Evaluating Kayako? Not fit for all types of Business model

[sureshkumar.mr]

This message will be helpful for the users who are trying to evaluate eSupport product of Kayako. Here I am interested to higlight few of the major limitations in the product (If you want to know all, then go to http://bugs.kayako.net, there are hundreds of bugs and feature request in undecided status). I also request others to update the limitations they are facing. I am soon going to update Helpdesk reviews in all other Major blogs and reviews so that it will be helpful for others to select the right product and not to face difficulties after purchasing.

Our business requirement is very simple, we have Head Quarters in California and offices in Singapore, Japan and India.
Each location is having separate HR, Finance, Admin, IT department, etc. Each department policies vary depending upon the location and even the staff and their timings vary. Each department will have a separate Knowledge base articles. We cannot mixup US HR and Finance policy with India or Japan. We need to use a common domain name so that users can easily remember and should not find difficulty when user travel to other locations.

We did partial evaluation of SupportSuite and eSupport, as we thought SupportSuite was not mature, we decided to buy eSupport.

The following are the problems we are facing with the product.

1. There is no proper installation manual or quick and detailed user guide. There is a 240 page manual which was updated a year back. Many versions of the product has rolled out but they are not bothered to update it.
2. No guide on how to use the staff module. They say it is self explanatory. If you are not intelligent, please don't buy.
3. No option for the user to delete the closed tickets or to withdraw a ticket which they have sumbitted accidentally.
4. End Users cannot sort on a particular field or to view only the fields they are interested.
5. Department list is shown even when there is only one department in that group. They will not take directly to the ticket submission page.
6. No Holiday schedule list.
7. You should have a good programming knowledge experience even for small customizations.
8. Different department Knowlebase articles gets mixed up in IRS even after selecting specific department. They will ask you to create a different usergroup, in that case the URL will change and it will not be listed in department list.
9. They never view problems from end user perspective, they view the problems from Programmer perspective.
10. Support is pathetic. I will run out of words if I start describing about their support. Better you search this forum and know about it yourself. There is no meaning for priority, if it is easy they will answer it in one day time, else it will be pending for a long time. They have only 3 status, Open, OnHold and Close. They never update us on daily basis even for show stoppers. Very unprofessional approach.
9. User Group (some times they call it as template group, satellite helpdesk, ...) and department terms will confuse you. Each department you create will not create a separate group internally, you need to create it.
10. Reports are not upto the expected level. Lot of improvement is required.
11. There is no HTML editor in staff reply or during ticket submission.
12. There will be no Signature for Autoresponder messages when users submit their ticket using web. They have not planned properly where to keep this Signature section. You can find such blunders at many places across the product.
13. In POST REPLY you will see all the staff of all departments. They are not separated by departments. You need to sit and select.
14. Incase if they decide it as a bug or feature, then you should open a bug or feature request yourself. They will not do it for you. My per hour bill rate is $200, I need to spend 15mts to open one, I have raised nearly 6 tickets so far Not even a single bug/feature is updated till now.

If you have only one department then this can look into Kayako. This product is not fit for Multinational companies and is not flexible to fit for all the business model.

After purchasing eSupport we are facing it difficult to customize even to our simple requirements. We could not launch more than one department even after two months.

The following messages in the forum should be helpful during evaluation of Kayako products.
1. Helpdesk for external customers (companies)?
2. Kayoke Support almost 20 days No response

[Varun Shoor]

Hi Suresh,
I have posted replies to every point of yours below.

This message will be helpful for the users who are trying to evaluate eSupport product of Kayako. Here I am interested to higlight few of the major limitations in the product (If you want to know all, then go to http://bugs.kayako.net, there are hundreds of bugs and feature request in undecided status). I also request others to update the limitations they are facing. I am soon going to update Helpdesk reviews in all other Major blogs and reviews so that it will be helpful for others to select the right product and not to face difficulties after purchasing.

