My Experience with Kayako - A Warning.

24th January, 2008 - Posted by Chance -

Kayako makes a pretty awesome support suite that came highly recommended to me from a couple of friends. I will say first off that their support software is top notch and feature packed, and I have no qualms with their product.

Their customer support, however, leaves much to be desired.

Kayako offers a few options for their products- monthly hosted, monthly and yearly leased, owned. We opted for the monthly leased option as we didn’t want to plunk down the hefty $499 price for the owned license. Our major problem with all versions of the Kayako software was that it required either the Zend or Ioncube decoders to be installed on our server in order to run their software- all versions have “encoded” files that require the decoder running to use, including the owned license.

The decoders were causing a performance hit that we didn’t like. We looked around, found another support suite that did not have encoded code, and installed it. It worked. The owned version of it cost 1/4 the price of Kayako. It didn’t require any performance robbing decoders. We decided to go with it and drop Kayako.

This is where the pain began. First, there is no cancel button on their website. The only way to cancel is to contact their support email:

A few days ago, my first email:

I want to cancel this account. Please cancel all renewals of this license immediately.

Their reply:

Can you please let us know the reason for the cancellation of your eSupport License? If you have any issues regarding the product, we will be more than glad to assist you in that.

Waiting for your response.

Ok, you want to know why. I understand that- cool.

My second email:

We have decided to go with a solution that has 100% access to the source code unencoded. We have already made this decision and migrated to the new solution.

Please cancel the account immediately.

The key phrases in this email being “we have already migrated to a new solution” and “cancel the account immediately”.

Their second response:

In case of the Owned license, you will get 99% of open source code. You can modify the source code to customize the software as per your requirement. The 1% source code which is not provided includes the license management files and they are not provided to stop the piracy of the software. Please let me know if you are interested in buying the Owned license as we have some special offers for the day or you want us to cancel your eSupport Monthly Leased license.

Awaiting your response.

I’ll be the first to admit I snapped a little bit after this one. I already told them twice to cancel the account, I already told them we migrated to another solution. I know that in a couple days I am going to be re-billed for the leased license if they do not cancel my account. Now it just smells like they are trying to draw this out and get another payment from me when I have already removed their software from my server, installed another solution, and just want to move on with my life.

My third email:

I can not believe you badger your customers like this. I don’t want to talk about it or see special offers.

CANCEL THE MONTHLY LEASED LICENSE NOW.

If I receive another charge from your company I will file a fraud claim with my bank and perform a charge back. You have guaranteed that I will never be a customer of Kayako in the future, and I will go out of my way to share this experience with others.

Today I was billed again after repeatedly asking them to cancel the account. Kayko has not replied to my previous email or canceled my account.

My final email before I perform a chargeback with my bank:

I was just billed again for this license after I have asked you repeatedly to cancel.

You have 24 hours to refund my payment before I file fraud with Worldpay and my credit card company.

I am waiting for your response.

Screw you Kayako. Take it from someone else who runs a service that does monthly billing- This is not how you treat customers.

You have effectively taken a customer that was pleased with your software but couldn’t use it due to a compatibility issue and turned him into someone who is going to badmouth you to everyone he comes in contact with everywhere he goes online. I’ll get my money back anyway, and all you will have to show for it is bad press. Keep up the good work jerks.

7 Comments

Chance

February 13th, 2008 at 11:32 am    


A quick Followup:

I did some searching and ended up canceling my recurring billing with Worldpay myself after figuring out how to do that. Why you would make a customer search to find out how to cancel your billing arrangement is beyond me.

Kayako eventually replied and said they would refund my credit card for the last payment.

On 2/12/08 the refund was received from Kayako.

Kayako has made some replies to this situation on a post over at The Consumerist- go there to see their views.

Will

February 15th, 2008 at 11:06 pm    


I’ve been somewhat fortunate in that I’ve not required much in the way of support or even contact from Kayako and I’ve got two installs of their eSupport desk as well as the mobile version on my Windows Mobile PDA mobile phone.

I haven’t come across any other support software that offered the key features that I like about eSupport, namely the automatic AJAX look-up of the built-in knowledge base when users are filling in tickets, the automatic ticket closure and the sophisticated email piping with custom rule parsing features.

What support system did you go for in the end?

Chance

February 15th, 2008 at 11:19 pm    


Will,

we ended up going with Support Center from QualityUnit. Full version costs $99 and the support has been great- instant response, and they released a new version the next day to address a specific issue I was having. No encoders needed, it does email piping and kb (our two must-have features), and there is automatic AJAX lookup of kb articles as they type like Kayako. Its very easy to integrate a ticket form including the auto AJAX lookup into your existing pages- something we were having difficulty with using Kayako.

I don’t think it has mobile features, but they do have live chat options, etc. you can add on.

I am going to do an in-depth review of Support Center in the next week or so as soon as we publish the next version of Secure Delivery and I have some extra time on my hands. Support Center will be integrated as part of the next update too.

they have a free single agent trial that is otherwise full version with all features that you can try out- I’d highly recommend it:

http://www.qualityunit.com/supportcenter/

InfoQuick

February 7th, 2009 at 12:26 am    


Thanks for the recommendation for Support Center from QualityUnit.

My experience with Kayako is that it is very complex and painfully slow (the hosted version that is).

For a mere $0 taking Support Center for a spin is a no brainer. If I like what I see I’ll send them $99. Please post your affiliate link here (and, if you could be so kind, email it to the address provided with this post).

I’m glad I found your website. Thank you. Google saves the day yet again.

I’m installing on Windows 2005 Server Standard Edition. Stay tuned for my feedback…

InfoQuick

February 7th, 2009 at 8:49 am    


Well that sure was fun. Installing PHP on a Windows 2003 server sure is lots of work. I could not have done it without Peter Guy’s step-by-step guide… “How to Install PHP 5.x on Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6″ located at: http://www.peterguy.com/php/install_iis6.html.

Installing Support Center was a cinch. Figuring out how to administer the site was a bear. They overload the login panel to redirect you to the administrator, agent, or customer dashboard depending on your login details. Not intuitive at all. You really need to run the demo to get a overview of how this aspect of the system works.

Here’s something special… Quality Unit the publishers of Support Center will install the software on your server for no additional charge. Just buy the $99 version and they’ll get it all set up on your server within 3 days. Sweet!

So far I’m really impressed. This software is really fast (thanks to AJAX) and is easy to use.

More feedback in a few days…

Viktor Zeman

March 27th, 2009 at 5:26 am    


Hello,

I’m co-owner of Quality Unit and I’m happy that I see so positive feedback to our software here.

In the last months we have many customers already, which migrated from Kayako to SupportCenter.

I don’t know what does Kayako wrong, but it seems to me like trend of last months and we are happy, that customers choose our software on place of their.

I saw in comment, that price of SupportCenter is $99 - this is not true anymore, price is not $199.

$99 was just promotion price and this promotion finished few weeks ago.

Still is valid our money back guarantee - we refund every customer within 30 days after order, if he doesn’t want to use our software and will remove it from his server. We don’t ask stupid questions like Kayako support, we do refund if required. Cancelling of hosted account is also no problem - upon request by email to our support we do it within 24 hours.

If anybody will have any questions about our application, don’t hesitate to contact our support or read our knowledgebase: http://support.qualityunit.com/knowledgebase/supportcenter.html

Chance

March 29th, 2009 at 1:15 am    


In my opinion Support Center is worth every penny of $199. We still use it to this day.

Leave a reply

Name *

Mail *

Website