Kayako Avis 19

The two features I use every single day are ticket summarization and the ticket assistant. They sound minor until you do the math.

I handle 30-plus tickets a day. Some of them have 20 replies in the thread. Before Kay, I'd scroll through the whole history trying to catch up before I could even respond. Now I hit one button and get a four-line summary. Then if I need more - ""has this been escalated before?"" or ""what did they originally ask for?"" - I just ask Kay and it pulls from the thread. Like having someone next to me who read everything already.

No voice channel yet, which matters for us - we still take calls and there's no AI equivalent for that. But for everything coming through email and chat, it's changed how the whole team works."

We had a ticket come in with five attachments. A debug log over 20MB, a stack of screenshots, and a text file full of error codes. That kind of ticket normally sits at the bottom of the queue until someone senior has time to dig through it.

Kay, the AI agent in Kayako, went through all of it. Found the relevant error buried in the log, matched it against what the screenshots were showing, and drafted a proper response with troubleshooting steps. Five minutes, start to finish.

I've used a fair few support tools. None of them touch attachments - they either skip them entirely or ask the customer to explain what's in the file. Kay doesn't do that.

Main gripe is the Snapchat integration, which isn't as clean as the other channels. Everything else has been solid.

Six months in and I'm still a bit surprised it worked. The way Kayako rolls out the AI makes all the difference. The AI agent called Kay starts by writing draft replies for your agents to check. They tweak, approve, send. Nothing forced. Then the drafts get better and the agents start changing less and less. Then one day you realise nobody's really editing anymore, they're just hitting send.

We moved categories across to full automation slowly. Billing first because those tickets are basically identical every time. Then account questions. FAQ stuff came last. Three weeks before people stopped second-guessing it, roughly.

The thing I didn't expect was how little pushback there was. Usually getting a team off one way of working and onto something new is painful. This one wasn't, because nobody felt like anything was being taken away from them

While Kayako Classic's technical obsolescence is widely known, a far more insidious problem lurks beneath the surface: its truly abysmal billing practices, especially concerning former customers.

Our experience with Kayako Classic's billing department has been a nightmare. Despite clear and documented cancellation of our service, we were repeatedly subjected to erroneous invoices for months, and in some cases, even years following termination. What's worse is the company's apparent willingness to escalate these phantom debts to collection agencies without proper due diligence or responsive communication.

Kayako is supported by Trilogy, CopperTree, DNN Software, ESW Capital, IngiteTech - and they're all trying to squeeze the most out of their dated email-based product. My company didn't cancel our subscription 60 days in advance and now have to pay for an entire year for a product we don't use. I can't get anyone to respond to my emails, their phone numbers don't work, and their bot routes me to an email loop. Garbage.

We were contacted numerous times after we terminated our service, even after we requested our contact details to be removed from Kayko and not to be contacted again.

We were then called and told our subscription was ending soon (we had already ended it) and we should do something about it. We were then emailed a quote for a new license that we were requested to sign.

Terrible practices, this feels like an attempt to scam people out of their money.

Been trying to get a demo of Kayako for week, got dumped with some appalling sales person called Gabriella Yahaya. She totally ignored emails clearly stating that we were not an agency and just wanted a demo then made us join a call where she was unable to give a demo and - because she hadn’t read our emails - still thought we were an agency!! When I complained she accused me of having ‘attitude’. Still no demo. Totally awful.

Our company has been using Kayako since 2013 when we purchased the original downloadable version. We paid support fees that increased year on year until 2017 when we wanted to change the domain name associated with our support portal. At this point we were told that we would have to change to a yearly licence but not to worry because it wouldn’t cost any more than our current support fees. This of course was not true and the price continued to climb in leaps and bounds. This year, ten days before renewal, we were told that we could no longer have our five user licence. We would have to pay for a minimum of 10 licences and that the renewal cost had increased to $3700, roughly quadrupling the cost. We replied saying that this was a very large amount to pay in one hit and could we pay monthly. We were then immediately sent an invoice for three years at a price of $36,000. No, that is not a misprint, it really was thirty six thousand dollars for five users for three years. Of course we have two choices - lose our support portal while we change to a new supplier or pay the ransom.

This is not SAAS we originally purchased the software outright and we run it on our own servers. We have not had and do not want any firmware upgrades. We support the code ourselves. In the last 12 months we have contacted Kayako support on only one occasion which was when Kayako failed to supply our new licence on time resulting in our support portal being down. On previous occasions when we had contacted Kayako support we were met with total indifference.

Kayako makes great play of how cost effective their product is but their latest pricing to us works out at $200 per month per agent for what is a very basic system that we host and maintain ourselves.

For most companies the support portal is the face of the company and you need to be confident that your supplier is going to be cost effective, fair, and responsive to your needs. Kayako has been none of these.

As a result of our experience I can not in all conscience recommend that anyone should purchase the product.

Over a 2 months without a single response from Kayako, this is not only negligeble, it simply unacceptable to have a response time so low without a single warning about it, or anything else given. This customer support was useless even before a response, though I will probably never get one?

We purchased Kayako Classic, and they are now forcing us to move to one of their subscription packages. Their new software is useless and is not worth a cent. Full of bugs. For some years now, they did not care for their commitment to Kayako Classic customers who paid a lot of money to purchase a perpetual license.
Kayako is not a company to rely on at all, and they are not ethic.

I guess Kayako explains it all. (The Grudge)

For the fourth year now, our Intui.travel company has been using Kayako solutions.
All information from different channels in one place. This is convenient!

We use the email automation offered by Kayako. We save time!

Extensive API capabilities allowed us to configure our environment as we needed.

Messenger and content Helpdesk reduce the load on our support team. The Customer can find an answer itself.

We like scalable solutions from Kayako and constant improvements, upgrade opportunities.

Thank you for the useful product and good service of Customer & IT team!

Best
Ilya, CEO Intui.travel transfer

Years ago I purchased a kayako software . Wasted a lot of time configuring it . As a matter of fact wasted years and at last they stopped providing the service they promised . The software is useless now.

A severely low loading speed of the system, make you cannot reply to conversations.

This is the badly designed, unintuitive user interface. One of the worst I have ever seen. I don't know why anybody would use it.

Do not deal with this company, their product has become awful and their support is even worse now. I am currently trying to cancel our service but they just ignore us and continue to take unauthorised payments.

During the demo, Kayako executive promised a lot of in-development features and prompt support. The moment we bought the plan, we didn't hear from them. We have a lot of open tickets and they never reply. It's been 6 months since we are Kayako's customer and we are facing a lot of problems. Mainly, their software and APIs are so unstable, it breaks our production environment very frequently.

The worst thing is there is no option to cancel the subscription or delete the customer data!

DO NOT BUY KAYAKO SUBSCRIPTION. PERIOD. USE HELPSCOUT OR ZENDESK. THANK ME LATER.

Used to be good software with good support. Now looking dated and as for support (from the support system company)... well I have had an urgent issue for 3 days... no support!!!

I recommend buying an alternate solution instead of Kayako until such time as they look after their customers, stop hiking the prices up and respond to support requests.

Kayako charge existing customers that have perpetual licenses extremely high charges for support. Kayako introduced new excessive support and upgrade charges well beyond the original agreement that perpetual licences holders had originally agreed and signed up for. Failure to pay the additional charges means that software updates are not available. Kayako has many bugs which are resolved with the upgrades.