bad taste in my mouth as a long-time customer? It just makes no sense and pretty much guarantees I will NEVER be back.

Powerful System, Steep Learning Curve

Kayako is where we manage all of our client tickets. It is great for my daily work routine and allows me to stay on top of many tasks at the same time. I have been working with it for 1.5 years and it works great for me now, but the first few months took a long time to get used to. Things are not where you would think they would be. The system is VERY customizable, however, and if you have a person that can put in the work to set the system up, it can be bent to fit your specific company needs.

Pros

Kayako automates a lot of the communication and tracking processes for us. Since my company has put the time into setting up Kayako to meet our companies needs, I am able to focus mostly on client communication and not administrative tasks.

Cons

The system is very particular about what you can and can't do. Things that seem like they would be obviously included do not exist (seeing all open tickets from an organization, for example), and must be either set up manually or gotten to in a roundabout way. Kayako also requires a steep learning curve and is not an intuitive system.

Please be aware this is a review for an year-old version of Kayako

I used Kayako A LOT on a previous position for all our customers and clients communications and to manage ticket assignment to my team (later, we switched to Intercom). While it served its purpose at the time, for a team of about thirteen support engineers, we never feel comfortable with it. It was plagued of usability issues and it wasn't strange to hear a comply - and even some cursing - upon its lack of functionality and flexibility. In the end, we eventually moved to Intercom since it also let us integrate the helpdesk with our (at that time) brand-new mobile apps.

Pros

- Fast to load - Just enough features to handle customer support request via a ticketing system

Cons

- Cumbersome and ugly UI makes difficult to find what you're looking for if you don't know where to look - Lack of flexibility to manage tickets and assign them to the team - Some features missing

Kayako worked for us

We installed the On-Prem version of Kayako and for the most part were happy with its functionality and management of our help tickets.

Pros

Kayako allowed us to manage our Help Desk while keeping costs down but still providing enough functionality to streamline our support and communication to the users.

Cons

There wasn't any integration withour Scrum and Agile software tools (and it didn't have the functionality on its own) so it made it double work to move a Trouble Ticket to a Task

It's a mediocre software that isn't very user friendly.

Pros

It has an app. It's kind of customizable.

Cons

The migration to the new version was horrible. There was little communication and I had to keep following up. I don't think they realizing that by migrating us, I had to give my customers a heads up on the migration as well. I'm still using the old version and being less usable every single day.

it works but required a lot of enhancements to make it work proper for us

Getting us closer to our customers and helping them solving their problems. Kayako delivered that base functionality and more at the time we switched from one of the Atlassian products (2012). Since than we have enhanced to improve out internal workflows. However, there is a lot we would like to see in the near future to shorten ticket work time and able to switch to customer self managment / help for the simple stuff. The more we can get out of the core / base functionality the better it is for us which requires real commitment. Btw. Industry selection is missing Enterprise software or similar.

Pros

As we use Kayako for a long time (since 2012?) you get used to it which makes it difficult answer. Thinking about it stability comes into mind. Beside usual software bugs our system is very stable and reliable and doesn't need much maintenance. We like the new UI that came with classic 4.90 as it gives a modern look. From the feature perspective ticket management works very well for us in general but there isn't a particular feature to high light.

Cons

In first place we are missing the commitment for Kayako classic. Nothing has happened since two years (going to cloud announcement). However, this might change now. There are a lot of things that can be improved like Knowledge Base, File management, workflow, troubleshooting, etc. Back porting some of the new cloud features would be also much appreciated team collaboration, one workflow, etc. Lastly a much better and faster context aware search would help us a lot. All of this has recently discussed with our new Kayako contacts.

Good choice although there are some problems.

There are so many helpdesk systems, Kayako has been our selected one, but we are still looking for better choice.

Pros

1- Beautiful user interface. 2- It Supports all activities in a helpdesk process. 3-14 days free trial 4-Good localization, so you can add your own translations to (just) on-premise version

Cons

1- When you are Kayako admin and at the same time one of the staffs (Agent), you have to switch so many times between Admin / Staff panel to do your tasks. sometimes it makes me confused because knowing which setting is in admin panel and which one is in staff(Agent) panel sometimes is difficult. 2-I can say that Kayako is designed for too many clients for a limited number of services. If you have too many services each of them assigned to a client, Using Kayako would be difficult (But Possible). for example, you have to set permissions for widgets separately. 3-Kayako is not suitable for small teams. it requires a lot of time and effort for setting up. 4-Kayako integration and API's are limited. We couldn't integrate Kayako with our Self-Built project management and timesheet system. 5- Localization in cloud version doesn't work very well. We couldn't use Arabic in cloud version

The overall experience was ok. It gets the job done. But through the years we ran into some issues.

Pros

It brings most, if not all functionality we need. The company still provides an on-premise version of the product. Support has reasonable reaction times, also they most only provide workarounds instead of solid fixes and solutions.

