Kayako Reviews 

Every other helpdesk vendor I evaluated sent a login and some documentation and wished me luck. Kayako put a team of four on our account for 90 days. They configured the routing, structured the knowledge base, trained Kay (their AI agent) on our scenarios, and stayed in the environment with us until we were resolving tickets.

I didn't have to become a Kayako expert to get results. The onboarding team already knew what worked from other deployments and would say things like ""most teams in your situation set up this routing pattern."" It would just work.

We went from kick-off to actually resolving tickets in about six weeks. Most of that speed was because their team handled the parts we'd have spent months figuring out on our own.

Customer last month was getting short with us. Not yelling, not rude, just clearly losing patience as Kay (Kayako's AI agent) kept trying to answer the same question different ways. Kay picked up on it, pulled a human in, and gave the agent a full summary so the customer didn't have to start over.

I've managed support teams for a while. Knowing when to stop trying and hand off is harder than it sounds. I've had actual humans who couldn't read the room that well. Kay gets it right more often than not, and when it escalates the handoff is clean.

The 'your bot is useless' complaints we used to see have dropped off. People who need a human get one fast. People with simple questions get answered. Everyone's happier, the team included.

One gripe: checking tickets on my phone isn't great. Mobile view feels squeezed, I'm always pinching to zoom. Just wait until I'm at my desk now.

Customer emailed in saying they couldn't get into their account. By the time I opened the ticket, Kay (the AI agent in Kayako) had already reset their password and sent the new login link. I went to the audit log thinking one of my agents was having a very fast morning. It was Kay.

Password resets and account activation used to be about a third of what we handled. Identical tickets, different usernames. Kay owns them now and the team is free to focus on anything that actually needs a human.

One honest callout: the first two weeks were slow. You have to load up your knowledge base before Kay can really do anything useful, and there's no shortcut for that part. Worth it once you're through, but budget for the ramp.

I noticed something. Kay had been quietly drafting knowledge base articles every time a human stepped in to handle a ticket it couldn't resolve. Watch what the human did, write it up, add it to the queue for review. We'd published 30-odd of them without anyone sitting down to write a single one.

The resolution rate has been creeping up ever since. I check the draft queue a couple of times a week, and there's usually something worth adding.

One frustration: the reporting is hard to navigate. Needed to raise a support ticket just to work out how to pull a basic report. The information is in there, it's just not surfaced well.

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.