KayakoReviews of kayako.com

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.