Its quite amazing how you expect us to implement every feature request posted in the bug tracker, We do listen to our clients and that is evident from the updates on our CVS tracker at http://builds.kayako.net and http://blog.kayako.net

As for bug reports, We will be doing an audit and clearing the bogus reports this week. Quite a lot of bugs have been fixed but not closed as they were sent in via support tickets, majority of them are feature requests posted as bug reports and from my estimate there are around 50-80 genuine open bug reports which to be honest is quite a low amount in this industry.

Our business requirement is very simple, we have Head Quarters in California and offices in Singapore, Japan and India.
Each location is having separate HR, Finance, Admin, IT department, etc. Each department policies vary depending upon the location and even the staff and their timings vary. Each department will have a separate Knowledge base articles. We cannot mixup US HR and Finance policy with India or Japan. We need to use a common domain name so that users can easily remember and should not find difficulty when user travel to other locations.

There are thousands of our clients using the product in exactly the same scenario. You had a specific requirement to which you were directed with instructions on how to achieve that by editing the templates.

1. There is no proper installation manual or quick and detailed user guide. There is a 240 page manual which was updated a year back. Many versions of the product has rolled out but they are not bothered to update it.

I dont know how much more details you can put in an installation guide, We have covered every basic step from uncompression to uploading and yet you call it incomplete. The manual is still valid and there has been no changes in admin cp in that regard.

2. No guide on how to use the staff module. They say it is self explanatory. If you are not intelligent, please don't buy.

Absolutely no arguments in this regard, This is something we lack on and something we are working on. You should expect an update in this regard soon.

3. No option for the user to delete the closed tickets or to withdraw a ticket which they have sumbitted accidentally.
4. End Users cannot sort on a particular field or to view only the fields they are interested.
5. Department list is shown even when there is only one department in that group. They will not take directly to the ticket submission page.
6. No Holiday schedule list.

Suresh, You need to understand that all feature requests are decided on popularity and the number of requests. Majority of the above features are specific to your organization and cannot be given priority over some other upcoming features that we are implementing.

7. You should have a good programming knowledge experience even for small customizations.

What do you expect? You have to know HTML to modify the templates. If you want to extend it further, you have to know the basics of programming languages because what you are planning to do is obviously not the part of default feature set.

8. Different department Knowlebase articles gets mixed up in IRS even after selecting specific department. They will ask you to create a different usergroup, in that case the URL will change and it will not be listed in department list.

I believe you meant Template Group. This is exactly how it works and how thousands of our clients use the system, As I mentioned to you in the ticket we cannot change this functionality. Knowledgebase Articles are linked to Template Groups and cannot be linked to departments.

9. They never view problems from end user perspective, they view the problems from Programmer perspective.

As much as we try to view it from our clients perspective we have to think over on how to acheive a certain feature set without breaking any existing part of our product. You obviously cannot blame us on this.

10. Support is pathetic. I will run out of words if I start describing about their support. Better you search this forum and know about it yourself. There is no meaning for priority, if it is easy they will answer it in one day time, else it will be pending for a long time. They have only 3 status, Open, OnHold and Close. They never update us on daily basis even for show stoppers. Very unprofessional approach.

Just ran a report on your tickets submitted. You have had 32 tickets and 47 chats with our staff. Your low level queries were replied within 30minutes - 5 hours. Anything complex like modification of templates for your departments, Explaining the satellite helpdesk scenario in terms of your context etc was replied to within 1-2 days. I seriously wouldnt call this pathetic.

9. User Group (some times they call it as template group, satellite helpdesk, ...) and department terms will confuse you. Each department you create will not create a separate group internally, you need to create it.

We never call User Groups as Template Groups, They were in fact renamed to Teams in latest revision just to avoid confusion (Which is exactly what has happened with you).

10. Reports are not upto the expected level. Lot of improvement is required.

Stay tuned for the Reports module beta coming during the holidays.

11. There is no HTML editor in staff reply or during ticket submission.

Again a feature request, We in fact had an HTML editor in v2 which was subsequently removed from v3 because it resulted in malformed replies when someone sent in a text email.

