I would warn anybody thinking about using Kayako to reconsider. Maybe there new version is better, but I doubt it, and its not only their software that is weak, it is their support of their software.

We have been trying to use it for quite some time now, and it is no less than a struggle. Our liveresponse has never worked, we have continously asked for help from kayako, I have even posted on their forums, no luck, hp-david thought I was crazy so he gave a go at contacting kayako to make it work, no luck.

Their software was very buggy, parsing emails is not great we often get blank messages and need to view source, the search feature was useless for quite some time and is still quite weak, most searches return every ticket. Oh and things like \ don't show up in your messages, its fun trouble shooting messages like " i cannot find c:windowssystem32driversetchosts "


But with all the problems we had, it was "usable" until friday. On friday we noticed our ticket volume was way down, at first we thought oh this is going to be a great friday, until hp-jonathan came into my office to let me know kayako wasnt downloading mail from the mailserver.

after much investigation on our side, we were sure all our areas of responsibility were covered, the mailbox was full of mail, when we ran pop3functions.php it would indicate Inbox: 300 or whatever it was, sit for a while then exist. It would run again, still 300 messages. I tried connecting via imap with outlook express, yes there all the messages were just waiting.

Jonathan turned on debugging, which was absolutely useless information from what I can tell, and nothing looked like an error just a bunch of B.S.

We have submit multiple tickets into Kayako with no response, it is now sunday and I officially give up with Kayako and wish I had never switched to them in the first place. The interface looks "OK" but it ends there. Don't expect any support from them when you most need it, or any point for that matter.

Earliest ticket from this issue, sent friday, CLP-831453 with no answer.

My latest ticket [#UDN-519610] unanswered as well.

Maybe I misunderstood their form, maybe Critical means critcially trivial please don't help me.


This is my expierence with Kayako, take it as you like.

This post is to warn people considering trying Kayako for their helpdesk needs.

We signed up about three months ago for their hosted helpdesk account (we went this route since we heard that installation with piping was a pain, so why not let them install it, in addition to the heldesk being hosted on a separate server).

The installation was done quickly as promised so no complaints there, though read the forums and you will see many people who have waited a long time for their activation.

The product itself is OK. It looks nice, but that's about it. a product is only as good as the people supporting it, and trust me on this, support from kayako is non-existent and just rubbish. Maybe it is because of the fact that there are just two people running the show, Varun and Hiren. Maybe it is because they just don't care about their customers.

Their hepdesk E-support, has some serious issues. Our main problems were with bounceback messages and spam. The program has no built in spam protector, and the flood protection didn't work for us. On Thursday morning we had about 9000+ tickets created due to bounce back emails. Not to mention several spam tickets everyday. Since we are hosted on their server (a big mistake!), we could not delete the 9000+ tickets. And manually deleting the messages would take forever (460 odd pages).

Since Thursday, nothing was done about this issue. Numerous emails to Varun, Hiren and their support desk have gone unanswered. Not one reply. I do not care if they are busy with the release of their new version. I do not care that other people say that they are amazing (these people have not been put in the unfortunate position of needing support :rolleyes: ). If Kayako cannot provide support to their customers, they should not be in business selling Esupport. There are plenty of people that are very upset with their lack of support, just do a search on the forums.

Again, it was not a nice experience with Kayako and we have decided to cut our losses early on and move to another helpdesk. Support is just not there with Kayako, and it has been a very annoying and frustrating experience, and I would most definitely warn people to think very carefully before availing of their services. There are much better performing and better priced options available on the market.

We have moved on now to Support trio, and so far, I must say that they have an excellent product, with spam protection, more features than Kayako, and easier installation. Great service so far, and I will post later on with my experience.

Buyer beware about Kayako.

Kevin, I totally agree with you. Absolute rubbish support from Kayako, and glad that you moved on.

Hi Kevin,
To start of let me apologize for the delay in resolving your tickets. I agree the support has been slow of late since we released version 3 RC1. Not to give an excuse, but both your tickets were created on a weekened which too was a reason for the delay.

We have been trying to use it for quite some time now, and it is no less than a struggle. Our liveresponse has never worked, we have continously asked for help from kayako, I have even posted on their forums, no luck, hp-david thought I was crazy so he gave a go at contacting kayako to make it work, no luck.
I have tried searching our helpdesk for any tickets created by David for issues regarding LiveResponse but I have so far not found any such tickets. Please email me the TicketIDs at hiren.mehta AT kayako.com which were not replied to or according to you were not answered satisfactorily.
Their software was very buggy, parsing emails is not great we often get blank messages and need to view source,
Parsing emails work absolutely fine in the software and the reason you receive blank messages is due to the break line feature of eSupport. Let me try and explain the feature to you, every reply received from eSupport has the message in following format:

Customer Reply
-- Break Line -- (Specified in config.shared.php)
Quoted Reply by Email Client

If the Customer Reply is less than 10 lines then eSupport will display the entire message including Break Line and Quoted Reply. If it is more than 10 lines then eSupport will display just the Customer Reply. The reason for this is because some people like to quote the original message by replying thus the original intended message is below the Break Line, if eSupport does not follow the above method of parsing message then you will just see a Blank Reply in Web Area (Earlier it did not follow the above described way of parsing emails and a lot of customers complained about blank email replies, because eSupport splits the message using Break Line and as the entire message is below it, it just displays a blank customer reply).
the search feature was useless for quite some time and is still quite weak, most searches return every ticket
The search feature for us seems to work fine. Please update your tickets with access information for us to look into the issue. Although the Search feature is completely revamped in version 3 where we do not completely rely on MySQL. We now have our own index system which enhances the searches.
Oh and things like \ don't show up in your messages, its fun trouble shooting messages like " i cannot find c:windowssystem32driversetchosts "
Slashes in eSupport work fine. You need to make sure 'magic_quotes_gpc' in your php.ini is turned On.

