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“We are pleased to have such an experienced sales leader like Ed join our team,” said David Weiss, president and CEO of Numara Software. “Ed’s extensive experience and revenue growth record in the ITSM and ITAM software markets will accelerate our business initiatives in all of the regions we serve. Having Ed as a member of our executive team is a key part of continuing to build our market leadership.”

Before joining Numara Software, Reilly was vice president of Sales for Permabit Technologies, an innovator in the storage management space. Ed was also vice president of EMEA sales for the Altiris business unit of Symantec having come over in the acquisition of Altiris by Symantec. Prior to joining Altiris, Ed was vice president of sales for Peregrine Systems. He has also held positions at Siebel Systems and Oracle.

“I see tremendous growth potential for Numara Software, as the company has built a very trusted brand in the market, a solid suite of solutions and a very profitable and scalable business model,” said Reilly. “I look forward to being part of the management team and the role I’ll play in helping this organization move to the next level.”

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LinkedIn has recently made some major changes to the way groups are structured and how information can be passed around and promoted within a community.

We’re really pleased with the changes – they are already facilitating more acivity among the Kayako Users’ Group which is already 125 people strong!

Kayako Users' Group feed on LinkedIn

Come and join us to meet other Kayako users, share tips and other relevant information as well as talk to Kayako managers and developers.

If you’re not already on LinkedIn, we suggest you consider trying it out. It is a great way to connect with your co-workers and friends in a professionally oriented context.

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Welcome to the twelfth in a series of Version 4 development updates and previews. Preview #11 looked at the new Ratings system we are introducing to V4.

This preview will be a quickie – taking a look at another new feature; ticket macros.

Predefined replies are out, macros are in

We are replacing predefined ticket replies with ticket macros.

Whereas predefined replies would append text content to the ticket reply area, ticket macros can be configured to configure other ticket properties – such as alter the ticket status, priority, owner and tags – as well as add content to the reply area.

We have also added a new kind of drop-down menu for accessing things like ticket macros and knowledgebase articles within the ticket reply area. The menu is very easy to use, working like a classic iPod menu system. Your position within the menu tree is tracked in breadcrumbs. You can click on any part of the breadcrumb to navigate back.

The best bit about this new menu is that it scales beautifully. Navigating through a deep and long database of macros is a breeze – no more lengthy menus to scroll through. Macro categories (folders, if you like) can be assigned to specific teams. For example, you may not need your support team to have access to any billing related macros.

This keeps things clean, simple and without distraction.

When selecting a macro, the ticket property changes are not executed immediately. The macro simply ‘fills in the form’, which changes executed when you submit your reply and/or ticket property changes. This means you can tweak the ticket properties beyond the defaults set by the macro you selected.

Here, we have navigated to the Support->Platform->Windows section, and have selected the “Installation on Windows” macro.

The macro has changed the department, the ticket owner, the issue type and has set the status to “In Progress” (cannot be seen above). The color change in the properties bar is the result of the status change. This bar will change color to reflect the status of the ticket.

Ticket macros will help your agents fly through their support tickets!

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Welcome to the eleventh in a series of Version 4 development updates and previews. Preview #10 looked at changes to the SLA features, ticket escalation rules and work schedules.

In this preview we will take you through a brand new feature we are introducing to V4 – ratings.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Metrics and measurements are critical to being able to continually improve and refine your customer support. You know that measuring customer support can be tricky, so we have turned the problem over to your support desk.

We have implemented an elegant and easy-to-use system to collect feedback from your customers and measure your performance.

Solicit feedback from your customers

V4 introduces ratings: a simple, centralized way to collect feedback from your customers on a variety of correspondence and items – support tickets, individual ticket responses, live chats, knowledgebase articles, and so on.

We'll be adding more rating types (for knowledgebase articles, news, etc)

Each rating translates to a number of stars. Your customers are asked to award a certain number of stars for each rating you create – this is a very simple point-and-click process.

We thought long and hard about how best to present this to users, and we think we have the right balance between detail and ease of entry. If we ask for too much or make it too difficult to input, your customers are less likely to provide feedback.

The ability to create multiple ratings gives you the granularity needed to harvest quality and refined data from which you can monitor your team’s good points and identify areas for improvement.

List of ratings

Because providing feedback has been made so simple, you can expect a lot of your customers to volunteer good feedback.

Rating options

Inserting a rating

Ticket and chat related ratings can be linked to a specific department, enabling you to collect different kinds of feedback depending on the department in which the chat or ticket was handled.

