Top Kayako Alternatives for Busy Teams

Supporting a large customer base and maintaining customer satisfaction is no easy task. While it’s incredibly exciting to gain new customers and sell more products, this usually corresponds with an increase in customer support tickets. Now, one solution is to hire more agents to cope with the demand, but this can be costly. An alternative solution is to adopt help desk software that streamlines your customer support and makes operations more efficient. 

That’s why many teams are turning to customer support tools like Kayako to help them offer stellar customer support. This type of software helps with tasks like ticket management but also offers automations to make your life easier. Collaboration features enable your agents to work more effectively as a team. Advanced reporting capabilities can tell you areas where your team needs to improve. 

But Kayako isn’t the only solution out there, and we’ve presented these top Kayako alternatives to help you make the best decision for your customer support team. 

What is Kayako? 

First, what is Kayako? Kayako is a customer service platform that integrates email, live chat messaging, and social media. You can gain a 360 degree view of the customer through a dashboard that displays the whole customer journey, and take advantage of automations that speed up your workflows for your customer support team. 

A complete help desk, inside Gmail?

Keeping turns your Gmail into a fully featured help desk. It's not magic, but it is magical.

See How in 2 Minutes

The shared inbox features enable your team to collaborate, such as being able to see who is viewing or working on a conversation, which means you can avoid duplicate replies. Internal notes allow you to bring together knowledge and share the next steps on a ticket. Your wider team can contribute behind the scenes as a free collaborator. 

Kayako is a good choice if you want to offer your customers live chat. Kayako’s live chat tool lets you provide a personalized, engaging live chat experience around the clock. You can assist your customers in real-time over all your channels, directly from Kayako’s dashboard. The live chat software can be customized easily and integrated into your website, iOS and Android apps.

With Kayako, you get a full picture of your customer’s journey and have the context behind every interaction. Your support team is aware of every interaction a customer has had with your company and the issues they are struggling with before they even log a ticket. All the information your team requires to provide a personalized and engaging customer experience is readily available.

One final feature Kayako offers is its self-service knowledge base. The knowledge base is fully customized and can help your customers 24/7, even when your agents aren’t working. Kayako’s dashboard tells you when a customer has viewed a help center article. You can set up automatic replies that direct customers to relevant articles to save your agents time. 

Kayako pricing starts at $60 per agent per month. 

Top 8 Kayako alternatives

1. Help Scout

Help Scout is a popular Kayako alternative. As a help desk software, it offers a shared inbox, help center and live chat software to enable your support team to efficiently respond to customer requests. If you want to support your customers over live chat, you can easily install live chat on your site, and collaborate with your team as effectively as you would over email. 

Help Scout is primarily a shared inbox that allows your agents to organize and collaborate over tickets. Automations save your team time and effort, while assignments allow you to allocate tickets to both individuals and teams. Private shared notes help your teams work together on solving tickets, while saved replies allow you to build a searchable library of email templates. 

Help Scout allows you to integrate with all the tools you already use to HubSpot, Salesforce and Shopify so you can bring all your customer data together. Help Scout analytics gives you real-time data on how your agents are handling customer support tickets. You can assess your team’s volume by channel, busiest hours for customers, and trending subjects among your customers.

Help Scout pricing starts at $20 per agent per month. 

If you want to know more about Help Scout alternatives, check out our blog post. 

2. HelpSpot

HelpSpot is simple help desk software that offers a great Kayako alternative. HelpSpot organizes your support emails into tickets, while a shared inbox means you can read, reply and manage multiple email accounts from one shared inbox. Filter, track and categorize your tickets for powerful ticket management. 

Read More: The 6 Best HelpSpot Alternatives in 2022

HelpSpot offers a self-service knowledge base so you can provide an extra resource for your customers. You can customize a knowledge base and contact form for each of your brands, keeping the support experience consistent. You can save full or partial responses to common queries from your customers and save them in your help desk. 

With HelpSpot, you have access to advanced reporting. You can see your ticket volume and track trends. You can track resolution speed, and first response speed. The great thing about HelpSpot is they offer on-premise hosting so you are free to install your own solution of HelpSpot, all for the same price. 

HelpSpot pricing starts at $14 per agent per month. 

3. OneDesk

OneDesk combines powerful help desk software and project management software in a single platform. You can support your customers and manage projects in one place, without having to switch to different tools. Customers submit tickets through OneDesk directly by email, which then creates tickets, replies, classifies and assigns automatically, and captures all future replies. 

OneDesk’s ticket portal allows customers to login to view, submit and discuss their tickets, giving much higher visibility to the support process. OneDesk’s knowledge base empowers customers to find answers to typical queries themselves, without the need to submit a support ticket.

You can discuss customer tickets privately in OneDesk. Automate your workflows to pipe tickets through triage, replies, status-changes and assignments. OneDesk offers live chat so you can support your customers on your website. 

OneDesk pricing starts at $9 per agent per month. 

