Open Criticizm - my overall Kayako experience

[vinny]

8th months later, less than a year....

First, I haven't been to these forums in quite sometime (a few months). Depending on how you look at it, that's either a good thing or a bad thing. Good in the sense that business could be going swell and I don't need to hit anybody up for redundant help or obvious solutions. Bad in the sense that perhaps to be a part of a "community" one has to "participate" more. However you look at it, it is what it is. But I make no claim to be in the Kayako "fam" -- it's not like it's Open Source That being said -- upon entering these Forums just now, I'm completely turned off. What's with all this new warning agreement thing? Wow - I've been to many Forums in my day, and I haven't seen the screening this bad in a while...

Okay, my 1st rant out of the way....

I'm back here posting because of I'd like to share my experience with other owners of SupportSuite. Call it flaming or criticism, I actually don't care -- because it's my final time here. But I'd just like to point out some circumstances to people who actually run a small business, spend money on solutions, and make every attempt be just as successful as the next business.

I purchased SupportSuite Owned on November 20, 2006. At the time -- it seemed as though this was the solution I had been looking to purchase for a very long, long time. These circumstances were due to the fact that I had purchased NUMEROUS software packages such as ModernBill, Daylite, BaseCamp, etc. etc. prior. Although evaluation after evaluation after purchase after purchase, I finally decided that SupportSuite was the end-all, do-all.

I bought it. Then, soon after, I noticed that there were certain areas that I could not brand my company without purchasing a "brand free" option. So I purchased that also. So here I am, two months into my SupportSuite experience. I customize, I convert my Clients, I'm rolling. Business is moving and I'm actually having fun! A few times I'd come back to the Forums and ask for a little help. I admit that I did not quite make use of my Tech Support offered by Kayako -- I figured I could get answers quicker in the Forums. I did. For the most part.

THEN, I had an issue where a feature just was not working. I opened a Ticket. It took weeks for Kayako to reply. But I went ahead and kept the Ticket open. WEEKS later, no response. I even created an account for a Tech to login and help out -- something I never do ...like give out FTP passwords. Weeks go by, still no help, still no solution. The issue is irrelevant now -- but the point is that they abandoned me. *poof*

AND NOW, the tough luck part. This is where it gets good: about 3 months ago, I received a very odd email from a member at Kayako. From the company. The letter claimed that I had voilated their Terms by removing Branding and this that and the other, and they threatened me that unless if I adhere or comply, they will take immediate strict legal action against me! I couldn't help but be confused, but laughing at the same time. Not once in my life has someone threatened me in this way, and I felt like that criminal mistaken identity. So I emailed Kayako back and told them that I in no way had voilated any Policy and that I took total offense to their accusation. I also directed them to my Members Area where it clearly shows that I purchased a Brand Free version of the OWNED Support Suite. I almost WISHED they had harrassed me more -- I'd counter-sue like....like...oh nevermind. You get what I'm saying. Then *poof* they went away. No apology, nothing.

I'm curious, anyone else receive an email like this? How are they tracking my website anyway? Smells fishy. Oh and don't get on me about paranoia -- did any of you receive your "courtesy" call on the phone when you purchased their product? Oh I call that COMPLETE paranoia, wtf. Ridiculous.

OH YEAH, and you all know SoftAir that constantly spams these forums with their customized and expert solutions for SupportSuite? Well I have record on file too about contacting them about a custom paying gig. That's right, I enjoyed SupportSuite I wished to invest more money into it. They seemed legit and their devs even started piping my project through build levels etc. I was excited! But guess what? SoftAir ignored me for weeks, then when I sent them a very short letter that I was not, "too comfortable with this working relationship" -- their owner emailed me to revisit the project. I happy declined.

Currently, doing Summer cleaning and checking all my apps for updates -- I see that SupportSuite has a new update. So casually stumble over to the Members Area, login, and whattaya know? MY UPGRADE PERIOD HAS EXPIRED?!?!?! What the F___? Has ANYONE in these Forums ever purchased Web or Desktop software for close to $300 and had their upgrades expire in 6 MONTHS?!

So in final, the moral of this is that Kayako -- no matter how "almost great" their product is -- they are now classified as a bad company. Trust me, if you think I'm ranting I'll let you know that I don't do this everyday -- like I don't reject food at a restaurant if there's something wrong with it. I suck it up, eat it (or don't), and still tip very well. So this rant is warranted and I stand behind my conclusion 100%. Regardless of any discount or basic descrepencies that occurred down the road -- the fact of the matter is that I was a paying consumer and as the global economy knows -- a product is useless without us.