12. There will be no Signature for Autoresponder messages when users submit their ticket using web. They have not planned properly where to keep this Signature section. You can find such blunders at many places across the product.

Again something where you require us to break the existing functionality of Email Queues. I did explain it to you clearly in the ticket that signatures from Email Queues *will not* apply to tickets from Web because they never do apply in that context.

You can however with basic if tags create the same functionality by editing the email_autoresponder template. Here is a brief example:

<{if $ticket[department] == "Support}>
Support Signature
<{elseif $ticket[department] == "Support}>
Sales Signature
<{else}>
Global Signature
<{/if}>

13. In POST REPLY you will see all the staff of all departments. They are not separated by departments. You need to sit and select.

I did mention to you that this was hotly requested by others (Like NC Software) and coming in the upcoming CVS build? I dont see the point of posting it here.

14. Incase if they decide it as a bug or feature, then you should open a bug or feature request yourself. They will not do it for you. My per hour bill rate is $200, I need to spend 15mts to open one, I have raised nearly 6 tickets so far Not even a single bug/feature is updated till now.

Obviously when you are the one experiencing the issue or have a feature, you can only describe it better. This policy is in force on purpose and will not be changed just because you cannot take out 10 minutes to describe the problem in detail or let us know exact functionality change you want.

Regards,

Varun Shoor

[sureshkumar.mr]

Originally Posted by Varun Shoor

Its quite amazing how you expect us to implement every feature request posted in the bug tracker, We do listen to our clients and that is evident from the updates on our CVS tracker at http://builds.kayako.net and http://blog.kayako.net

Most of the bugs / feature requests are in Unassigned state, there is no tentative date (2007 or 2008 or 2010) for fixing / including it. If some one is looking for a specific feature they can understand whether to wait for it or look for an alternative.

Originally Posted by Varun Shoor

As for bug reports, We will be doing an audit and clearing the bogus reports this week. Quite a lot of bugs have been fixed but not closed as they were sent in via support tickets, majority of them are feature requests posted as bug reports and from my estimate there are around 50-80 genuine open bug reports which to be honest is quite a low amount in this industry.

If there is a process in place this problem would have never occurred. Before accepting Bug / Feature request it should be verified. Now you are finding it difficult to sort it out.

Originally Posted by Varun Shoor

I dont know how much more details you can put in an installation guide, We have covered every basic step from uncompression to uploading and yet you call it incomplete. The manual is still valid and there has been no changes in admin cp in that regard.

You claim the installation guide is complete. Take a fresher, give him the Kayako manual, once he is through, ask him to install. If he his able to install with out any help then we will agree your guide is complete. I know the problems I faced during the installation.

Originally Posted by Varun Shoor

Suresh, You need to understand that all feature requests are decided on popularity and the number of requests. Majority of the above features are specific to your organization and cannot be given priority over some other upcoming features that we are implementing.

Yes I can understand all the features cannot be implemented immediately but when there is no tentative date announced we believe those features will not be implemented soon. Hence I have posted here.

Originally Posted by Varun Shoor

I believe you meant Template Group. This is exactly how it works and how thousands of our clients use the system, As I mentioned to you in the ticket we cannot change this functionality. Knowledgebase Articles are linked to Template Groups and cannot be linked to departments.

Again I repeat. I am very clear that we need to create a separate template group which needs to be associated with each department to fix this problem. Incase if we do that, we will not be able to see the department in the department list. According to you we need to manually add it, which we did, but after selecting the department the associated template group is not loading. From Oct 10, I am waiting for the reply (7 days over).

Originally Posted by Varun Shoor

Anything complex like modification of templates for your departments, Explaining the satellite helpdesk scenario in terms of your context etc was replied to within 1-2 days. I seriously wouldnt call this pathetic.

