Today businesses of all sizes need to handle their customer and employee support issues easily and consistently. This is where helpdesk solutions play an important role. However, choosing the right helpdesk tool for your business can be difficult no matter what type or size your business is. One of the popular help desk solutions is Kayako and in this article we’ll have a look at the pros and cons of this tool to help you decide if it’s the right choice for your company. To give you more perspective we’ll also compare Kayako’s features with pros and cons of one of the leaders in the help desk software category – Freshdesk. If you want to try out Freshdesk on your own you can easily get Freshdesk free trial here. You may also be interested in reading our comparison of best help desk solutions in 2015.
Pros & Cons of Kayako
Pricing: starts at $24
Overview of Kayako GUI
After a thorough analysis by our 2B2 review experts we gave Kayako a solid score of 8.9/10 While that’s not enough to put Kayako on our list of top ten help desk solutions it proves that Kayako offers a reliable level of service. You an get more information about Kayako and its features, integrations and pricing plans from our detailed review of Kayako.
Kayako provides various support channels to customers such as email, phone, and live chat in a fully integrated system. This combination of various channels answers many important concerns of multi-channel client support, allowing service departments to work more efficiently and give more outstanding support.
Kayako offers an efficient ticket management system, allowing you to prioritize customer tickets based on a number of factors. This helpdesk solution can organize tickets with use of descriptive tags or filter them based on status or another factor. Your client service managers and support agents can use the tool’s macro function in order to create task shortcuts that are usually repeated as well as create automatic notifications for specific situations.
Bing one of the oldest solutions that have been existing for over 13 years, Kayako started as a personal project. With many years of experience, the tool has served over 30,000 companies to help them provide the best support customer experience.
Kayako is offered in self-hosted and cloud platforms. It provides simple integration for various support platforms into one software solution. Whether you use web, email, phone, live chat, you will easily be able to get and manage customer messages and provide them with the appropriate response accordingly.
With this tool, you can also get a resourceful knowledge base that will provide answers to different customer problems. In addition, you can add images and videos in the knowledge base articles to make it easier for clients to understand your content. There is also an instant answer feature that enables your clients to get quick answers to their problems or questions as they type their queries into the search box. With the tool’s support center feature, clients can manage tickets and stay updated with the latest news and updates from your company.
Kayako makes it quicker for you to check out support tickets submitted by customers, and respond as soon as possible. This helpdesk solution will let you prioritize messages according to importance, time targets, and department.
You can also put tags for the tickets for easy sorting and quickly assign ticket status as well. It’s also posisble to make live conversations with customers. Instead of waiting for customers to reach you, you can reach and engage them easily in a conversation.
Pros
Functional. Kayako offers a reasonable pricing structure.
Easily scalable. Kayako offers an easily scalable client support platform that offers features to track your customer service job. It also has options available to install the solution on your web host or use a hosted service. Kayako is also easy to use. It offers organizational capabilities for customers, such as the option to color code various categories separately.
Cons
Expensive features. Unfortunately, Kayako reserves many of its best features to only its most expensive pricing options. You can have some good features in the more basic plans, but you may feel limited. Multi-channel reporting, for instance, is only available only for the most expensive plan. In addition, Kayako lacks some basic features that are available in other helpdesk software programs, such as Freshdesk.
Spotty email capacity. There are situations where attaching and receiving files can be quite difficult. Sometimes, customers complain about making two to three attempts, especially if you are receiving or sending email attachments of huge sizes. It may also be bit limited or spotty when it comes to getting emails with attachments that are over 10 megabytes.
Clunky and cumbersome interface. Creating tickets can sometimes be crude or very difficult to follow. Although ticket creation seems simple enough, managing it can be cumbersome. Customers complain about cluttered interface, making it difficult to search for all the important business features. The tool’s interface tends to be a bit overwhelming for users, which may result in a steeper learning curve.
