Should I buy eSupport Owned ?

[tryhard]

Hi all

I have read varying reviews of the functionality and support I can expect from Kayako. I would like to thank Kayako for keeping this open approach to discussion, which is a lot better than most products who only display the sales approach and won't discuss the ongoing issues. This positive approach reminds me of the Dreamhost webhost who was one of the earlier 'warts and all' approaches I saw. I hope Kayako appreciates the value of someone like Jamie staying committed to the discussions on here.

So on with my question. I am considering Kayako and a couple of the other well known Help Desk products. The Kayako feature set looks great. The other products ok and also seem to have some shortcomings.

I only have fairly basic requirements - I mainly want :
- a good/simplish UI
- canned responses
- incoming email piped into tickets
- able to create outgoing messages as new tickets with attachments
- creating all communications containing the ticket reference in one thread, no matter which email address communications come from
- reasonably tight security as this system will contain all my client communications,

... and anything would be better than my existing email only solution.

Can others recommend the right decision who are in a situation similar to mine ? Is Kayako owned a good choice, bad choice, why ?

I'm semi technical but if the product is buggy I will rely on reasonably prompt support as I;m not good at troubleshooting heavy duty coding issues. Having said that I doubt I will use most of the product features to their full extent, and if it handles the basics of incoming/outgoing reliably is probably all I need.

And thanks again for the opportunity to ask this question - that feature alone puts Kayako ahead of a lot of the products out there in my opinion !

Thank you !
Carl

[craigbrass]

Kayako's Owned range (eSupport, LiveResponse, SupportSuite) is the best value for money. If you go leased or hosted, you end up paying more.

Kayako is a great product and is getting better on a daily basis. The forums contain a lot of information on how to do things and the manual is coming along fast thanks to Jamie.

I think Kayako give refunds if you are not happy with the product (Jamie will be able to confirm that).

[Jamie Edwards]

If you are at all unhappy with your purchase shortly after purchasing we would be able to refund you - but we would do our best to ensure that whatever issues you had would be resolved, however.

Our support team is very prompt, typically responding to support tickets within a couple of hours (except over the weekend, where the support offices are closed). Obviously, the forums are also here to supplement your support package.

There are a few outstanding bugs in the bug tracker (http://bugs.kayako.com) but this is nothing out of the normal - we look to fix bugs as quickly as possible.

With regards to your requirements:

- a good/simplish UI
I believe (from a customer point of view - I was a user before I joined the team) that the UI on Kayako is unparalleled in terms of ease of use and style. The interface is very regular, and does not take long to absorb yourself in it.

- canned responses
This is standard functionality present in SupportSuite. We refer to ticket canned-responses as "predefined replies" and we refer to live chat canned-responses as "canned-responses".

- incoming email piped into tickets
The piping functionality is very reliable and robust.

- able to create outgoing messages as new tickets with attachments
Tickets can be "created" as a staff user, with files attached. This is equivalent to "sending an e-mail".

- creating all communications containing the ticket reference in one thread, no matter which email address communications come from
This is one of the fundamental principals of the ticket core. The system goes one step further, and attempts to analyse e-mails where ticket IDs are not found in obvious places to try and match a reply to a ticket.

- reasonably tight security as this system will contain all my client communications
The user authentication system (based on sessions and cookies) is very secure. All passwords are hashed and cannot be 'decrypted'. As with most web-based software, security issues do sometimes appear (particular in software that uses a lot of form-based control). Our insecurity incidents are rare, and when they do occur we fix these at highest priority.

I hope this was helpful

If you would like to arrange a 7-day leased trial version, please contact Sales and they will be more than happy to arrange one for you.

[supportskins]

I would suggest you start off with the monthly leased license and try it for a month. If it meets your requirements then you can easily upgrade to an Owned license without loosing any of your data.

[tryhard]

Hi all

Thanks very much for your responses. Despite some of the criticisms of support in the past (I gather, like a lot of products, Kayako has had some challenges) the community here, and the apparent product features, make Kayako a hard package to pass up.

I'll start reading through the features in more detail with the view to trialling it... thanks again for your feedback

Cheers

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi tryhard,

You might find the usermanuals useful (http://docs.kayako.net) as an overview of the features.

[tryhard]

Hi again Jamie et al

I gotta say, after only an hour or so trialling, that Kayako appears REALLY really good. I have tried most of the trials and free installs out there, and none to me seemed anywhere near as intuitive or powerful as Kayako for the stuff I need to do.

I've always been one of those "if all else fails, read the instructions" types ! But I'm now motivated to read the user manuals properly, because Kayako has massive promise for me and I can't wait to be rid of Outlook / Microsoft Mail etc. !

Thanks loads - very happy newbie user

[Racked Hosting]

I would like to add that by trying it out for a month, you will still end up paying the same price (if the discount scheme still exists) when you upgrade to OWNED in the next billing period .

[supportskins]

Kayako does allow you to upgrade by paying the difference in license cost. So if you purchase monthly leased license and decide to upgrade at the end of the month before you next billing cycle then you just need to pay the difference in license cost i.e. Cost of Owned license - Cost of monthly leased license.

[tryhard]

I can see after some more testing that I will wonder what I ever did without Kayako

I often get Outlook up to its 1GB limit before its already limited performance gets worse.

Any ideas on what max database size can be for Kayako before performance suffers ? I guess my planned 6-10 GB wouldn't be a problem ?

Still looking great ... things are looking up in email land

Thanks

[craigbrass]

MySQL is a good database package. It can handle the above database sizes fine as long as your server resources are there. I would recomend a 10GB database to be on a dedicated server with at least 2GB of RAM and a dual core processor though.

A tip is to keep optimizing the database tables. This keeps everything running nice and fast.

[Jamie Edwards]

Craig is correct - it is not so much a matter of the performance of SupportSuite in terms of database size, but instead the performance of the server you are running it and MySQL on.

[craigbrass]

You can have one server for Kayako's PHP files and one for the database if it gets too big for just the one server if you like.

[tryhard]

Thanks again guys for the great advice

[craigbrass]

Your welcome. Let us know if you need any more help.