XQJ-488399 - Initial Response time(1 day, 20 hrs, 28mts) - Acceptable
LGU-629887 - Initial Response time (3 days, 10 hrs, 7mts) - Not acceptable - Issue raised on Tuesday.
XIS-723413 - 4 days
DOO-474782 - 6 days
XKL-795630 - 4 days
KWP-260725 - 7 days
ZBB-633087 - 6 days
HTM-655400 - 6 days

Let us all know the SLA's if you have defined any. Average always looks better.

Originally Posted by Varun Shoor

Again a feature request, We in fact had an HTML editor in v2 which was subsequently removed from v3 because it resulted in malformed replies when someone sent in a text email.

You have to come out with a good solution instead of removing it. Check out how email applications are handling this case, you might get some solution. But this is a major limitation for all of us. Don't you agree?

[jerdman]

I think this product and support is awesoem considering the price I paid for the software. Anything enterprise class from M$ would easily be in the $1000s!

I

[rickowen]

totally agree with jerdman,
i have alays found support to be good, the last ticket we logged this week was answered within the hour and we had it ifxed with 3 hours

we certainly have seen an improvment and benefits from the investments made in additional staff and new support center.

keep up the good work

Richard

[Tomas Dolezal]

Sureshkumar,

I think that you have to consider the features / price ratio and from this point of view Kayako cannot be beaten.

You are right in many points, but again - when you take that the whole suite with all the bells and whistles is under 500 USD if you buy it owned, then you simply cannot expect that you will get just the turn-key solution.

Kayako is very complex product; it can be deployed in different environments and if you do not have your internal expert on PHP, MySQL etc. then you must simply use outsourcing to make everything running smoothly.

Buying and deploying Kayako is a bit like buying IKEA furniture. You will get well designed product at very competitive price. But you must assemble it on your own. If you are not able to use screwdriver, driller and figure-out sometimes rather clumsy installation diagrams, then this product is not the right one for you. Or you must pay assembly service.

It is the same with Kayako - Kayako itself or any other REALLY experienced PHP / MySQL / Web Server specialist will do installation for you easily, but then you have to pay extra.

I will tell you our story with Kayako and I hope that it will be more relevant information for possible Kayako users evaluating the product.

1]
I have discovered Kayako more than 1 year ago; when I have found that one of our SW suppliers used it. I was very impressed with the product and price / performance ratio so I decided to try it.

2]
Just when I was going to trial it, Kayako launched new version 3.
I think that at that time the new version was very premature and in fact it caused big damage on Kayako image. It was buggy, their support was heavily under-resourced and many very important features from v.2 were missing.
I have tested the hosted demo several times during the year, and – to be honest – I was still waiting until the product fulfils my very high expectations.
Fortunately - this is history now.

3]
Just one month ago, after 1 year of very close monitoring of Kayako forums I have finally decided that we should go for Kayako and buy it.
(Many thanks to all the Guinea pigs users which helped to push Kayako v.3 to the state where it is now ;-))


4]
After all the negative comments I have seen on this forum regarding the purchase process, license activation etc. I was a bit worried when we had placed the order for Kayako Support Suite Owned / 499 USD.

But – no catastrophe came!

Our order was promptly processed and we got our license activated after short time and confirmation phone call from Kayako.

5]
We do not have any internal PHP / MySQL experts here (we are mainly MS-technology based) so we decided to use the external expert to get the system working. We use it for internal IT helpdesk for 300 users, so we opted for very compact installation on this platform:

• Win XP Professional
• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP
• ZendOptimiser
  
• Mail parser against our MailServer
• https access
• Active Directory integration

The external expert hasn't seen Kayako before.
However - it took him just couple of hours to get it installed from scratch and running over https.
Active Directory integration was few more hours, but everything has been successfully completed at the end.

5]
Right now we are in process of Kayako roll-out to our users. We have designed several departments; we are starting to customise templates and custom fields for them etc.

We are aware about some minor limitations, impossibility to edit html (formatted) tickets as you mentioned is one of them. But all those limitations are IMHO negligible comparing to the overall product value.


If I look back at what Kayako team achieved over the last 12 month, I am sure that those limitations will be sooner or later solved and already very good product will be even improved.

Thanks & Keep up the good work, Kayako.