To me, my business ethic is not, "for every 1 sale or client lost, you will gain 10 more." I stand behind the philosophy of, "for every 1 sale or client lost, you will lose 10 more or go out of business quick."

It's easy for the "lucky" ones with perfect experiences to flame on 1 bad criticism from a disgruntled ex-customer -- but the honest truth still prevails....

So Kayako, if you stand behind your customers or if you challenge anything I've said, then don't delete this post and allow your loyal consumers to comment and share. It's the least you can do. But I promise you, beyond the average Tech website -- I truly do not see your company gaining more business or getting any better from here on out. Sorry to say, but it's pretty ironic you sell Support Software! You're great programmers and good at what you do (I suppose), but for $300 and wasting my time writing this -- you're also really good at being a bad company...

I WAS DUPED BY A BAD COMPANY. ENJOY MY $. BYE.

P.S. No spell-check was harmed in the writing of this post. Yes, I know it's, "criticism" or "violated" - but it's 3am. Cheers.

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi Vinny,

It makes me very sad to hear of such complaints and problems, like those you have posted. For the benefit of yourself and readers, I'll try to address some of your points.

What's with all this new warning agreement thing? Wow - I've been to many Forums in my day, and I haven't seen the screening this bad in a while...

Do you mean the forum rules? They are just that - nothing more than forum rules, so people know what to expect and what not to expect.

THEN, I had an issue where a feature just was not working. I opened a Ticket. It took weeks for Kayako to reply. But I went ahead and kept the Ticket open. WEEKS later, no response. I even created an account for a Tech to login and help out -- something I never do ...like give out FTP passwords. Weeks go by, still no help, still no solution. The issue is irrelevant now -- but the point is that they abandoned me. *poof*

I am disappointed to hear this. Even though it sounds as if you are past any point of us reconciling with you, could you provide me with this ticket ID or the e-mail address from which you raised the ticket so that I can find it and find out why it was not handled?

AND NOW, the tough luck part. This is where it gets good: about 3 months ago, I received a very odd email from a member at Kayako. From the company. The letter claimed that I had voilated their Terms by removing Branding and this that and the other, and they threatened me that unless if I adhere or comply, they will take immediate strict legal action against me!

This is an obvious mistake on our part - and we can do little else but to apologise (again) for the mistake. I also feel that the tone of the notice you received was out of order and will look to ensure these kinds of situation are handled competently from now on.

Smells fishy. Oh and don't get on me about paranoia -- did any of you receive your "courtesy" call on the phone when you purchased their product? Oh I call that COMPLETE paranoia, wtf. Ridiculous.

This isn't paranoia, or a courtesy call for that matter. As you were told during the ordering process, we verify all orders manually to combat fraudulent orders - I am not sure what paranoia of ours would be satisfied by calling you after you have placed an order, but I do assure you that the verification method has worked; we are down to around one fraudulent order per week as opposed to more than 5.

Currently, doing Summer cleaning and checking all my apps for updates -- I see that SupportSuite has a new update. So casually stumble over to the Members Area, login, and whattaya know? MY UPGRADE PERIOD HAS EXPIRED?!?!?! What the F___? Has ANYONE in these Forums ever purchased Web or Desktop software for close to $300 and had their upgrades expire in 6 MONTHS?!

I am sorry that this arrangement did not suite you, but if the support and upgrades period was a concern for you there were other license options to consider - such as the yearly leased license, which has a support and upgrades period for as long as you hold the license for.

you're also really good at being a bad company...

I completely understand your frustrations and sheer bad luck of having two mishaps happen to you - but I do feel that this accusation is not warranted; we try our hardest to help our customers. I am fully aware that there are areas of improvement we as a company need to make, and they will happen. Improvements have been happening continuously - I am sure many will give testimony to that.

Once again, I am very sorry to lose you as a customer, and for the problems you encountered using our software. I hope we will be meeting at some point in the future and hopefully on better terms

[craigbrass]

With support, clients have two options. Support directly from Kayako which is included in your maintenance fee you pay every 6 months (which includes updates as well) or the forum route. You are not guaranteed to get support from Kayako staff here on the forum although Jamie (operations manager) is here to help out. There is also myself, Hiren from SupportSkins and a few others who just come here to assist other users because we enjoy doing so (we do not get paid for doing it just to make that clear).

