Kayako vs. Topsy

When it works, It's without a doubt a great help desk solution. It is perfect for our usage, and have rolled it out company-wide. It's great if you have multiple departments. We have it set up so most items come through a single desk that then hands out tickets to their proper department. There may be cheaper options for smaller organizations but for one that is as service-driven as ours, we really think Kayako is a great fit.

Incentivized

Based off the price, I'd be hesitant to blindly recommend Topsy unless there is a need for the kind of big data it provides access to. If access to every single Tweet ever sent about your brand is important, then there is nothing else out there will do what Topsy does. At $12,000 per user, this is definitely not a product for the small social team, but if you manage a larger brand where reporting and brand sentiment mean a lot, then you owe it to yourself to evaluate Topsy Pro

• Gives a very good report on an individual level of what is being done for a customer or corporate issue.
• Easy to understand who has what, what the tickets are about, how long they have been opened and how many times the customer/employee have gone back and forth with each other.
• Nice dashboard view.

Incentivized

• Access to every single tweet ever sent since the start of Twitter.
• Immediate access to results - extremely easy to generate search queries.
• Multiple ways to visualize data.

• Departments need a bit of work. Even though you can have multiple departments, the only changes that can be made are globally. If you want independent queues within the departments, you have to do a lot of work that can be very confusing.
• Survey system is not up to speed. Kayako really needs to add Net Promoter Score into their system. Also, if a staff user removes their name from an incident ticket, it removes them from the survey so you really can't even get a good estimate of how well your staff is in the eyes of the customer.
• Very difficult to implement when you already have a customer base. Setting them up in organizations is difficult. Also, the sign-up for new customers is quirky. If you send an email to Kayako, it will say you are not an authorized user, however, it will store your email address. If you try to send an email a second time, it will go through. This is one of many reasons why we decided to move from Kayako to Oracle Service Cloud.

Incentivized

• Pricing is steep and on a per-user basis.
• Limited amount of data sources - Twitter, links and videos.

• We are grandfathered in on their old Software-assurance pricing and our continued use costs us only a few hundred dollars a year (excluding hosting expenses)
• Our team's processes are now heavily ingrained in the system
• We have not been shown a more compelling option that is more cost-effective while still offering all the features we've come to expect

Incentivized

Quite simply, there is no other option out there with the amount of data we can get from Topsy. Others (like Radian6) have a large amount of data, but it isn't as easy to find, and creating reports is too cumbersome. Report generation in Topsy takes seconds, not minutes

I did not come from an IT background and I picked this program up quickly

Incentivized

They are really good, but it takes a while to get back, because of the large time difference to the Eastern US. However, they are very helpful.

Incentivized

• We didn't have to use support too much, but when we did, they were able to assist us and help us make everything work.
• Mostly we used their Online KB and step by step instructions to get all of our issues resolved.

Incentivized

The few times we have asked questions, they were answered instantly by our own account rep

Three years in we are about as happy with Kayako as we could be. We've had several employee's leave and on-boarding new hires was easier than it has ever been as things are uniform and consistent across the entire application.

Incentivized

We were using Spiceworks for a few years before switching to Kayako but found that it wasn't as customizable or as user friendly for our customers. The SNMP scanning and inventory features with Spiceworks was nice but we needed more of a Help Desk that would allow us to scale our services to more companies.

Incentivized

• Tickets were definitely responded to faster once we implemented the audible alarm that would go off when new tickets came into the queue. This was possible because of the API.
• Since the system was email based we could set our monitoring software up to generate tickets automatically via email for customers when it found something out of the ordinary.

Incentivized

• Immediate access to campaign performance data in social. Our sales team regularly requests metrics from campaigns several years old, and with Topsy, we can dig in and find it. This assists in helping them in their sales pitches to new clients and renewing deals with previous clients.