Mar201221

Jamie Edwards

9

Kayako Mobile for iOS is Now Available in the App Store

We are really pleased to announce that Kayako Mobile for iOS is now available in the App Store.

Joining Kayako Mobile for Android and Windows Phone, Kayako Mobile for iOS brings an amazing helpdesk experience to your iPhone, iPad and iPod. We have created a beautiful, tailored experience for both of the iPad and iPhone interfaces, focusing entirely on ease of navigation and speed when it comes to managing tickets on-the-go.

On the iPad, we’ve exploited all of that screen space with a sliding panel interface that’s perfect for multi-tasking.

On the iPhone, we have kept Kayako Mobile compact, with a focus on rapid navigation and decluttering your view.

Features

• Multiple helpdesk account support – manage multiple helpdesks from within one app.
• Ticket management on your iPad and iPhone.
• Offline support – take a snapshot of your open tickets for use even when out of service.
• Sliding and stacked panel interface on the iPad puts all of the important information in your helpdesk in the forefront.
• Sleek tabbed iPhone interface keeps focus, puts common actions at your fingertips.
• Support for searching and filters (saved searches), synced from the helpdesk.
• Support for ticket notes and time tracking/billing information.

On the iPad

Click to expand the screenshots. From left-to-right: the helpdesk account view (departments, statuses and ticket filters) and a ticket listing, opening a ticket into a new sliding panel, opening tickets from search results, adding a note to a ticket.

Gesture tip: Sliding panels can be repositioned, and you can clear your view by sliding a panel or a stack of panels all the way to the right and releasing.

On the iPhone

Click to expand the screenshots. From left-to-right: the helpdesk account view (departments, statuses and ticket filters), the ticket listing, a ticket, adding a note to a ticket.

Gesture tips

• After adding an account, pull down to refresh on the helpdesk account list. Pull down to refresh in any ticket to reload data from your helpdesk.
• Swipe on a ticket in the ticket listing to delete.
• On the iPad, sliding panels can be repositioned, and you can clear your view by sliding a panel or a stack of panels all the way to the right and releasing.

Get Kayako Mobile for iOS

Kayako Mobile was approved and published to the App Store about two hours before this post. According to Apple, it may take up to 24 hours for the app to become available worldwide.

The latest 4.40 update for your helpdesk is required in order to use Kayako Mobile.

Your feedback on the forum is welcomed. Happy mobile helpdesking!

Mar201219

Kanika Minhas

1

Case Study: Hitachi Europe IFG Sees User Adoption Success and Frees Up Agent Time with Kayako

Hitachi Europe, part of the Japanese conglomerate giant Hitachi, is one of the world’s leading technology companies. They develop technologies and provide services in sectors as varied as consumer technology, IT, heavy industry, automotive and even nuclear.  The Information Systems Group (IFG) is one of the five business units of Hitachi Europe.

Hitachi’s IFG is dedicated to providing best-of-breed solutions, consultancy and support and training services for their enterprise IT solutions. Additionally, IFG is qualified to deal with designing, implementing and supporting the technologies they provide and is spread across Europe, Middle East and Africa with its headquarters in the United Kingdom.

Mohsin Chaudhry, the group’s security solutions consultant, kindly agreed to share their team’s Kayako experience and told us why they chose Kayako for their helpdesk, the kind of value Kayako has delivered to their business and how that fits in and facilitates Hitatchi’s IFG customer support philosophy.

“Our support staff keeps for Kayako what I call a ‘steady even keel’”

The IFG’s services have hardly been something to complain about, but as the number of community sites has ballooned, so has the number of support tickets and issues coming in. Mohsin credits Kayako with enabling his support team to respond to 6,000 tickets in a single month.

“By using Kayako to respond to hundreds of tickets at a time, my Support staff keeps for Kayako what I call a ‘steady even keel’, leaving them free to create a more proactive support infrastructure and address any larger support issue which may arise.”

Kayako’s ability to handle support tickets en masse proved to be a tremendous help in addressing site-wide problems, settling hundreds of tickets in a few actions (sometimes with as little as just one response).

And while the company’s support team has significantly expanded, the same features that made them efficient when they were small continue to fuel that same caliber of efficiency as the team continues to grow.

“When we have a site issue that’s happening on 800 different communities, multiply that by the number of people who are paying attention to each individual site. One incident would blow up with literally hundreds of tickets in a short amount of time.”

Building a knowledgebase encourages smarter inquiries

By building a well organized and easy to navigate knowledgebase, customers get encouraged to search and find their own answers to commonly asked questions. The more knowledge that can be collected and reused, the more agent time can be spared and the faster issues can be diagnosed and resolved. Inspired from this, more recently IFG has been building out their knowledgebase.

“We’ve found that with a built out knowledgebase, we are suddenly getting much smarter questions from customers. When customers contact us, they often reference articles that they saw which helps explain the context of their question. It makes our jobs much easier when our customers are better informed.”