When you mention the warnings thing, are you talking about this? If so I don't really like it either as I feel doing this to a forum makes it seem like police are watching over the forum. But, that is Jamie's decision and I respect that.

The reason for Branding Free being a paid option is that having the links on lots of helpdesks gets Kayako's Google Pagerank up which in turn generates them business. If they let everybody remove, they would have to do lots of marketing instead of this to get the business in so they must charge for this.

The ticket you refer to that wasn't answered for a long time, do you have a ticket ID? It would be interesting to see if Jamie could find out why it took so long.

The email you mention about violating Kayako's terms of service, do you still have them? If so could you post them. It would be interesting to see how this mistake could of happened.

The call you get from Kayako is not a courtesy call. It is to verify your order to ensure it isn't a fraud order. Fraud in digital goods is very common to Kayako must do this to protect themselves from chargebacks.

When you say SoftAir spams, this is not true. They as well as Hiren from SupportSkins simply help other users when problems arise that they know how to fix. They also post a lot of offers for free modifications and paid modifications in the market place. This is not really what I would call spamming.

With regards to the support and upgrades, I at first did agree it was a little pricey when I first came to Kayako a couple of years ago and did raise this point with Varun (owner of Kayako) at the time but after starting to develop my own software package, I now realise why this must be charged at the price it is. Continuous development needs continuous investment. Simple as.

[craigbrass]

Looks like you beat me to it Jamie

[Jamie Edwards]

When you mention the warnings thing, are you talking about this? If so I don't really like it either as I feel doing this to a forum makes it seem like police are watching over the forum. But, that is Jamie's decision and I respect that.

The infractions system allows us to send out notices (warnings) or infractions (which are points) so we have a record of who has already been warned for something or who has already been given an infraction for something.

If we had to type out a private message for every notice sent through the infractions system ourselves, the forum would be barely moderated - it would take up too much time. I think an 'infraction' sounds worse than what it is, but it is a standard feature in vBulletin and a very useful one at that.

Can we please stop discussion of third parties inside the Kayako Comments forum. If you would like to comment on SoftAir, please do so in the Marketplace forum (where SoftAir have their own threads for comments and testomonials).

Originally Posted by craigbrass

Looks like you beat me to it Jamie

The world might just end!

[Siora]

To comment on SoftAir...my experience with them at first was great, they were prompt with responses when trying to provide a quote for me but when I turned their offer down, it seems like communication on their part died. I tried numerous times to get information regarding the joomla loginshare help that they provided to someone here but got no response from them (even after 3 emails directly to JC). But that has nothing to do with Kayako, that is Softair's business practice so it should not reflect on Kayako in anyway.

Even though Kayako support may be lacking at times, I find that this forum is a great place to come and get help and provide help as much as possible. I am by no means a Kayako expert but I still come here to try to provide some answers and also ask questions hoping that the same courtesy will be demonstrated to me, and it has.

That being said, other then the slow feature request implementation, I think Kayako has been great and will continue to be great if they attempt to meet customer's requirements in a more prompt manner (as you can see from numerous customer complaints on this forum).

[craigbrass]

The world might just end!

It may just! lol

With regards to the infractions system, I didn't realise THAT many people did stuff wrong here. If there are, are these just small things or a large things? I really don't notice anyone doing anything wrong (apart from me who gets a wrist slap over WLM occasionally from you ).

[Jamie Edwards]

Originally Posted by craigbrass

It may just! lol

With regards to the infractions system, I didn't realise THAT many people did stuff wrong here. If there are, are these just small things or a large things? I really don't notice anyone doing anything wrong (apart from me who gets a wrist slap over WLM occasionally from you ).

The infractions system is not utilised by us so much as a mechanism for punishment, but as a way of pointing things out in the rules (such as advertising outside of the Marketplace, which is the most common one mistake people have made) but simply as a very good way of keeping track of exactly how many times someone has done something 'wrong'.

Very few infractions have to be given out here (aside from the instant ban infraction used for spammers).

[craigbrass]

Ah, suppose its just the official nature of it I have a problem with (and by the looks of it, Vinny) anyway.

[gedsta07]

We have 13k of users on our forum and when we have issued infractions, (apart from spammers) it just causes pms full of abuse and accusations of being like a school teacher.

Hence we no longer use them unless you are a spammer. Seriously I wouldn't even bother with them now. Its a good idea, but people's backs just get raised.