Tomas Dolezal
IT Manager for Central & Eastern Europe
Kingspan
www.kingspan.com


P.S.
You wrote that Kayako was not for multinational companies.
As I can see, you operate in just 4 countries.
The Kingspan division I am responsible for has got headquarters in Czech Republic, big manufacturing plants in Czech, Poland and Hungary and offices in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Croatia, Serbia and Romania. Tell me something about multinationals ;-)
Our IT is divided into 3 departments - ERP Systems, CRM systems & General IT Support


– and yes – I have got couple of pieces of IKEA furniture in my house ;-))))

[sureshkumar.mr]

Originally Posted by Tomas Dolezal

I think that you have to consider the features / price ratio and from this point of view Kayako cannot be beaten.

We were ready to pay a good price for quality product and service. A quality service really matters in this industry. I cannot ask our users to wait for Kayako fixes as we have paid less price for our support tool.

I blame myself many times for not evaluating this product correctly. I have listed the above limitations with good intention so that no one gets into difficulty like me after buying a product.

There is nothing wrong in mentioning the limitations of a product.

Originally Posted by Tomas Dolezal

But you must assemble it on your own. If you are not able to use screwdriver, driller and figure-out sometimes rather clumsy installation diagrams, then this product is not the right one for you. Or you must pay assembly service.

We are good in that and the setup is already in place with ADS integrated long back. We figured out a bug during ADS integration and the solution which we gave has been uploaded in KB article also.

Time matters, we cannot sit and re-write most of the code and test, in that case we would have developed a in-house product itself.

Originally Posted by Tomas Dolezal

I have discovered Kayako more than 1 year ago; when I have found that one of our SW suppliers used it. I was very impressed with the product and price / performance ratio so I decided to try it.

Same way we also got trapped, I swear I didn't go for this product because it was less priced. I am ready to pay more for the support but they need to fix SHOW STOPPER bugs quickly. I cannot wait for years.

Originally Posted by Tomas Dolezal

Many thanks to all the Guinea pigs users which helped to push Kayako v.3 to the state where it is now ;-)

Oh... Then there are so many like me, yes Varun has mentioned above - "thousands of clients"

Originally Posted by Tomas Dolezal

Our order was promptly processed and we got our license activated after short time and confirmation phone call from Kayako.

We didn't face any difficulty in that stage.

Originally Posted by Tomas Dolezal

We do not have any internal PHP / MySQL experts here (we are mainly MS-technology based) so we decided to use the external expert to get the system working. We use it for internal IT helpdesk for 300 users, so we opted for very compact installation on this platform:

Yes, off course works fine with one department, same here, no major issues.

Originally Posted by Tomas Dolezal

Right now we are in process of Kayako roll-out to our users. We have designed several departments; we are starting to customise templates and custom fields for them etc.

All the best Tomas, we have completed that process and waiting for Kayako to come out with a solution to our problem. You will soon come to know the difficulties once you start working with multiple departments.

Originally Posted by Tomas Dolezal

We are aware about some minor limitations, impossibility to edit html (formatted) tickets as you mentioned is one of them. But all those limitations are IMHO negligible comparing to the overall product value.

Yes, I completely agree, fit for those who are looking for a cheaper product.

Originally Posted by Tomas Dolezal

You wrote that Kayako was not for multinational companies.
As I can see, you operate in just 4 countries.
The Kingspan division I am responsible for has got headquarters in Czech Republic, big manufacturing plants in Czech, Poland and Hungary and offices in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Croatia, Serbia and Romania. Tell me something about multinationals ;-)
Our IT is divided into 3 departments - ERP Systems, CRM systems & General IT Support

Good to know that, We wish you to create more departements, templates and custom fields to help them all.

[nibb]

I boutht i since 2 weeks, found several bugs. My livesupport is still doesnt working on my pc or others, even with the latest build. Support is slow. Very. Search the forum better.

But i agree, for the features and price ratio its a good buy.
The only tip would be to launch a stable release only if all features works.