I cannot resolve this issue right away since we do not have any access information we require in order to trace the issue. Please update your ticket with the requested access information and I assure you the issue would be looked into right away.

Regards,

Hiren Mehta

Hi,
First let me start off letting you know Kayako is most certainly not a 2 people company. Just because Varun and myself are seen making the post regarding Kayako in the forums, it does not mean we are a 2 man company. We do have an efficient Sales, Support and Development team which is extended every month.

The installation was done quickly as promised so no complaints there, though read the forums and you will see many people who have waited a long time for their activation.

Most activations are done within the 1 business day as written on our order pages. Clients in the past have placed orders on weekends which they want to be activated right away and insome cases even after the orders were activated many have not bothered to update their forum threads.
Their hepdesk E-support, has some serious issues. Our main problems were with bounceback messages and spam. The program has no built in spam protector, and the flood protection didn't work for us. On Thursday morning we had about 9000+ tickets created due to bounce back emails. Not to mention several spam tickets everyday.
Thousands of emails created in your helpdesk due to bounced messages and not because of SPAM mails. This is absolutely not an eSupport issue and can occur due to the following reasons:
- Flood Protection settings have been changed
- Your Staff Member is using the same email address which is being used in the helpdesk
- Your Staff's email address has the autoresponder turned on.
Since we are hosted on their server (a big mistake!), we could not delete the 9000+ tickets. And manually deleting the messages would take forever (460 odd pages).
When you opted for the hosted solution, we clearly let you know that we will not be providing any system access to hosted solution users and we absolutely cannot change this company policy. You always had the option to transfer the helpdesk onto your own server by changing over to one of the non-hosted leased licenses.

An email loop was detected for your helpdesk due to which we had to disable email piping on your system since an email loop increases tremendous load on a server, eventually bringing it down and affecting the quality of service we provide to our hosted clients. An email notifying this was sent to you.

I wish you all the very best with your new support system and wished your issues were resolved in timely manner. I would be glad to offer you a full refund for last months charges for the inconvinience caused to you.

Please email me your Transaction details at hiren.mehta AT kayako.com. Let me know if there is anything else.

Regards,

Hiren Mehta

We have no problems with their software over 2 years and 40,000 tickets later. We just upgraded to support suite a couple days ago and could not be happier.

I feel sorry for what happened with Kevin -- but I personally have used kayako but never had any such issues :-/

May be kayako support is slow but kayako team is always in helping mood -- specially Varun :)

Not had any issues here with Kayako either although I dont think I ever needed to use their support.

I hope the situation manages to get resolved.

Just to follow up on this,

The problem does not seem to be directly the fault of Kayako, its some extremely obscure problem we are trying to resolve, but this doesn't excuse the fact I could not get a response from Kayako when I needed it the most.

Originally posted by Hiren Mehta
Hi,
First let me start off letting you know Kayako is most certainly not a 2 people company. Just because Varun and myself are seen making the post regarding Kayako in the forums, it does not mean we are a 2 man company. We do have an efficient Sales, Support and Development team which is extended every month.



Reply:


Really? It honestly doesn't seem that way since you two are the only ones that always reply to a ticket and if you did have more staff or adding them as you claim, I do not think the support would be THAT bad. At least be honest about it.

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Thousands of emails created in your helpdesk due to bounced messages and not because of SPAM mails. This is absolutely not an eSupport issue and can occur due to the following reasons:
- Flood Protection settings have been changed
- Your Staff Member is using the same email address which is being used in the helpdesk
- Your Staff's email address has the autoresponder turned on.



Reply:


Well, that might be so. However, no one adjusted the flood protection settings, and no one is using the same email address as that being used in the helpdesk, and the autoresponder was not turned on.

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When you opted for the hosted solution, we clearly let you know that we will not be providing any system access to hosted solution users and we absolutely cannot change this company policy. You always had the option to transfer the helpdesk onto your own server by changing over to one of the non-hosted leased licenses.



Reply:


Yes that is true, but then when something like this happens we expect reasonable support to resolve the issue since we cannot access the server. That, we did not get. Four days is a long time to wait for support, and you people provide a "support" help desk!!!

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An email loop was detected for your helpdesk due to which we had to disable email piping on your system since an email loop increases tremendous load on a server, eventually bringing it down and affecting the quality of service we provide to our hosted clients. An email notifying this was sent to you.



Reply:



Yes, we recieved that email. However, since our account was hosted with you, we needed support from you to resolve the situation fast as we were losing new tickets that customers were sending us. We submitted tickets and updated it many times, even sent you and Varun personal messages, but not a reply until I posted on this forum :rolleyes: It was this complete lack of support and responsibulity from your side that finally did it for us.

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I wish you all the very best with your new support system and wished your issues were resolved in timely manner. I would be glad to offer you a full refund for last months charges for the inconvinience caused to you.

Please email me your Transaction details at hiren.mehta AT kayako.com. Let me know if there is anything else.


Reply:



Thanks for your wishes, and I do not want any refund. I did not post this message to get a refund. I just want other people considering your services to consider that they will get very poor support if they do purchase your product. A product is only as good as the people supporting it, and you guys do NOT support your product.

Please do not make any more excuses, you guys did not support us when we needed it the most.


Regards,

Hiren Mehta