Major New Update: Introducing Unified Search and Reports Export

Whenever we ask our customers what their support agents’ favorite features are, the most common answers all relate to tools that save on time and allow you to do more with less, without cutting corners on the customer experience.

We’ve always placed a huge amount of emphasis and effort on stripping out repetitive tasks and what we call unproductive clicks. When we approach each new feature, we ask ourselves ‘How can the helpdesk do the most legwork?’. This means that your team can focus on what they do best: delivering an awesome customer support experience.

New little search box; what wonders do you hold?

We are very excited to introduce Unified Search – your support agents’ new search companion that will make finding and organizing information across your helpdesk easier and quicker than ever before.

This small search box undersells itself: subtle and quietly occupying a small amount of space of the helpdesk navigation, you wouldn’t think much of it.

Powerful, cross-helpdesk search engine

Start typing into the search box, though, and it’s power will be revealed. Unified Search will search everything in your helpdesk, including tickets, chats, user accounts, user organizations, news postings and the knowledgebase as you type.

The search results are aggressively sorted by relevance and where appropriate shows how long ago the item was created or updated. This puts the most relevant and important information in front of you first.

Highlight a result by hovering your mouse (or stepping down the list using your keyboard) will reveal additional extended information. If you highlight a ticket, you’ll see the ticket’s department, owner, creator, status and priority. Hover over a user record and you’ll see their email address, country, telephone number and other profile information.

Read More…

Bringing the Helpdesk to Windows Phone

We are now incredibly pleased to announce that Kayako Mobile for Windows Phone is now available in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

We released Kayako Mobile beta only last month. It received a huge amount of interest, with nearly one hundred beta registrations within a matter of days. We owe a thank you to our customers who were more than eager to test the app and share their feedback, and a congratulations to our brilliantly talented Windows Phone developer Adam, for creating the best helpdesk experience on Windows Phone.

Full ticket management on-the-go

Kayako Mobile delivers a full ticket management experience to your Windows Phone. There’s support for ticket macros, ticket notes, time tracking logging and ticket list pinning (more on that below).

Full support for ticket filters (saved searches) keeps a dynamic list of the tickets that you want to keep on the front of your screen. Advanced searching makes little work of digging deep into the helpdesk, with searches performed on the helpdesk itself for better speed and accuracy.

Click on the app shots below to check out Kayako Mobile.

Pin ticket lists for an up-to-date helpdesk overview with Live Tiles

Kayako Mobile takes full advantage of a fantastic Windows Phone feature, Live Tiles.

You can pin ticket departments and dynamic ticket filters to your phone’s home screen, to mark and enable quick access to to important tickets and ticket lists.

Live Tiles automatically update, indicating when new tickets arrive and how many are yet to be resolved within that ticket list. Want to glance at your helpdesk? Just unlock your phone and you’re presented with an overview of the tickets and departments which matter to you.

Don’t worry – we made the background processing as quick and light as possible to preserve your battery!

Props for Windows Phone

We’re new to Microsoft’s latest Windows Phone platform, and we are quite taken with it. Interacting with Windows Phone and its apps is very gratifying – even rekindling the same kind of awe and novelty that the first iPhone inspired!

It’s absolutely ideal for an equally stunning Kayako Mobile experience, and we are very excited about exploring what more we can do to enhance the mobile helpdesk experience using.

Get Kayako Mobile for Windows Phone

Kayako Mobile is available in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Click on the button above, or search for Kayako. Let us know how you get on!

Register for the Kayako Mobile for Windows Phone Beta

Yes, we have been keeping this one up our sleeves. We are very excited about bringing the helpdesk to Windows Phone – another platform on which you can keep your finger on the pulse of your helpdesk.

Read More…

Automatic Call Recording, In-Helpdesk Call Playback and Custom Field Searching

We are pleased to announce another new update to your Kayako helpdesk, including some recent fixes and introducing two great new features.

Call Recording and In-Helpdesk Playback

Users of our live chat and real-time customer support solution Kayako Engage and our flagship multi-channel helpdesk solution Kayako Fusion will be familiar with the ability to place and receive calls within the helpdesk by integrating any SIP-compatible VoIP service.

When a customer calls a telephone service integrated into your helpdesk, Kayako will automatically pull up the customer’s support history (whether ticket, email, live chat or other calls) for the operator. Delivering and managing telephone support has never been so seamless. This is multi-channel customer support done right.

We have now added automatic call recording to the helpdesk. When enabled, each call handled by your operators through your helpdesk will be recorded and automatically saved to the helpdesk. The recording will be attached to the call log and can be played back within the helpdesk itself.

Call recording is a very popular feature when it comes to reviewing a customer’s case history in detail – for example, if account notes turned out to be insufficient. It is also great news for auditing and managing compliance within your organization.

Rather than maintaining a separate ‘dump’ of call recordings with your existing telephone provider (which we know is a pain to sort through), Kayako now stores and manages each call recording, linking each one to your customer profiles. This makes call recordings easier to find and easy to access.

Call recording is disabled by default. To enable call recording, after updating your helpdesk go to Settings -> Live Chat -> Enable Call Recording.

We will continue to build on top of the existing call recording and logging features, and further improve the integration of call recording throughout the helpdesk. Watch this space.

Advanced Custom Field Searching

It’s here, at last. We have built full custom field support into your helpdesk’s advanced search.

All types of custom field are searchable, and there is support for fixed input type fields (such as drop-down menus). If you’re searching for a fixed input type of custom field, the helpdesk will automatically fetch the options for you (demonstrated in the first search criteria below).

Find out more about custom fields on the Kayako wiki.

Get the Update

Kayako OnDemand customers will be automatically updated in the coming week. We’ll take care of the work, so feel free to grab a coffee.

The update is available now for all Kayako Download customers who can find the updated product files in my.kayako.com. As always, an upgrade guide for Download customers can be found here.

A full change log for this update (4.30.732) is available.

Happy helpdesking!

Video: Implementing, Enforcing and Monitoring SLA Plans In Kayako

Out of the box, your helpdesk is configured to mark tickets as overdue if a customer has not been replied to within 12 hours of their last update.

When and under which circumstances a ticket will be marked as overdue (ie late) is governed by one or more SLA plans (service level agreement). In Kayako, SLA plans specify a timeframe where a customer’s ticket should be responded to, and a deadline by which the ticket ought to be resolved. If a ticket becomes overdue according to its SLA plan, the ticket is considered to be overdue.

What happens when a ticket becomes overdue?

Using ticket escalation rules you can configure a number of ticket actions which will be automatically executed if a ticket becomes overdue. For example, you might choose to change the ticket priority, send a notification to a certain team and change the ticket’s status.

Support for multiple SLA plans

You may decide to have one single response deadline and an optional resolution deadline across your helpdesk. However, you can go much further than that. Kayako supports multiple SLA plans, and you can tell your helpdesk which SLA plan to use for certain tickets using various criteria.

For example, you may wish to have one SLA plan (and reply and resolution deadlines) for tickets received in your Support department and another SLA plan for tickets submitted by customers belonging to Acme Inc.

Video walkthrough

Support for multiple SLA plans and criteria means you can implement and enforce complicated service level guarantees without a great deal of work or rocket science.

We have put together a video walking you through the creation of a work schedule (your working hours), an SLA plan (setting response deadlines) and an escalation rule (what to do if a ticket is late) to show how easy it is to harness Kayako’s powerful and comprehensive SLA support.

You can find more Kayako tutorials and videos at tv.kayako.com.