Perform internal quality auditing with ‘internal’ ratings

The customer is, of course, the best judge of the support your team provides. However, you may also wish to perform internal quality assessments and auditing. To facilitate this, we have added a public and private switch to each rating.

The screenshot below shows a chat log being viewed by a staff user. The two ratings – Overall satisfaction and Quality of communication – have been submitted by the user. The Politeness rating is internal; hidden from users and can be modified only by your staff.

Internal ratings on a chat log

When a rating is set to private, it cannot be accessed or seen by your customers. It can only be set and viewed by your staff users (who have the appropriate permission to do so).

Rating permissions

Live chat surveys

At the end of a chat your customer is invited to take a satisfaction survey. This survey result is tied to the chat history (in the staff control panel) and is recorded as a message in the live chat area which allows your staff to follow up with the user.

Post-chat survey form

Individual ticket posts (replies)

The screenshot below shows a icket reply, viewed by a user in the support portal. As well as being able to submit overall ticket ratings and feedback, your users can provide ratings for each individual reply.

Ticket survey

Once a ticket has been closed (or set to a status where the “is resolved” flag is enabled), the customer is invited to take a satisfaction survey. The link to the survey contains a unique auth code which bypasses the need to log into the support center before completing the survey.

We have found that this immeasurably increases the likelihood that your customers will complete the survey, rather than abandon it at a login prompt.

The survey form your customer sees is shown below. It is clear, simple and to the point. We plan on adding custom field support to this area.

The ticket view in the staff control panel is shown below. The ticket survey results are displayed in the information and action side-bar, on the left.

The contents of the comments field from the survey is attached to the ticket as a reply (marked clearly as a survey response). This keeps correspondence connected and tightly coupled so that you do not lose track of the support issue followed by survey related correspondence, should you wish to follow up.

Plan and schedule updates

Our last estimate for the public beta release of V4 was this quarter. We are not going to release it this quarter, but it won’t be long afterward. Over the next few weeks we will be rolling V4 out on our own support desk (you may have seen that we have almost finished doing so with live chat). The public beta release will follow this.

We still intend to provide Kayako developers with access to protocols, APIs and an early preview of the framework. Apologies for the intermittent updates – as we’re getting closer to launch things are getting very hectic! We hope you’re as excited about receiving V4 as we are about releasing it!

Our next preview will feature more detailed looks into ticketing and e-mail management. Stay tuned!

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Thousands of our customers have upgraded to Kayako from another best best help desk software software provider. To help make their transition as smooth as possible, we developed Impex – our import system that automates the process of moving your best best help desk software software’s data from one solution to Kayako.

We have recently added a number of Impex scripts to the collection, including:

• Zendesk
• Perldesk (3.3 and 4.0)
• OTRS
• Cerberus 4

Click here for a full list and details about what data can be imported.

We offer these Impex tools with both our on-demand, SaaS and host-it-yourself solutions. Our technicians will be more than happy to help you with the move if you are not confident about doing it yourself.

Let us know if we’re missing one

If you would like to upgrade to Kayako and we don’t yet have a tool to help you bring your data with you, please contact us – we’ll be happy to create one for you!

Ready to upgrade to Kayako?

We have been developing and hosting best best help desk software softwares for almost a decade. The flexibility and ease of use of our software makes it popular amongst a broad audience – including small to medium businesses, enterprises, academic and government agencies. More than 30,000 organizations rely on Kayako solutions to improve their customer support, close sales and create more happy customers!

For fear of using a cliché, increasing business pressures have made it ever more crucial to make sure that your customer support delivery is top-notch. With Kayako’s unrivalled ticketed support, e-mail management, live chat and superb self-help facilities, we think it won’t be long before you’ll thank yourself for upgrading to Kayako.

Our on-demand solutions start at $29.95 a month and $299.95 host-it-yourself (both with no user limit). Compare each of our solutions side-by-side and sign up for a <a href="http://www.kayako.com/best best help desk software software-software-trial.php”>30-day free trial.

Any questions? Drop us a line.

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Welcome to the tenth in a series of Version 4 development updates and previews. Preview #9 looked at the new user management and organization features of V4.

In this preview we will take you through the changes and improvements we are introducing to ticket service level agreement plans, escalation rules and work schedules.

Don’t need SLAs? Don’t worry – we won’t bog you down in unnecessary detail

If you find that you do not need SLAs or escalation rules to effectively manage your support desk – don’t worry. You won’t get bogged down in unnecessary detail.

Out of the box, your Kayako support desk will use a simple default overdue time setting for all your tickets, allowing you to prioritise which tickets are in need of an update soonest. You can, if you wish, disable overdue tracking altogether.

