Getting help from beyond your support team with collaborators

The collaborator user role in Kayako enables you to loop in people from beyond your support team to get expert help responding to conversations. Collaborators can view support conversations and add private notes, which are visible to your support agents, but not to the customer. Using the collaborator role lets you tap into your entire organization's expertise — without having to buy a full account for your entire staff.

In this article, we'll go through how collaborators might fit into your support workflow, and walk you through creating collaborator accounts.

NOTE: The number of collaborators you have depends on your subscription plan. If you migrated from Kayako Classic, you'll need to upgrade to one of our current pricing plans to get collaborator accounts. 

Understanding how to use collaborators

You can use collaborators to call in back up from outside your support team. Although collaborators can log into your Kayako, their capabilities are limited. They can review conversations, but they cannot update conversation properties nor send replies directly to customers. Instead, they can add notes to conversations and user or organization journeys that are visible only to your support team. 

The other area in which collaborators come in handy is in building up your self-service content. Collaborators cannot edit your Help Center's categories or sections, nor can they create new or publish existing articles. However, they can make and save changes to existing draft articles. 

For easy reference, this table describes the limits of a collaborator's power: 

CAPABILITY	CAN COLLABORATORS DO IT?
CONVERSATION CAPABILITIES
Reply to customers	?
Update conversation properties	?
Leave private notes on conversations, users, and organizations	✅
HELP CENTER CONTENT CAPABILITIES
Create or publish Help Center content	?
Manage Help Center categories and sections	?
Edit existing Help Center articles	✅

Essentially, collaborators are an affordable way to bring valuable outside expertise into your support conversations and self-service content. Now that you have an idea of what they can do, let's have a look at how to create collaborator accounts. 

Creating collaborator accounts 

The process for creating collaborators is the same as creating any other type of user account. From the agent area, you'll add a new user, and then assign them to the collaborator user role. Once the account is created, your collaborator can sign in, and start collaborating! Read on for detailed instructions.

NOTE: To add collaborators in Kayako, you will need an agent or administrator account with the 'Create and update users and organizations' permission.

1. Sign in to the agent area.
2. Hover over the +New button on the top toolbar, and click User.
3. Enter their email address, which will search Kayako to make sure that address is not already in use. 
4. Click the Create new user link. 
5. You'll be taken to their user page.
6. From the Role dropdown, select 'Collaborator.
7. From the Conversation access dropdown, select 'All conversations'. Alternatively, if you want to limit what your collaborators can see, you can select 'Conversations in agent's teams'.
8. If the email you supplied is from your company domain, the user will have been automatically added to your company's organization. If not, select your company from the Organization field.
9. Next, you can select the user's local time from the Timezone field.
10. If you selected 'Conversations in agent's teams' from the Conversation access dropdown above, then in the Teams field, you should select the names of any teams the collaborator will be helping with.
11. Fill in additional details as needed, and then click the Update Properties button to save your changes.

And that's it! Your collaborator will get an email asking them to verify their account.

From here, you can get a collaborator's help on a conversation by @mentioning them in a note. So long as they're signed in, they'll be able to review the conversation, user, and organization details. Similarly, when they're logged in, they'll be able to edit any draft articles on your Help Center, and save their changes.