Kayako was created in 2001 by Varun Shoor to better provide effective customer service to his own customers over the web. In time, the solution became the product, and the development team grew. Today, Kayako remains a solution dedicated to providing a streamlined and intuitive customer service platform for businesses of all sizes and industries.

Kayako Pricing and Services

Intended Customers

Small to Midsize Businesses, Enterprises

Free Trial

14-Day Free Trial on Growth Plan

Features

• Ticket Management

• Multichannel Integration

• Helpdesk Management

• Customer Self-Service

• Customer Relationship Management

• Custom Reports

• Security

• Service & Support

Editor’s Bottom Line of Kayako

Kayako offers a visually-satisfying, organized user interface with plenty of ticketing options for customer service interactions over a multitude of channels. The most notable aspect of Kayako, on first use, is the level of immersion achieved by the integration of those channels into the ticketing ‘conversation’. Customers contacting you via tweets, emails, website live chat or by logging into your branded help center will have their messages - and in some cases, tracked behavior - organized into a timeline. The notion is to provide a contextual, continuous conversation per case until the issue is resolved. These conversations can include the support agents’ private notes in addition to the collaborators included with each plan.

It’s a very effective, familiar messenger-like interface. Each case has ticket properties on the right, which can be manually altered or automatically configured or updated through triggers and workflows. The support agent can send and save macros to respond to regular cases with pre-written templates. The internal messenger system, called Kayako Messenger, enables live conversations when your team is online and offline messages when they’re not; this works across devices, so agents can respond to customer issues, and vice versa, anytime, anywhere. It can be enabled on your help center and embedded in any other website with a bit of HTML code.

The ticketing options per case are not unlike what Kayako’s larger, better-known peers provide; however, the scope of Kayako’s features do not extend as far as those rivals. For example, Kayako doesn’t seem to support call or SMS integration, at least not out of the box. The agent interface seems to come in only one language (English), there are no built-in visual reports nor a performance overview dashboard, you aren’t able to build community forums and there’s no marketplace for add-ons or extensions to ensure compatibility with your existing business applications. (However, there’s a system called endpoints, which sends Kayako data directly to external systems, and users can specify what data is sent at which times. Data can be send via endpoint to email addresses, Slack, to the external API of any other piece of software.)

Of Kayako’s features that coincide with their larger rivals, Kayako holds its own with a very well-designed system and array of features that perform the platform’s essential purpose - helpdesk ticketing. The lack of call functionality limits its appeal for businesses that seek granular insights on the performance of their customer service department or simply the ability to call or text their customers. With a bit of technical know-how, users can overcome the lack of built-in reporting or third-party integrations, but this requires a bit more oversight and management than platforms that handle it for you.

For businesses willing to make the effort, or whose use case doesn’t require many integrations, phone calls or the need for reports, Kayako is an effective platform with a very natural, intuitive customer service interface. It’s among the least cluttered and most immersive ticketing platforms around - achieved as much through effective design as through a somewhat limited scope in features.