“People are shy so you have to led by example. We try to give people a framework to encourage sharing. Moreover, the biggest challenge is just getting people to the knowledgebase. So we try to build compelling content to attract them there. We’ve recently posted a lot of how-to articles”. 

“By pulling them onto the knowledgebase it’s easier for people to find the articles when they need them.”

An easy-to-access helpdesk encourages rapid user adoption

“We knew firsthand that Kayako was a flexible, intuitive solution, and we found it cost-effective to implement,” says Mohsin. “Throughout our implementation process, Kayako’s support staff was extremely helpful and attentive.

Mass-ticket actions, ticket macros (prescribed responses), and ease of assigning tickets to other staff members have been a huge help to the IFG. “Our productivity and efficiency has improved immensely since switching to the Kayako software.

“With Kayako, we’ve revamped our entire help desk operation. Employees are giving lots of feedback along the lines, ‘This is so easy! Why didn’t you guys do this much sooner?’”

Mohsin’s team had a lot to say about working with Kayako’s interface. “Its simplicity and minimal settings made it easy for agents to begin using it right away, without the need for custom programming, which can sometimes cost a company weeks of valuable time.” 

The IFG had used other help desk systems before, and found many of them to have clunky, complicated user interfaces that got in the way of agent productivity. With Kayako, even those who had never used help desk software could hit the ground running.

Improving efficiency and enabling personalized customer support

It seems almost paradoxical, but Kayako has helped the team to increase the efficiency of its help desk and support operation overall, but not at the cost of personalized customer support – even having taken advantage of Kayako’s automation and bulk management tools, the team can provide human customer support; the personalization of email and the efficiency of a robust helpdesk.

Using Kayako’s helpesk reporting and analytics engine, Mohsin can check ticket volumes, response times and a range of other statistics to get an immediate sense of performance, productivity and even identify potential problem tickets early on.

“With Kayako, we can easily identify trends in the questions our members are asking, and then use this information to guide our product development decisions.”

“Moreover, our job is to keep our employees – happy and productive. Kayako has already solved so many issues for us, and has given us a holistic view of customer satisfaction so that we can keep improving on what we’re offering.”

Mar201207

Jamie Edwards

0

The Best Helpdesk Experience for Windows Phone Just Got Better

We are continuing to build on top of our mobile apps, and working hard to deliver an even better helpdesk experience to Windows Phone. So we are pleased to announce that Kayako Mobile for Windows Phone 1.3 is now available in the Marketplace. The update includes:

• Unassigned tickets pivot view: If you go to the “options” pivot on an account you can now toggle both the “My Tickets” and new “Unassigned Tickets” pivot.

• Attach drawings to tickets: As well as being able to attach photos, you can now attach line-drawings to tickets. This can be handy for illustration or capturing signatures.

• Improved ticket macro view: Now displayed by category with a reply contents preview.

• Pin individual tickets to the start screen: You can now pin individual tickets (in addition to creating Live tiles from departments and ticket search results) to the start screen for quick access.

• Optional ‘light’ theme: For those who aren’t keen on white-on-black.

As well as various other fixes and improvements.

Get the App

To view Kayako Mobile in the Windows Phone Marketplace, click on the button above, or search for Kayako. Top update your existing app, open up the Marketplace app on your.

Problems updating?

If you are updating from an earlier version of Kayako Mobile and run into issues after installing the new version, please remove the app and reinstall.

Feedback

We’d love to hear how you’re getting on with Kayako Mobile. Stop by the forums and share your suggestions. If you have something particularly nice to say about the app, we’d also appreciate it if you’d say it on the Marketplace… perhaps in the form of a star rating!

Mar201205

Jamie Edwards

3

Introducing Customer Ticket Search, New APIs, Code Hooks, Navigation Improvements and more

We have just released a big new update that brings more than 100 improvements and fixes to your helpdesk, including:

• Ticket search for customers: your helpdesk users can now search their own ticket history in the customer-facing helpdesk
• New APIs: new API coverage for ticket custom fields and template group support for existing ticket APIs
• Browser-friendly control panel URLs: all control panel links, even dynamically generated ones, play nicely with standard browser controls (including open in new tab)
• New hook locations: new, comprehensive code hook coverage of the framework for easier customization without having to modify core files
• More than 100 fixes and improvements

Better Self-service with Customer Ticket Search

Hot on the heels of making thousands of support agents’ lives simpler with Unified Search, we have added ticket search capabilities to the customer-facing helpdesk.

As well as searching all of your helpdesk’s self-service content (including knowledge base articles), search will now dig into your customer’s own ticket history and return a clean, simple overview of everything in the helpdesk that is relevant to their query.

Your customers can now share in the advantages you already make use of in a single, consolidated helpdesk for all of the correspondence they have had with your organization. One search bar, one set of results and a better self-service experience.