[craigbrass]

it just causes pms full of abuse and accusations of being like a school teacher

Yes gedsta07, that was the point I was trying to make.

[gedsta07]

It's weird really how people react to them, one moderator got a death threat to his family, obviously we reported the member to his ISP.

[Jamie Edwards]

Originally Posted by gedsta07

It's weird really how people react to them, one moderator got a death threat to his family, obviously we reported the member to his ISP.

Maybe an oversight is that we (as forum administrators) are aware of the features and intentions behind the forum software we use in good detail, whereas the forum users may not be as acutely aware as us. I'll take this as food for thought

[vinny]

Hello, I wasn't going to revisit this, but I've gotten numerous PM's and it appears this post is active, so I'll reply. Of course there have been good experiences from other customers - so that's always a good balance in a democracy....

1. I can't find the ticket number, I'll dig or PM you. I can remember 2 I opened. One was about sessions not authorizing; and another about some Javascript with the Quick Insert method for custom replies, etc. As stated, I even gave Kayako an temp Admin acct to debug. As for the branding letter I received - it wasn't as harsh as previously posted, but a legal threat nonetheless.

2. Been around forums for a while, even had an old Ikonboard CGI back in the day that had very popular traffic. My comment was that I was already 'weary' about Kayako's business practice -- that the filtration in the Forums just added more fuel to the fire you can say. My reaction was that there seems to be 1 too many steps to an ultimate goal -- satisfied patrons = stronger community.

3. I mention SoftAir merely because there is heavy cross-promotion going on here. Hence the reason I contacted them in the 1st place. My experience with SoftAir was similar to Siora's. I approached them since they seemed to be the "go-to" guys re: Kayako customization, and the blew me off. Not Kayako's fault -- but again, more fuel. When I mentioned that they "spam the forums" my comment was to convey that, lets face it, advertising is advertising. You either offer FREE contributions in an open forum because you're a generous soul, or you add your href in your sig. But don't 50% help in the Forums and evade that the other 50% is easily affordable We get it. Bottomline, they're a small business like the rest of us -- but they neglected a done deal.

4. I could use Cerbrus or Flyspray or whatever. I chose to pay for SupportSuite Owned - not the hosted version because I run my own Plesk server. I went through every avenue evaluate SupportSuite, and yes in the outcome I felt duped. I felt good money gone down the drain. Primarily, the reason why I'm aggravated, is that I don't think there is one software solution that has given me this much grief from start to finish. But perhaps just chalk me up to that 1% statistic -- if you so choose.

5. I was not aware that when you receive a buggy/broken product that your CVS and upgrades expire in 6 months. Just because other's have solved issues or worked out the kinks doesn't mean the software is flawless. If that's the case, then where's my refund? I never asked for my money back -- I merely wished for a working product: all features, not some. Or help me fix it, sooner than never.

6. Since I'm a JavaScript/ActionScript guy - I have set out on my own LAMP, Ajax quest to build an open source application to suit my needs at this stage. It will be a full compatible component for Joomla 1.5, PayPal and loginshare for aMember Pro. I'm in absolutely no competition or skill level to even try to bluff at the hard team of Kayako developers. But in the end, I'll have no one else to flame on except myself. That's how we all get the job done right? But obviously, writing my own app is what I was trying to avoid - that's why I paid to support other developers.

I guess you can say that since I received the demand letter from Kayako about mistaking my Brand Free license -- I've been a skeptic and naysayer ever since. But that's just it. Prove the naysayers wrong - show me that you care. We live in this pseudo new-tech society where so many talented people are underpaid and wear too many hats -- Kayako should hire n00b sales and support staff to tackle THESE issues - and stick to developing.

No, the world's not coming to an end. But there are millions of post's and email's and phone calls like mine happening this very second all over the world. Please, put an end to this messy business.

[Digital Mayhem]

Originally Posted by vinny

Currently, doing Summer cleaning and checking all my apps for updates -- I see that SupportSuite has a new update. So casually stumble over to the Members Area, login, and whattaya know? MY UPGRADE PERIOD HAS EXPIRED?!?!?! What the F___? Has ANYONE in these Forums ever purchased Web or Desktop software for close to $300 and had their upgrades expire in 6 MONTHS?!

Lets see ModernBill you spend $179.95-$999.95+ and only get 6 months of support/upgrades and then have to spend like $80 to renew it for another 6 months.. Almost all companies do this now and days..