Cons

Kayako feels out-dated all along. After two years of the 7.0 php release it still is not even fully compatible with any php 7.x release and up to today relies on the out-dated php 5.x versions. There are many other issues like the HTML-Mailparsing which have not been fixed completely in years now. Also we know Outlook 20xx do not create great HTML-mails still a lot of customers are using it and it is one the most spread applications in companies. But still the emails are not parsed correctly through Kayako. This should definitely have more priority. The forum is full of long threads and requests about this topic. Many people were upset, because resources were spent on creating a new webinterface instead of fixing basic functionality. Maybe customers should be involved in creating the roadmap for the product or at least help prioritizing issues.

Great application, the only one with the "Follow up" feature.

I don't get any benefits, It's just our ticketing system :)

Pros

Customer support are great, they're really helping and I'm getting a great service. They're answering tickets really quick as well.

Cons

1. Reports aren't that professional with the Classic Kayako, and the KQL is hard to understand, i believe that you have to make it a bit easier and user friendly. 2. I would like to upgrade to Cloud Kayako, but there is a missing feature which is highly important for me, the "Follow up" feature, this feature letting me create a trigger that will open my ticket after several minutes, this feature implanted only in the Classic Kayako. 3. From the moment you've changed your pricing method, it's a bit expensive.. and while having customers that would like to get reports (most important for them) Kayako Classic at least doesn't give the best value here, i don't know about Cloud Kayako.

Kayako From a Customer Service Perspective

Pros

It it nice to be able to pull up multiple conversations/tickets within one window, as it made it easy to switch between current ongoing projects and also complete research with little confusion. Also, Kayako shows in real-time who is looking at a ticket, thus it made it easy for Customer Service as we could see if someone was already working on that ticket. One of the nice things about Kayako was the ability to see when the recipients of an email opened it or looked at it. If there were several recipients, it would break down who opened the email, when. Thus, from a documentation standpoint, if someone was claiming to have never received an email, we were able to show that they had in fact opened the email.

Cons

There were few reporting tools and there was no way to set follow-up tasks. We relied on setting reminders on another system like our Google calendar. Also, Kayako was getting quite expensive, which was one of the big factors in our company switching to a different ticketing system.

Longtime User

Excellent support system, Kayako assists us with providing great online help desk support via ticket logs and live chat to our clients.

Pros

I like how effective Kayako's support team is. They reply in a timely manner to help fix the issues at hand. I also enjoy how easy it is to use, and allows for employees to stay on top of logged faults, tasks and other items within the system while providing detailed updates to keep the customers in the loop. Kayako has been our main helpdesk software for the past 7 years.

Cons

There is not too much I don't like about Kayako, I believe their live chat incorporation to websites could use some work. It would also be perfect if they can link it to CRM as we currently have to use these separately.

It's great, but we like to be as efficient as possible, which means tabbing through everything.

Easy access to the emails we want, especially from Amazon.

Pros

The look and feel. the customization options and custom insights. Filtering and suspending messages options. Ability to send all the messages we want to our inbox and not the ones we don't want.

Cons

Can't tab through and select "type, priority" etc. quickly without clicking (you could in the old Kayako). Can't forward or CC a message easily. Images and attachments not perfect. A little slow. I also can't figure out how to remove the "message sent from Kayako" signature. This should not be required since we pay for the product and it can be embarrassing when we're trying to send professional emails, so we opt out and use Outlook for those.

We have been using kayako for 8+ years and it was a great experience for customer support portal .

Pros

Kayako has a modern fast interface that will guide you what queries you want to know , and the fast response from the server , also its mobile application . Easy update the tickets , replay , attach files . Users and department managing is

Cons

I was fetching a query to make csv or excel report exported for the tickets opened during last year for example , I made copy and past for all pages ! . I wonder if there is a way to export the list of critical tickets for example other than the way I used . Also , Manual Backup was removed from the tools . The monthly fees is high related to the dollar increasing .

so far great. good response time. Love the new installed version of Kayako. It's so much faster!!

Pros

the speed increase and the stability even though we have 100's of thousands of tickets. I'm assuming you're using more AJAX to load content which helped to improve the speed. I especially like the "light" design and how minimalistic the design of the site is. The focus is on speed which in return helps with speed of customer service. Use of the LoginShare to connect with OAuth2 to allow single login ID is fantastic.

Cons

somewhat complex upgrade. technically the upgrade process is not that bad considering the sheer number of attachments in the system.

Kayako is an advance in potential customers.

I have been able to establish better attention with potential clients within my company, in this way, it has had a better control and thus obtain better finances. Potential customers have been satisfied when we use Kayako because we serve them at any time of the day.

Pros

The best thing about Kayako is that it has many, many ways to communicate with a potential client, and this is very important and very influential because it allows a connection with more progress and makes the client get more attention.

Cons

I think you should improve a couple of things, such as prices, and customer service, the design should leave it as it is since it gives a lot of comfort and is nice, but should fix the support by 80% so that a better customer service.