Brushing up on SLAs in Kayako

In case you are a new to Kayako or haven’t yet needed to configure any SLA plans, here is a short brush-up on the state of SLA functionality in V3:

• Put simply, an SLA (service level agreement) plan governs the due time of a ticket. An SLA enables you to define your user’s expectations of your support centre. Kayako helps you define, manage and report on your response times. You can create multiple SLA plans and specify which tickets they govern by selecting a department, ticket status and ticket priority. You can also assign SLA plans to users and specific tickets.
• A work schedule defines the hours in a day during which the due time clock on a ticket doesn’t tick, so that tickets do not go overdue while your offices are closed. Multiple work schedules can be created and only one can be assigned to each SLA plan.
• An escalation rule is a set of prescribed actions that will be automatically carried out on a ticket that violates its SLA plan (goes overdue). These actions can, for example, include changes to ticket properties like the ticket’s owner and priority. An escalation rule can be assigned to a specific SLA plan, meaning it will only affect tickets governed by that plan.

A word about some ticket changes

Although not covered in detail in this particular preview, we are introducing some fairly major changes to tickets in your Kayako support desk. We need to describe a couple of them here so that the detail in the rest of this post makes sense.

• Resolved property of ticket statuses – tickets currently have a status (such as Open, On Hold, Closed, etc). In V4, we are adding a ticket resolved property to each status. When this property is enabled for a status, any ticket set to this status will be considered to be resolved by the system. A ticket set to any other status without this property set will be considered to be unresolved.
• Ticket resolution due time – tickets have an due time (as in your existing support desk), which is a time frame (set either manually or automatically) within which a ticket needs to be updated, else it will be marked as overdue. In V4, we are adding a resolution due time to tickets. This is a time frame within which the ticket must be marked as resolved, or the ticket will be marked as overdue.

Work schedule (working hours)

In V3, administrators can define work schedules - a set of working hours, with open and close times for each day of the week. The work schedule dictates during which hours of the day a ticket’s due time clock ticks. This ensures that tickets do not go overdue while your offices are closed.

A simple work schedule showing several open and closed days during the week

In V4, we have enhanced the work schedule interface. Rather than just being able to specify just one block of opening hours per day, you can now set multiple. The interface has also been improved so that it is easier to see the state of the schedule at a glance.

Multiple work schedules can be created for assignment to specific SLA plans. In the example below, a ticket’s due time clock will not tick during 0900 – 1200 and 1400 – 1700 on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Saturday.

Creating a more advanced work schedule

Holidays

We have implemented support for holidays – specific, fixed calendar dates during which you do not want the due time clock to keep running for a ticket assigned to a particular SLA plan.

A list of holidays imported into the system

V4 will ship with typical US national holidays. You will be able to download and import holiday packs published on our website, as well as create and share your own.

Editing holiday properties

SLA plans

SLA plan properties in V4 generally remain very similar to V3. In practice, however, a lot has changed.

You can now configure a set of criteria which determine when a certain SLA plan will govern the due times of a ticket. For example, you can create an SLA plan that governs tickets in a specific department, of a certain priority and whether or not the ticket belongs to a particular user organization.

Creating an SLA plan

These SLA plan rules can be sorted, with some given a priority above others (kind of like a processing order).

The SLA plan in the example above will be used to govern tickets that;

• Are not resolved;
• Are set to the In Progress status and
• Belong to the General department.

Automatic ticket escalations

As in V3, escalation rules can be created to change the properties of a ticket that violates a particular SLA plan (goes overdue). In the example below;

• For tickets that are governed by the SLA plan Account audit SLA plan A;
• When the tickets go overdue;
• Change the ticket priority to High;
• Change the ticket status to Open;
• Flag the ticket and
• Tag the ticket with the tag ‘escalated’

Creating a ticket escalation rule

Escalation rules can be configured to react only to ticket update due time violations, ticket resolution due time violations or both.

Feedback review

We feel passionately about engaging our customers in the 4.0 roadmap; giving them the opportunity to shape their future support desk.  In most V4 updates, we summarise some of the feedback we received on the last, as well as any subsequent decisions we have taken based on the feedback received.

And…. What happens with WP7? It looks very promising for enterprises due to Office and Outlook Integration.

(from Josemi)

Any plan for Windows Mobile as well? You will still have the web accessible mobile interfaces as well, correct?

(from Kyle Davies) We have no plans for Windows Mobile 7 right now. We are going to dedicate our resources to already well established mobile platforms. We will revisit the WM7 question when time resources allow.

