What has changed in the new Kayako

After all the hard work we've put into building the new Kayako, we're really excited to be able to share it with you! There are many powerful new features and capabilities, so we thought it would be useful to give you the rundown on what's new, what's changed, what's missing and what you still have to look forward to! 

Features we've added

The new Kayako comes packed with exciting and powerful new features to help your team deliver the best support out there.

Feature	What you can do with it
Unified conversations	Rather than dealing with your customers ticket-by-ticket, the new Kayako lets you hold rich, contextualized conversations across multiple support channels. Each conversation will show you details about the customer and their company, as well as a chronological timeline of every interaction the customer has with your team, with other areas of Kayako, and even with external systems you've connected to. Learn more in our article on responding to conversations.
Social support (Twitter, Facebook)	You can now handle support requests that come in over social media by connecting Kayako to your Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Learn more in our articles on adding Facebook and Twitter to your Kayako.
Unified search	We’ve added a powerful unified search feature, making it easy to find whatever you need, from any area of Kayako. Learn more in our article on unified search.
Help Center editing	Delivering great self-service content is easier than ever, with an intuitive content editing experience built right into the Help Center. Customize your Help Center HTML and CSS, for total control over its look and feel. Learn more in our articles about managing Help Center content and customizing the Help Center's appearance.
Automations	Using two simple but powerful automation structures — time-based monitors and event-based triggers — you can build a huge range of automations. From SLA escalations and notification emails, to complex, multi-step workflows, automations can help you seriously streamline your support processes. Learn more in our article about getting started with automations.
Kayako Messenger	Kayako Messenger gives your customers a more friendly and personal chat experience. Starting out with suggestions from your self-service content, Messenger then seamlessly hands off customers for live chat support, or captures and stores their messages when your support staff isn't available. Learn more in our article on handling live support with Messenger.
Collaborators	Pull in help from people outside your support team, or even your company, with collaborators. These users can add private notes to conversations to help solve problems, without interacting directly with your customers. Learn more in our article about collaborators
Zapier integration	Connect with over 500 business apps, like Stripe payments, JIRA or Trello.  And because we use the newest integration methods, you have even more power with instant, real-time multi-step zaps. Learn more in our article about Zapier
Endpoints	Push data from Kayako directly out to custom endpoints in third-party tools, without needing to modify the source code. Learn more in our article on adding custom endpoints.
SSL	The new Kayako provides SSL support for every account, whether you use the default Kayako domain or your own custom domain.
Conversation field descriptions	Make it easy for your customers to understand what you're asking, with custom field and form descriptions.
Required fields	You choose which conversation fields to make mandatory when resolving a conversation. This makes it much easier to standardize your process for conversation resolution.
Two-factor authentication	Add an extra layer of security to your user accounts by enabling two-factor authentication.
Spam handling	Kayako will monitor incoming messages and suspend those it identifies as spam. If you ever suspect a message has been suspended unnecessarily, you can review and restore it to its rightful conversation.
Single sign-on for your team	With single sign-on, you can enable external authentication for your support team.
Inline images in staff replies	Your support team will be able to include inline images in conversation replies to illustrate concepts and provide a richer experience for customers.

 

Features we've updated

Many of the core functions of Kayako Classic still exist in the new Kayako, but with a twist. We've put in a lot of work into making these features super-versatile, more intuitive, and better integrated with other parts of the product. 

