A new Kayako, Helpdesk Evolved.

This week we are celebrating our ninth birthday, and will be celebrating it in style. We are incredibly excited and pleased to announce that Kayako 4, a complete overhaul of our market-leading product line, is available to new customers from today.

Founded exactly nine years ago, Kayako was the fruition of a core group of people’s determination to make helpdesk software that was easy to get started and accessible to organizations of all types, sizes and capacities.

Since then, we have grown both as a company and a product, iterating through four major generations. Kayako is now a team of 60 spread across the world, trusted by more than 30,000 organizations. We are still entirely independent, completely self-funded and focused on the same single thing: helping our customers deliver better customer support.

Today has been a long time coming; we are announcing relaunched products, new plans and a new Kayako.

Thank you

First and foremost we would like to extend a massive thank you to all of our loyal customers. Thank you for using and supporting Kayako, for your feedback and for taking the time to help us refine the tools we build.

We would also like to thank the enthusiastic community of Kayako 4 beta testers. Kayako 4 has been in a public beta for four months, and there are already hundreds of live Kayako 4 helpdesks.

Kayako 4, the product and the philosophy

Kayako 4 is the culmination of more than two years of research and work; taking feedback, testing implementations and talking to thousands of Kayako customers of all sizes who use Kayako in all sorts of different ways.

The end result is that Kayako 4 is still the world’s most flexible and powerful customer support and helpdesk platform. For tens of thousands of customers, Kayako is their helpdesk. Kayako is popular because it tailors, without effort, to how you work rather than the other way round. That is our core design philosophy.

We have never deviated from this philosophy an inch, which is why organizations big, small and enterprise trust Kayako to deliver their customer support. Kayako doesn’t intrude on your work, it supports it. Kayako helps you to manage customer communications across a variety of channels all in one place.

Kayako 4 does this better than ever before, giving you the tools to deliver an unrivaled customer support experience across even more mediums. Manage your email, tickets, live chat, calls, remote desktop support and self-service all in one place. A new, fresh interface focused entirely on getting things done. Brand new tools to help you keep on top of tickets and email. A completely new, rewritten framework and open APIs.

Kayako 4 is the Helpdesk, Evolved and there isn’t anything else like it.

Kayako 4, the helpdesk that will help you improve your customer support and engagement

We couldn’t possibly list everything that is new in Kayako 4, so here is a quick overview:

• Keep everything in one place, whatever the medium, including tickets, email, live chats, remote desktop support, calls and self-service.
• A new, more developer-friendly framework, written from the ground up to power your helpdesk. It is faster, more reliable and far more extendible with rich APIs and open app protocols – paving the way to some fantastic integration and extension opportunities.



• Three overhauled products, made slicker, faster and with hundreds of new and improved features that make delivering customer support and providing a better experience to your customers easier than ever.
• More automations and filters (including an intelligent trainable filter) to automate tedious administrative tasks and correspondence sorting.
• A brand new live chat and real-time support desktop application, Kayako Desktop.
• Kayako OnSite – free as standard, one-click remote access to your customer’s PCs.
• An overhauled, redesigned and vastly improved infrastructure to support our hosted customers.
• Kayako Mobile for iOS, Blackberry and Android in the pipeline.
• Brilliant, wiki-fied documentation and developer documentation at the Kayako wiki.

.. and much, much more. In fact, why not take the tour on our new website?

Kayako 4, a new brand and a new face

As we have announced previously, we are rebranding our products and we have launched our new website.

• SupportSuite is now Kayako Fusion.
• LiveResponse is now Kayako Engage.
• eSupport is now Kayako Resolve.

We haven’t entered into this lightly. We are proud to have some of the strongest brands in online customer support and helpdesk software.  We have renamed the products because we feel that this is not just a product iteration, but a product evolution – the introduction of a brand new platform, written from scratch, on which we’ve built your favorite helpdesk suites.

We invite you take a look at our new website. We think it shows off our new products rather nicely (and are particularly fond of a long-overdue page that collects the glowing feedback we have been lucky enough to receive from our customers!).

Kayako 4, new plans

With the new products we are also introducing new product plans. We are still offering our two purchasing options:

• Kayako On Demand - our reliable and secure hosted (SaaS) platform. Sign up, pay monthly and be started in less than five minutes.
• Kayako Download - perpetual licenses, boxed software, download and host Kayako in your own IT environment.

Our plans are now priced according to the number of staff user accounts (seats) you require. We are not limiting the number of customers, departments or tickets your helpdesk can handle.

This is a necessary change. For its time (five years ago), our one-hat-fits-all pricing and licensing scheme suited the majority of our customers. Since then, and especially now, Kayako has evolved and grown leaps and bounds. Kayako is a much bigger product than what it was, and it is used in different ways.

However, we are absolutely convinced that the return on investment is substantially higher and will be essentially immediate. You will not find a helpdesk that provides better value for money, or a bigger return on investment than Kayako.

Kayako starts at just $29.00 per user/month, or $599.00 one-time for 10 staff users if you want to install and host the helpdesk yourself. A small price for better customer support.

For our existing customers

We want to thank and reward our customers for choosing Kayako, and make good on our part in this mutual investment. We have our priorities straight, and will not be charging a feature premium to plump our margins.

We have put together a variety of upgrade options for our existing Kayako 3 customers. For the most part, it won’t cost anything more to upgrade to Kayako 4 and all of the fantastic new features it brings. See this earlier announcement for more information.

If you are a Kayako 3 hosted customer, we are afraid you will have to wait a little longer in order to upgrade to Kayako 4 while we get the automated upgrade systems up and running. We do not expect this to take longer than a matter of weeks. Meanwhile, you could sign up for a trial to test out Kayako 4.

For people currently evaluating Kayako

Thank you for your interest! We hope that you have been enjoying your evaluation. Because we are no longer issuing new Kayako 3 licenses, we understand that the sudden change to the licensing and pricing scheme may cause you procurement hassles.

With this in mind, we will honor the same Kayako 3 prices for Kayako 4 licenses, under the same terms offered to our existing customers, for people who registered for a trial after the 20th October 2010. There isn’t an expiry on this offer, and we invite you to take out a new Kayako 4 trial. For more information, see this article.

Helpdesk software is something to get excited about (really!)

The good news doesn’t stop here. We have all sorts in the pipeline – new apps, expanding our services and a raft of new features that are set to appear in your helpdesk.

The feedback from Kayako 4 beta testers has been superb, and has already attracted a lot of interest. We invite you to see how Kayako 4 can help you deliver an unrivaled online customer experience. Take the tour, register for a no-obligation, 30 day trial or get signed up right away.