Likelihood to Recommend You absolutely need a full time individual on this program to manage it properly. It is likely a powerful application. However, you have to know how all the disparate parts interact with the other content in the application. How they actually interface with your businesses operation applications (really check this one out as it only seems to play nice with Microsoft suites based on our experience.) and decide how much time and additional money you are willing to bury into this. Figure at least 2x over CW cost your initial period of out-of-pocket costs
Read full review When it works, It's without a doubt a great help desk solution. It is perfect for our usage, and have rolled it out company-wide. It's great if you have multiple departments. We have it set up so most items come through a single desk that then hands out tickets to their proper department. There may be cheaper options for smaller organizations but for one that is as service-driven as ours, we really think Kayako is a great fit.
Read full review Pros Tickets- Customers can email and a ticket is generated and falls under their profile for historical records. You can save documents and select if they are customer facing or only internal facing. The option as well to have communication in tickets whether its internal facing or customer facing is nice to have when you're trying to keep a record or important details for just internal means and the customer doesn't have to see all the jargon. Procurement - It's great to have this integrate with Quosal Sell. Quotes being processed into opportunities and then into a sales order which connects to a ticket or project is pretty easy to use. It does have a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's straightforward. Everything is pretty connected, whether keeping track of products customers have purchased historically through us, to knowing what ticket is associated to an RMA. Read full review Gives a very good report on an individual level of what is being done for a customer or corporate issue. Easy to understand who has what, what the tickets are about, how long they have been opened and how many times the customer/employee have gone back and forth with each other. Nice dashboard view. Read full review Cons I will say the calendar option needs a little bit of work. A calendar that looks more like lets say a Google Calendar would a nice feature. Better Knowledge base section. We attempted to get very good use out of the Knowledge however due to not really being able to organize it and it being very hard to navigate we had to go a different route for our documentation. Possibly adding a cleaner user interface and adding more customization for the organization of companies would help. A better layout for reporting would also be something good to have. The layouts available are so difficult to put together to get what you want out of a report. Virtually makes it impossible to get what you want out of them. Read full review Departments need a bit of work. Even though you can have multiple departments, the only changes that can be made are globally. If you want independent queues within the departments, you have to do a lot of work that can be very confusing. Survey system is not up to speed. Kayako really needs to add Net Promoter Score into their system. Also, if a staff user removes their name from an incident ticket, it removes them from the survey so you really can't even get a good estimate of how well your staff is in the eyes of the customer. Very difficult to implement when you already have a customer base. Setting them up in organizations is difficult. Also, the sign-up for new customers is quirky. If you send an email to Kayako, it will say you are not an authorized user, however, it will store your email address. If you try to send an email a second time, it will go through. This is one of many reasons why we decided to move from Kayako to Oracle Service Cloud. Read full review Likelihood to Renew ConnectWise has uniquely positioned themselves with the Modern Office Suite to have direct integration with a nearly full suite of tools for MSPs. Although each tool may not necessarily be the absolute best tool on the market, the efficiencies leveraged through direct integration make the entire suite an obvious choice for most companies.
Read full review We are grandfathered in on their old Software-assurance pricing and our continued use costs us only a few hundred dollars a year (excluding hosting expenses) Our team's processes are now heavily ingrained in the system We have not been shown a more compelling option that is more cost-effective while still offering all the features we've come to expect Read full review Usability I have been using ConnectWise since 2004 and I am impressed with the progress they have made. However, there are still bugs that don't work quite like they should. If I were to run reports and get consistent answers along with a couple other annoyances, then I would score CW as a 10
Read full review I did not come from an IT background and I picked this program up quickly
Read full review Reliability and Availability We use the cloud version of ConnectWise and in the last 5 years it has never been down for us during business hours. I can only recall 1 time when it was not available during off hours when we wanted to use it.
Read full review They are really good, but it takes a while to get back, because of the large time difference to the Eastern US. However, they are very helpful.
Read full review Performance Some tab for certain areas load speeds could be better. Dashboards can load slowly when they reference multiple reports. Some reports can load slowly based on the tables and views they are accessing. At times the SQL queries being performed in the background can actually timeout and a tab or screen will fail to load.
Read full review Support Rating The front line support techs are wildly inconsistent when it comes to the level of support. Sometimes you get someone who just wants to throw links to University documentation at you, sometimes you get someone who truly tries to understand your issue and confers with peers and managers to find an answer, and sometimes you get someone who just wants to create a ticket and escalate immediately. If you ask three different techs the same question you will probably get three different answers, one of them being, "That's not possible."
Read full review We didn't have to use support too much, but when we did, they were able to assist us and help us make everything work. Mostly we used their Online KB and step by step instructions to get all of our issues resolved. Read full review Online Training We are a telecoms company. Whilst CW were very happy to sell us their product and tell us how good it is for telecoms. All the training material is geared towards IT MSP's. The on-line training material was virtually useless. We found the implementation a bit of a joke. They tried telling us 12 hours of implementation time would be sufficient to launch the product. We erred on the side of caution and paid for 24 hours. This was quickly eaten away and we were nowhere near ready to go-live. I find the on-line chat facility is of much more use for us.
Read full review Implementation Rating Rather than letting them sell you a block of time for implementation, create a list of things that must be completed do declare the implementation complete. The implementer will have the discretion on what they set up and in what order. They will be trying to end their services in as little time as possible and may not get things set up right. You are best advised to hire a third-party wizard that has done many of these setups. Record the audio and video of all of your implementation sessions.
Read full review Three years in we are about as happy with Kayako as we could be. We've had several employee's leave and on-boarding new hires was easier than it has ever been as things are uniform and consistent across the entire application.
Read full review Alternatives Considered ConnectWise, does more than one function well for a CRM, it enables managed service providers to place all of their services into a single solution, that helps smooth the running of the business. Now we don't have to have 4+ different software packages to provide customer tickets, account information, sales pipeline, and HR.
Read full review We were using
Spiceworks for a few years before switching to Kayako but found that it wasn't as customizable or as user friendly for our customers. The SNMP scanning and inventory features with
Spiceworks was nice but we needed more of a Help Desk that would allow us to scale our services to more companies.
Read full review Scalability ConnectWise seems to have a good understanding of the IT service industry. During the required onboarding training, they even preach configuring only features that you need right now, as you can always scale up later. The feature set for the most part takes into considerations all aspects of an IT business, whether small or enterprise, or growing from one to the next.
Read full review Return on Investment The positive impact is no one has to return to the office to look at notes - they can look up the support ticket on their laptop, tablet, or phone. The positive impact on ROI is keeping all of your support tickets organized in one spot and multiple techs can update them. The positive impact on ROI is that you have happier customers as you can update the support tickets no matter where you are at Read full review Tickets were definitely responded to faster once we implemented the audible alarm that would go off when new tickets came into the queue. This was possible because of the API. Since the system was email based we could set our monitoring software up to generate tickets automatically via email for customers when it found something out of the ordinary. Read full review ScreenShots ConnectWise PSA Screenshots