Kayako Classic feature	How it works in the new Kayako
Agent and admin control panels	One app, one login screen. Rather than logging in to two control panels, you'll log in once and be able to move seamlessly between the agent and admin areas. Your account permissions will dictate what admin settings you see.
Departments	Departments have been replaced by teams. You can assign conversations based on teams, build views to show only a particular team's conversations, or limit your agents access to conversations within their team(s). Learn more in our article about grouping agents into teams.
Workflows	Workflows have been replaced by macros and automations. You can now use macros not only to automate common replies, but also to make common updates to your conversations. Automations will allow you to build complex workflows to move your conversations through your support processes. Learn more in our articles on macros and automations.
Ticket filters	Filters have been replaced by views. To see a filtered set of conversations, you can build views that display only the conversations that match your criteria. Learn more in our articles about views.
Ticket follow-ups	You can build ticket follow-ups using automations. You can set follow-ups to send either at particular time intervals or whenever a particular action occurs. Learn more in our article about getting started with automations.
Escalations	You can build SLA escalations using monitor automations. Monitors can track which conversations are about to — or have — breached their SLA targets, and automatically take any actions you define. Learn more in our article about SLAs and escalations.
Email parser rules	Using triggers you can automate assignments, priorities, tags, status and any number of other attributes for any email that comes into Kayako. Learn more in our article about building triggers and monitors.
Notification rules	You can build a whole range of automatic notifications using automations. To send email notifications to external systems, you can also build custom endpoints for those systems. Learn more in our articles about automation and endpoints .
Time-tracking	You can use a built-in time tracker that enables you to monitor how much time – billable and otherwise – your team is spending on each conversation.
Quick search	Kayako's new unified search is much faster and more robust, making it easy to find what you need in no time. Learn more in our article about unified search.
Forwarding replies	Rather than having to forward conversation replies, you can now simply loop in collaborators, who can view and leave private notes visible to your support agents.
Banning spam emails	Kayako will automatically suspend any spam messages as they come in. Plus, you can also disable any user account to prevent them from creating or replying to conversations.
Satisfaction and article ratings	Satisfaction ratings for conversations as well as Help Center articles are now managed with a 'Good/Bad' or 'Helpful/Not helpful' rating, rather than a scale from 1 to 5.
Taking/surrendering tickets	You can assign conversations to any agent using the 'Assignee' field. You can also assign conversations to a team, rather than a particular agent, as well as automating assignments with macros or automations.
Ticket audit logs, live chat history, and notes	No more switching back and forth between different logs. All interactions with your customers are compiled into centralized conversation timelines. For each conversation you can see your messages over any support channel, private notes from agents and collaborators, customer activity from elsewhere within Kayako, and customer events from any external systems you've connected. Learn more in   our article about responding to conversations.
Ticket lock	Tickets are no longer locked when multiple agents are working on them. Instead, each agent sees notifications for anyone viewing or editing the conversation. Any updates show up for everyone in real time.
Knowledge base and news management	The new editing tools in the Help Center mean you can make on-the-fly changes to content, style, and organization from within the Help Center itself.
Multi-brand/satellite helpdesks	Brands, in the new Kayako, let you customize the Help Center's appearance, build branded self-service content, use a custom domain, set a default language, and configure separate email accounts. Enterprise plan subscribers can add multiple brands.
Team permissions	Assigning your support team to specific user roles lets you control their access to Kayako's configuration options. Subscribers on the enterprise plan can build additional custom user roles to further refine their team's access.
Visitor groups	Rather than building visitor groups, you'll be able to use engagement rules to automatically tag customers on chat, making them easy to categorize.

 

Features we've said goodbye to 

As we were building out the new Kayako, there are some features that we've discontinued. Many of them were just rendered redundant by some of our newer features, and others we cut because they weren't being widely used.

Feature	Why it was discontinued
Cron job tasks	In the new Kayako, there's no need to configure cron jobs for particular activities. Everything happens in real time.
POP3 & IMAP email queues	With email support in the new Kayako, there's no need for setting up POP3 or IMAP queues to fetch emails. Instead, you can just set your email accounts to forward to your Kayako address, and your emails will be processed immediately.
KQL queries for reporting	Instead of requiring you to build complex KQL queries to run your reporting, Kayako's Insights section comes with several built-in analytics dashboards. You'll be able to browse reports and metrics on your conversations, team members, and Help Center content. We'll also be adding more advanced reporting capabilities soon!
Ticket flags	Since you can categorize your conversations using custom fields or tags, we've retired color-coded ticket flags.
Internal ratings	Although we've discontinued the ability to submit internal ratings, you will be able to track a variety of other metrics to see how your support teams and agents are doing, from the Insights section.
Support site widgets	With the Help Center's visibility controls and customization tool, you have full control over the appearance and organization of your support site. No more adding and configure widgets. Learn more in our article about customizing your Help Center.
News subscriptions	We've removed the ability to subscribe and send updates to subscribers of News articles. We're hopeful that we'll be able to bring this back through an integration eventually - please do let us know if this is something you're looking for.
Troubleshooter	We've retired the troubleshooter feature, but we're confident that the self-service improvements in the new Kayako will help ease the pain of its passing. With automatic article suggestions in Kayako Messenger and on the submit request screen, as well as vastly improved search capabilities, we've made it easier than ever for customers to find the answers to their questions.
Printing tickets	Although there is no option for exporting a conversation to a printer-specific format, you can always print off the conversation directly from your browser window.

 

Features that are on the way

We've focused on getting a lot of power and flexibility into the new Kayako, right out of the gate, but there's a ton of additional features coming up on our roadmap that we're also super-excited about. 

Feature	What new functionality it will contribute
Splitting conversations	To round out your conversation management tools, we'll be adding the ability to split up complex conversations.
Linking conversations	Linking related conversations is a great way to give your support team additional context — and it's a feature we'll be adding soon.
Following conversations	To make it easier to keep track of conversations that you're not assigned to, we'll be adding the ability to follow the progress of conversations. You'll be able to build a view to show you all the conversations you've elected to follow.
LDAP support	To give you even more login and authentication options, we'll be adding support for LDAP. In the meantime, you can still use the new Kayako SSO API to build an adapter for your own LDAP implementation.
Live Chat Metrics	Kayako's live chat has been redesigned from the ground up for the new challenges facing your business and your customers. We are continuing to develop Kayako Messenger to deliver the effortless customer experience and will be adding metrics and measurements for Kayako Messenger.