Browser-Friendly Control Panel URLs

The Kayako control panel interface is so quick and snappy largely because it is dynamically loaded and rendered. In Kayako 4, we threw away the traditional concept of loading pages and replaced it by loading views on demand, much like Gmail and now Twitter.

Rather than making your browser load a new page and re-render it each time you navigate to a new section or perform an action, Kayako can change the interface and send and retrieve information without having to reload a page. The result was a blisteringly-fast navigation experience.

Up until now, this method carried a niggle with some of the buttons and links in the helpdesk – you couldn’t open them up in new tabs using standard browser controls (such as shift-and-click, or right click and ‘Open in new tab’). Instead, you had to rely on our own ‘open in new window’ icon:  

But no longer.

We have changed the URL handling throughout the control panel, meaning links and navigation now play much nicer with your browser and browser’s history.

And yes, you can now CTRL-click (or Apple OSX users can CMD-click) tickets into new tabs and share URLs to direct sections and any helpdesk item. This is a small but major usability improvement that your agents will love.

Get the Update

Kayako OnDemand customers will, as always, be automatically updated in the coming week.

The update is available now for Kayako Download customers with an active support and updates subscription, who can find the updated product files in my.kayako.com. The upgrade guide for Download customers can be found here.

A full change log for this update (4.40.959) is available.

Feb201217

Kanika Minhas

4

Case Study: Host1Plus.com Supporting a Remote, Multinational and Distributed Customer Base With Kayako

Host1Plus.com, established in 2008, is one of the fastest growing web hosting companies located in the United Kingdom, with a network spanning the Netherlands, Germany and Singapore. Today Host1Plus provides shared hosting and VPS hosting, domain name registrations and services to automate website management, application scalability and performance.

We had a chat with Vincentas Grinius, founder of Host1Plus, about his company’s experience with Kayako and how it has improved the customer service they provide to a remote, multinational and distributed customer base.

So, which features of Kayako have the biggest impact on your team’s productivity and your overall support operation?

“It is hard to single out just one as Kayako fits perfectly with our workflow. The ability to document a problem and actions taken for other team members (using the send-to-knowledgebase tool) is crucial to our ability to recycle knowledge and diagnosis work. The filters for open tickets provide a real-time snapshot of our support issues.

Kayako delivered several features that enhanced the way we interacted with our customers. Using Kayako’s automated business rules including automations and macros, we can route customer requests efficiently.

Kayako lets us associate topics and posts with specific product releases so that customers can more easily determine which information applies to them. More importantly, we have increased collaboration among our users. Like-minded people are helping each other out and feeding off each other’s creativity. This all leads to deeper engagement with our product.”

What has the feedback from your support staff been like?

“Our support team is now able to simplify daily tasks by utilizing specific Kayako capabilities. With Kayako email and ticket rules, the support team can route tickets to the appropriate departments as soon as they are submitted. Using Kayako’s macros, they can deliver familiar responses to common support questions, and flag the tickets that agents are already addressing.

Host1Plus department listing showing multi-lingual support capabilities

Moreover, the web-based ticketing increases access to support staff. Kayako makes a world of difference. It lets our cloud customers see the current status of their tickets, which increases their overall confidence in us.

By offering our customers an additional means of interaction, we have solidified our customer service in improving our customer interaction without devoting more resources. Some customers use Kayako as their primary means of communication with our support team.

Many of our customers don’t have time to make a call or interact via online chat, they appreciate being able to create a ticket and then come back to check on it at their own convenience.

Our customers want to feel taken care of, but they don’t need to be bothered with constant updates. Kayako allows us to customize our notifications to include only the most important milestones for each ticket.

We use Kayako to label incoming tickets by priority. Agents appreciate the ease with which they can create, manage, and update tickets in Kayako.”

How has your customer service improved since adopting Kayako?

“Kayako’s transparent system let customers experience superb customer service firsthand. We’ll never be able to prevent all issues, but Kayako helps our customers to get a ticket status at any moment. This helps us in providing an additional level of interaction with our cloud-based customers.

With Kayako, customers can look at a control panel, see a status, and get notified via email whenever an update occurs throughout the process. This is a huge step forward in showing our customers that when we promise, we walk the talk.

Host1Plus uses visitor rules to automatically invite lingering new visitors to speak with one of their agents.

Not only does Kayako respond to our support requests within minutes, but they’re completely transparent with their customers. That’s a completely foreign concept to many businesses—but it’s an approach we’re adopting at Host1Plus. If we can pattern our service goals after Kayako’s and achieve them, we will know we are on the right track.

We built our business and reputation by providing excellent customer support. I want to give Host1Plus customers the same things I expect: speed and simplicity. Kayako has not only helped us meet those two goals, but has allowed us to scale our support team as the business grew rapidly.”

Thanks, Vincentas!