4. TeamSupport

Kayako alternative TeamSupport is help desk software for B2B companies. TeamSupport offers more than efficient ticket management, since it also provides an omnichannel experience that supports internal team cooperation. TeamSupport has been specifically designed to handle lower volume, higher complexity issues while focusing on collaboration with the company’s customers.

TeamSupport gives you the full view of your customers by integrating with other popular tools and showing past interactions. TeamSupport’s Customer Distress Index (CDI) helps you understand your customers and improve retention. The ticketing tools allow you to automate repetitive processes, so your customer support agents can prioritize being human and shaping strong customer relationships.

Integrate with Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, JIRA and HubSpot, plus many more. Take advantage of enterprise-class live chat and chatbot solutions that have been built to empower customer support and success teams. Get closer to your customers and deliver high-class support. 

TeamSupport pricing starts at $49 per agent per month. 

5. Intercom

Intercom is a customer communications platform that offers a viable Kayako alternative. Using Intercom unifies every phase of the customer journey, from conversion to engagement to support, allowing your customer-facing teams to work more seamlessly together. 

Intercom enables you to provide personalized help at scale with proactive, self-serve, and human support. Your team can use Intercom’s chatbots to send helpful messages to customers, take advantage of the Intercom knowledge base to offer self-service resource, or assist customers over live chat. 

You can lighten your team’s workload and offer instant value by serving help center articles and answers to common questions in the Messenger. Resolution Bot can automate answers to one third of repetitive queries. Intercom’s support is centered around a robust Inbox that makes it simple to support a high volume of customers. 

Intercom pricing requires you to get in touch. 

6. LiveAgent

LiveAgent is a great option if you’re looking for live chat from a Kayako alternative. You can enhance customer engagement and encourage conversions with LiveAgent’s customizable live chat widget. Offer personalized instant support and share an invitation to your customers to chat that’s triggered by the time they’ve spent on your site, location, and visited pages.

LiveAgent offers a help desk platform that unifies your omnichannel support. With LiveAgent, your customers can contact you from any platform. Customers can email, chat, call or message you through social media. LiveAgent empowers you to respond to all their requests from one dashboard.

Once you’re within LiveAgent, you can take advantage of the ticketing system which collects customer inquiries from multiple communication channels and organizes them into one universal inbox. You can receive all your emails, social media inquiries or mentions, calls, live chats, and more into one platform and they can be managed by your agents.

LiveAgent pricing starts at $15 per agent per month. 

7. Zendesk

Zendesk is a very popular customer support platform which makes it a good Kayako alternative for enterprise teams. Zendesk offers an omnichannel support customer experience by combining text, phone, email, live chat, and social media. It has a broad range of functionalities for teams that want to improve their ticket management and customer communication. 

With Zendesk, you can build an integrated help desk and customer communities, which enables customers to resolve their own queries. You can use automation and AI-powered bots to provide the right context to guarantee that customers never have to repeat the same information.

Zendesk offers a ticketing system that makes it very simple to track, prioritize and respond to customers with one unified agent workspace. And with complete customer context, that includes more than a thousand native integrations, your customer support agents can deliver better, more personalized support.

Zendesk pricing starts at $46 per agent per month. 

8. Keeping

No list of Kayako alternatives would be complete without mentioning our very own Keeping. Keeping is a no-fuss, no-frills customer support help desk software designed to work within Gmail to help you manage customer tickets and offer excellent customer service. As soon as you plug Keeping into Google Workspace, your team is up and running with the ability to collaboratively handle customer issues using a user friendly interface. 

Keeping makes your life simple. Incoming customer support emails are turned into tickets, and updated with a status. You can assign emails to particular agents, and even use automated rules to automatically complete the process for you. Collaborate more effectively with internal notes, and advanced collision detection means you can prevent duplicate work. 

Keeping supports multiple shared inboxes so you don’t have to log into different accounts. You can respond from your personal inbox, and support emails are stored separately from your personal emails. It’s possible to set up confirmation receipts so you can let customers know you have received their email. Common responses can be stored as email templates, which you can insert into your replies with a single click. 

Never struggle in the dark again with Keeping’s advanced reporting to help you manage team performance. You can access the data you need to know in relation to how your support teams respond to customers. Track first response time, volume of requests, and how each of your team members responds to support customers.

Wrapping up

As a help desk software, Kayako boasts a large number of features, and its functionality is reflected in its high price point. Maybe your team doesn’t need live chat or a knowledge base and would be much happier with a simple solution like Keeping as the best Kayako alternative. Keepings lets you support your growing customer base over email and makes it easy for support teams to collaborate. 

Keeping can be set up in three minutes, allowing your team to get back to doing what they do best – helping customers and achieving customer satisfaction. With Keeping, you don’t need to learn a whole new system because it works in exactly the same way as Gmail. Agents can stay within their favorite tool while enjoying all the benefits of a full-featured help desk. 

Whichever tool you choose, consider both the features you might need and your ideal budget. Cost-conscious companies are very happy with Keeping as a Kayako alternative and the functionality it offers.