Kayako Takes It Beyond Ticket Solutions

“No, I will not start over for the umpteenth time”

Does this sound familiar? You get in touch with customer service with a problem. The agent asks you to explain the issue. You do. That agent realizes your problem might best be solved by another agent, or in a different department. You’re transferred. You explain the problem all over again.  

Really? Can’t everything you’ve just said simply transfer over to the next agent so you don’t have to restate every word and become more impatient by the sentence? 

Kayako is the help desk platform that gets its raison d'être from sympathizing with some very real-world human problems to deliver personable customer solutions fast, and without repetition. 

Who needs extra hoops

So what is Kayako? In a nutshell, it unifies all communication channels for customer engagement. 

The platform saves and sorts all customer activity and provides a shared inbox among teammates to better exchange relevant customer data when passing an issue from agent to agent or between departments. 

In other words: No more repetition.

Here’s how it works, When you, as a customer, need to get in touch with a company, you can call them, email, or hit them up through their social media accounts. The choice of how to communicate still rests with the customer—they have zero extra hoops to holler through.

On the company’s end, however, is where Kayako makes all the difference. It captures that customer engagement from any channel and logs it with that customer’s file in the Kayako platform. 

Now, even if that same customer gets back in touch through a different channel—say, they tweeted last week but today they are picking up the phone—this doesn’t become a separate thread of communication. Kayako brings it all in line so that the customer service agent sees all communiqués via all channels as one continuous conversation. 

And most importantly of all, the customer doesn’t have to take the agent on a brand new walkthrough of their problem. 

Down the river with Kayako

Journeys and conversations

Kayako captures each customer’s journey by logging every single interaction they’ve had with your company, no matter what channel, and lays these communications out in a neat timeline.

This way, when a customer returns with a problem, the agents are less likely to see the issue as a single problem, but inserts it into a larger customer story, providing more personalized support and improved customer experience.

And just in case two agents are separately dealing with one customer, unbeknownst to each, Kayako alerts them to avoid any collision.

Live chat

When having a live chat with a customer, you’ll see all their relevant details, not only their name, age, location and contact info, but you might also see stats like their purchase history (if you‘re running an online shop).

Kayako’s live chat software can be embedded right onto your website, where it supports both web chatting and mobile chatting on your customer’s end. Switching back and forth from web to mobile in the same conversation is seamless

If nobody is available, you can pre-set a canned response asking for their email to get back to them as soon as someone can help. Otherwise, if they forget to respond, they can get an email reminder that you’re still waiting to help.

Self-service

Not everyone wants to engage with a human, some people just want to trailblaze through an FAQ on their own. No problem.

Kayako helps you manage your Help Center content with an easy-to-use editor and several other features to improve your knowledge base both internally and for curious customers. 

Customers can use natural language to describe their problems when searching for a solution, or simply use familiar tags to bring up any relevant articles. Customers can also rate how helpful an article is, or even add comments to it, thereby always helping you improve the help center.

Furthermore, Help Center articles can be spiffed up with images and GIFs and can support a variety of common languages. 

Going social

Who would have thought that the platforms which made high school reunions possible and cats into virtual celebrities could also be part of a great customer service experience? Well, why not. A great company goes where its customers are.

With Kayako, there’s nothing lost when switching from Facebook or Twitter to other channels of communication, but quite a lot to gain, like a broader picture of your customers.

A cool feature here is grabbing Tweets that contain search words which might be useful for promoting your company and helping customers in need. Similarly, you can track wall posts from Facebook to stay on top of the conversation.

For example, if someone posts to the social media universe a text that has your company name, or product, and the word “faulty” or “disappointed” or “sucks,” you can get on top of that bad publicity right away.

But it’s not just about staying on top of negative press. By being able to follow up with your customers on social media, you can pick out the satisfied ones with the biggest followings and the loudest voices and engage with them to be brand advocates too.  

No thanks, we’ll do it our own way

Founder and CEO Varun Shoor proudly states, “I’ve never been to college. I’ve started [Kayako] and dropped out of high school with no money.” In the past, this statement might sound discouraging coming from the mouth of a CEO. But today, it speaks to a whole new way of imagining the path to success. 

Shoor is also proud to report Kayako as a fully bootstrapped company that has never taken outside cash. 

The non-traditional path worked. Today Kayako is used by over 130,000 support agents, from “startups and Fortune 100 companies to charities and governments,” like Sega, Peugeot, and Toshiba. 

Assuming profit-driven bankrollers would push efficiency scores (eg: number of tickets resolved per day, wait times between responses) over a more human-centric approach to problem-solving, perhaps accepting funding from investors might have corrupted Kayako’s core principle of helping people versus quickly resolving tickets,

Shoor would have none of that. It’s safe to assume that customers in search of support are on his side.  

Every ticket tells a story

Back in the day, customer service was buried in basements or stuffed in back rooms. It was often treated as an afterthought—as if a company only cared about selling something once and moving on.

Today, a customer comes for the whole experience, from browsing to buying to brand-advocating. A problem is not just a ticket to be resolved and crossed off a list; a problem is a human who deserves a personable solution (and likely hates having to repeat themselves).

With Kayako, the aim is to take those solutions and understand them as part of the larger customer experience.