Pros & Cons of Freshdesk
Pricing: free for up to 3 users, paid plans start at $15
Here’s how part of Freshdesk UI looks like
Freshdesk won our Best Help Desk Software Award for 2015
To compare how well Kayako fares with top help desk solutions of the market we decided to set it agains the leader in this category – Freshdesk. Our B2B review team analyzed all major players in the help desk software industry and after scrutinizing tests Freshdesk emerged as the best solution available. We gave it an impressive total score of 9.8/10 which places it at the top of our list of best help desk solutions. Their quality is also confirmed by a stellar customer satisfaction rating of 98% showing whi positive all clients are about using Freshdesk. Finally, our review team chose Freshdesk as the winner of our Best Help Desk Software Award for 2015 and also distinguisehd it with a prestigeous Expert’s Choice Award for 2015. Freshdesk offers a very flexible pricing plan and even offers a completely free version of the app for small teams of up to 3 users. You can comfortably test all Freshdesk’s features with their great free trial plan as well. If you want to try out Freshdesk on your own you can easily sign up for Freshdesk free trial here.
Because the tool is entirely Web-based, Freshdesk can easily help you manage multiple escalation procedures, groups, and workflows. Freshdesk allows multiple brands and products as well as multi-language and multi-timezone capabilities.
Freshdesk’s user interface is very easy to navigate throughout the entire configuration process, making it quick for anyone—even the most novice of all users—to tweak the web service to perform just what he or she wants. In case you do need to resort to doing things manually though, you will find a lot of online documentation and training materials from Freshdesk to seamlessly guide you through the whole thing.
The bread and butter of Freshdesk experience is its effective ticketing system, since that is where most of your helpdesk agents are going to spend their work time. That’s why Freshdesk’s ticket page contains all of the crucial information users are likely to need when either handling or triaging tickets from all over the world. All of the customer ticket’s properties—status, priority, the name of the helpdesk agent it is assigned to can be quickly seen. They can be also be edited easily and on the spot. There are far too many helpdesk programs that expect edits to be performed in separate views but thankfully Freshdesk manages to avoid that potential issue.
With names such as Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Toshiba, and Goodreads using Freshdesk, you can easily be assured this solution offars a quality method to track questions and complaints. The tool has even created a nice feature to keep your helpdesk agents motivated through gamification.
Pros
Comprehensive free package. Companies will love Freshdesk’s free service level that is as comprehensive as its basic plan. Any small company can begin using the free plan and vastly improve its customer service experience for both helpdesk customers and agents. The tool’s forever free service is completely functional, allowing you to have up as many as three agents using one mailbox, so it’s an ideal solution for small teams.
Access anytime, anywhere. With Freshdesk, you can have complete access to your helpdesk anytime, anywhere through email without the need to sign in using the portal. In addition, you can forward questions to your helpdesk agents.
Refreshing and modern. Freshdesk is a modern and refreshing customer helpdesk support tool. It integrates a wide range of today’s modern communication channels into one unified stream of tickets and information. It also boasts of multi-brand management and social media integration. Finally, Freshdesk found a clever approach to integrate various social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook into its system.
Visually appealing interface. Freshdesk appeals to many businesses because of its visually friendly interface. It is also one of the most intuitive of the ticketing management systems available in the market right now.
Easy to use. The tool is very easy to use. Little assistance is needed to understand how the whole system works. Even the most basic users are able to navigate and utilize the tool’s features with ease and every feature is very intuitive. Freshdesk is also simple to set up and does not need a huge investment of resources or time to install. Freshdesk can also be integrated into your company’s existing website framework easily and quickly.
Cons
Contract customer warnings. Users are waiting for Freshdesk to implement warning features on contract customers, which can be quite helpful for some companies especially those whose contracts with the tool are already finished.
Limited tagging features. Some users prefer the option to add tags in multiple locations, and not just one.
Bottomline
While Kayako is definitely a solid software it is not one of the leaders in the help desk software category. At the moment the position of the best help desk solution is held by Freshdesk. With an outstanding score of 9.8/10 Freshdesk is the optimal choice for companies that look for efficient and reliable solution. It proved to be the leader in terms of user-friendliness, flexibility, pricing packages, integrations, customer support channels and more. It also offers a completely free version of the app for small teams of up to 3 users and you can easily try out other plans with their great free trial. If you want to test Freshdesk’s capabilities on your own you can get Freshdesk free trial here.
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