Innovations and changes are continually chasing every industry. So it was with the announcement of the end-of-life for Kayako Classic on July 2016. The vendor decided to shut down the development of the on-premise version and set up a cloud version. This is how the Kayako vs Kayako Classic comparison was born.
What’s All the Fuss About?
If you offer customer service, you are familiar with the pressing need to reduce cost spending. And so far, Kayako in the cloud turns out to be a win-win option for the vendor and you as a customer.
But the other hot button topic is a help desk data migration. Customers of Kayako Classic have to decide: to stay with the download version continuing to pay an annual licensing or to switch to Kayako in the cloud and get the upgraded toolbox.
What’s the difference between Kayako vs Kayako Classic? There are pretty many changes apart from the hosting type. The vendor had excluded or improved some features and introduced the others as shiny and fresh ones. Don’t make a “so what” shrug as the New Kayako can satisfy your unmet needs. Let’s draw a kind of distinction between those two Kayakos.
Kayako Classic Options Missing in the Cloud
Far not all of the old features are useful. Some may be redundant from the vendor’s point, while others are useless in the customer's opinion. Here are the features still supported in Kayako Classic:
- There is no need to configure activities with cronjob tasks. The new Kayako does it all in real-time.
- POP3 & IMAP email queues should be set up to fetch emails. The cloud help desk version enables that by setting support email accounts to forward messages to your Kayako account.
- Insight’s section replaces KQL queries for collecting reports in the new version. This section enables a set of pre-built dashboards.
- Color-coded ticket flags are still available. In the New Kayako, the custom fields and tags handle the ticket categorization.
- The internal rating can check how are the support team and agents doing.
- Support site widgets continue to work in Classic Kayako, while in the cloud you can get a customizable Help Center.
- You won't find the news subscriptions that send the updates to News articles subscribers in the cloud version.
- Within the Classic version, you can export tickets in the printer-specific format. In the New Kayako, you can only print them off the browser window.
Features to Improve Customer Support
Taking a job-to-be-done approach, the on-demand Kayako brings a list of the brand-new features:
- Social media (Facebook and X) has joined to the support channels.
- Kayako Messenger is introduced to streamline your live chat support and capture customer messages if there is no agent online.
- The cloud Kayako improved the workflows with time-based and event-based triggers. They automate assignments, notifications, priorities, tags, status and any other attributes of emails.
- Collaborators are a kind of support team members that don’t interact with customers directly. These people are outside your company, but they can add private notes on the tickets to streamline the issue resolvement.
- You can set the required fields and add the descriptions to custom forms. All for the sake of making clear what or why the information is needed.
- The New Kayako delivers open API, Zapier integration and custom endpoints. The last one allows you to define the endpoints (third-party external systems) to which data from Kayako will be sent.
- Improved search option helps to find your request from whole Kayako system.
- All accounts despite the domain type can get the SSL certificate.
- The two-factor authentication and single sign-on for the support team strengthened the security section.
- Unlike Kayako Classic, in the cloud version, you can deliver outstanding self-service. Plus, you can brand your Help Center using HTML or CSS.
What Functionality Got Updated
The New Kayako vs Kayako Classic shares features that differ in their performance. It’s worth to read on if you still doubt to switch or not to switch the platform.
- In the cloud-hosted, you have a single sign-in into the agent and admin control panels.
- Kayako Classic departments become teams in the New Kayako. The tickets get assigned to teams, views are built depending on the team’s tickets, and the access rules can be set for agents and teams.
- The views come into a ticket filters place. In the New Kayako, you can use any criteria you want for building views.
- In the cloud, you can create the automated SLA escalations to monitor, prevent and fix the breaches in performance.
- With the built-in time-tracking, you can monitor the time spent on each ticket and set up what’s billable and what’s not.
- The satisfaction rating got new scaling “Good/Bad” for the tickets and “Helpful/Not helpful” for the knowledge base articles.
- Real-time notifications replaced the ticket lock. Now they go on any actions taken to a ticket which are available for all agents.
- Help Center delivers editing tools. So in the New Kayako, you can brand content, edit articles, change style and organization, set default languages without leaving the Help Center. That said, the enterprise customers can add multiple brands.
Why Choose a Cloud-Hosted Help Desk?
On the whole, in the Kayako vs Kayako Classic comparison, the new cloud-hosted version offers more attractive features for delivering a comfortable support service environment. The cloud version also wins as it lets you cut back on the support and maintenance. But some companies still doubt due to taking cloud-hosting too good to be true. Let’s disperse the possible suspicions.
Generally, software as a service (SaaS) is one of the cloud computing services that you rent on a per-user/month basis. In simple English, a cloud-hosted help desk is available on-demand online from vendor’s servers. You get straightforward access to resources and applications managed by a vendor.
With that said, there are still aspects requiring your attention and pitfalls to watch out. That’s a cold hard fact that cloud computing may bring you such challenges as:
1. Data security is one of the most pressing and troubling concerns. But this aspect is entirely handled by the vendor on the stage of help desk platform development. Kayako ensures that its app delivers automatic security compliance for you as an end-user. Here is the tip: before buying a SaaS license, always check the vendor’s security policies.
From a pragmatic view, let’s outline the key Kayako security policies strengths. There are three points:
- physical security (facilities backup, background checks, and assurance program)
- platform security (SSL encryption, DDoS mitigation, disaster recovery, and backup)
- product security (single sign-in, two-factor authentication, credential storage, role-based access and PI-based restrictions, API security and authentication, email signing, spam filtering, and password policies)
2. Downtime may happen due to many reasons. As for Kayako, it follows a multi-level backup and disaster recovery strategy. Their system makes backups and snapshot with different intervals.
3. Complicated integration with the cloud help desk platform usually happens when you decide to connect your on-premise apps. It’s better to analyze the integration opportunities of the desired platform before switching your data. In this sense, the New Kayako offers open API, webhooks, native integrations and integration via Zapier.
From there, you can make appropriate modifications, set workflows between Kayako and other business apps you run either on-demand and on-premise.
On Kayako Classic to Kayako Migration
Migrating your help desk isn’t the easiest task. So is using software that is no longer supported and updated. Speaking of the moving from Classic to the New Kayako without exposing your data, you can use the Help Desk Migration service.
The competitive advantage of this automated service data types available for migration. It will transfer your tickets, contacts, organizations, agents, groups, public and private notes, comments, inline images and time stamp (created_at.) Besides, you can switch the knowledge base articles, attachments and tags. Overall, the API-based migration from Classic to the cloud Kayako takes less time and ensures data security.