Request: Gravatar support for Profile Pictures (for the clients/agents who don’t have yet uploaded a picture)

(from cenourinha) We won’t be supporting Gravatar. Perhaps, though, someone will make a small plugin to do this.

Question: why having “Restricted” and “Shared” organization types when you can have “User” or Manager” user roles? Both features kind of do the same right?

(from Andres Berdugo) The ability to select a “Manager” within a “Restricted” organization allows you to selectively give users the ability to see all other user’s tickets. The restricted/shared option is all or nothing.

What’s Kayako’s stance on v4 for the purposes of reselling?

(from Nick Walker) We have a number of plans about reselling and affiliate schemes. We’ll post about these soon.

If you disable a staff account, obviously that person won’t be able to log in any more, but what happens to the tickets currently assigned to that staff member?

(from Luke Pinion) The tickets remain assigned to that staff member.

Have you considered adding a support for sales leads? That way we can create a new kind of ticket which has a pipeline, and has a sale amount?

(from Daniel Martin) We are implementing a feature of tickets called ticket types. Out of the box you get the following types: Issue, Bug, Lead, Phone. Using ticket types, custom fields and the reporting engine, you should be able to achieve this.

Would be great to know about the support of telephone tickets, because in our country for example, there is a lot of people that call us for support or to request a service, witch doesn’t have an email, and we cant to be able to track them

(from Daniel Martin) We are implementing better support for tracking phone tickets.

With the new organisation filtering can a staff member also be given only access to certain companies and there / tickets … users etc…

(from Jeremy Otten) No, you can only restrict staff access to departments. However, by restricting user groups to certain departments, you can implicitly achieve this.

Will kayako v4 also support full RFC HTML e-mails.

(from Jeremy Otten) It will. We’re not sure if this will be the case on initial release, though. It might need to follow later.

This has probably already been covered, but the one request I get the most from my users is the ability (as a user/client, not staff) to search through their tickets either by TicketID or via their own criteria. Is this supported in V4?

(from Luc) Ticket searching for users will be in V4.

This might sound kinda like a dumb question, but with all of the changes and new features in V4, will it be possible to upgrade from V3 or will V4 need a re-implementation?

(from Tony Valenti) We’ll be providing an automated upgrade system, as we did with V2 -> V3.

Will V4 include satisfaction surveys or something like Amazon has when you contact them? At the end of each email is a link you can click to tell Amazon if the email solved your problem or not.

(from Jonathan Bloom) Yes, it will. We’ll post about these soon.

Can you please shed some light on multi-language capabilities ?

(from James) We’ll dedicate a V4 preview post to this specific topic soon.

Regarding pricing, I hope you won’t go to a per-agent formula.

(from shineyblue) We will be moving to a peragent (per seat) licensing scheme.

Will all the present addons work with V4 and when will it be realeased to the public

(from david) No, they won’t. We are developing new ones.

~

As usual, we would love to hear your thoughts, ideas and requests on the community forum. Thanks for reading!

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Carl Silver has shared a fantastic and super-simple method of integrating Facebook’s new comment-on-every-page-on-the-Web API with your Kayako support desk.

You can use this integration to either supplement or replace the standard commenting functionality across your knowledgebase articles, file downloads and news articles.

A file download in a Kayako support desk showing the Facebook comments integration

The integration is seamless. The best bit is that comments and Likes show up in your (Facebook users’) news feeds, gaining your web pages and articles extra publicity.

For the five-step process, see the tutorial thread on the community forums.

Thanks, Carl!

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Mobile for everyone

We bring tidings of good joy and a small update on what we’re currently cooking over here at Kayako.  As the new millennium chugs on, we are keenly aware that mobile is the future of computing.  As such, we have officially decided to make a mobile platform for Kayako products a key part of our V4 vision.

We also recognize that there are a lot of different mobile platforms out there, and we’d like to satisfy as many people as possible, so… KayakoMobile for Kayako version 4 will be available for the iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry platforms!

Development teams have been assigned and work has already begun.  We are concurrently developing for all platforms (while still working full steam ahead on the core products)  in order to reduce development time and to release builds for each platform simultaneously.

Currently, we do not have an idea of when we will have these applications ready, but we are shooting to finish them at or around the time version 4 final is released.

Stay tuned for progress reports as development progresses.

More on v4 – our best help desk software

We’d also like to take this opportunity to announce that V4 is nearing Beta and we will be upgrading our own best help desk software (support.kayako.com) to v4 soon.  We are extremely excited and pleased that years of hard work is coming to fruition and we hope you will join us in our excitement!

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