Founded in 1999 and headquartered in India, Kayako Infotech Ltd. is a privately held company. LiveResponse™ is their live help software developed with the help of AJAX. This product can be used stand-alone, or part of their larger suite of customer support applications (jump to common live help software questions & comments at bottom of this review).

From my understanding they have two ways to configure the live help server software portion: 'install on your own server', or host the server application with Kayako. 'Host your own' requires Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris or Microsoft Windows server operating system; and PHP: 5.1.0 or higher, the latest version of Zend Optimizer or IonCube loader, and MySQL 4.X or higher.

With respect to the 'hosted' version of their service, I tried installing the software on a Windows 2000 test computer at first, but the console installation gave an error about "...LiveResponse does not support versions prior to Windows XP..." I found that a bit odd as every other live help software I've tested didn't have such strict requirements. Keep that in mind on the computers you plan for console installation (installation on XP was fine as I suspected).

LiveResponse™ allows the operators to monitor website traffic and engage in live chat with visitors and other operators. The downloadable console software can be fully customized to your heart's content - no problems there. It supports all the basic features of live help software: push URL, proactive invites, canned responses, advertisement/referral tracking, and real-time website monitoring. Add to that spellchecking, proactive invites, visitor web pages viewed ("footprints"), and visitor banning by IP. Detailed visitor information includes: referring website, browser type, monitor resolution, operating system, current/past pages viewed, chat history, ad tracking, and geolocation (limited to Country (no City/State/Province shown)).

Three options stood out in my mind:
1. Ability to force a pro-active chat -- this is where a chat window opens on the visitor's computer without asking for the invite first. Not sure what I think of doing that, but it certainly was interesting!
2. Notes can be added to a specific website visitor's record/history by operators The notes are tracked by IP address (but could be troublesome if users behind a proxy are using the same IP).
3. Console software has what's called ViewShare. This gives an operator the ability to share his/her desktop computer screen with the website visitor they're chatting with -- like reverse-cobrowsing! I guess you would need to be careful on what you have open on your desktop at the time :-)
4. Ability to send 'formatted' html/programming code/images within the chat application window. So instead of copy/pasted coding wrapping in a chat post, it was nicely separated and lined for readability.

With the live chat operators can chat individually with website visitors, or can conference multiple operators within the same live chat session. Operators can also chat between themselves privately. Chats can be easily transferred between operators, which is nice when escalation is required. 'Round-robin' polling distributes chat requests to operators: requests will initially be sent to the first available staff operator and notify subsequent operators if chat no accepted by a time specified by you.

Pricing shown: $29.95USD/mo. 'hosted at your site', $39.95 'hosted' at Kayako's facilities (pre-paying yearly resulted in additional discounts). Also offers a low cost "branding free" license that allows you to remove the "Powered by Kayako LiveResponse" tagline and link shown in the live chat window. See if they have what you need today...

-Dave Swanson

> visit www.kayako.com

> see list of all reviews

Submit A Question Or Comment

No comments or questions yet. Add a comment, or submit your question regarding LiveResponse™ by Kayako.com now using the form above.