What part of “CANCEL THE MONTHLY LEASED LICENSE NOW” did customer service solutions provider Kayako misunderstand? Reader Chance’s request wasn’t unexpected. He tried to cancel his account three times and switched service providers before Kayako decided to renew his lease and issue a new bill. The full debacle, inside.

Kayako makes a pretty awesome support suite that came highly recommended to me from a couple of friends. I will say first off that their support software is top notch and feature packed, and I have no qualms with their product.

Their customer support, however, leaves much to be desired.

Kayako offers a few options for their products- monthly hosted, monthly and yearly leased, owned. We opted for the monthly leased option as we didn’t want to plunk down the hefty $499 price for the owned license. Our major problem with all versions of the Kayako software was that it required either the Zend or Ioncube decoders to be installed on our server in order to run their software- all versions have “encoded” files that require the decoder running to use, including the owned license.

The decoders were causing a performance hit that we didn’t like. We looked around, found another support suite that did not have encoded code, and installed it. It worked. The owned version of it cost 1/4 the price of Kayako. It didn’t require any performance robbing decoders. We decided to go with it and drop Kayako.

This is where the pain began. First, there is no cancel button on their website. The only way to cancel is to contact their support email:

A few days ago, my first email:

I want to cancel this account. Please cancel all renewals of this license immediately.

Their reply:

Can you please let us know the reason for the cancellation of your eSupport License? If you have any issues regarding the product, we will be more than glad to assist you in that.

Waiting for your response.

Ok, you want to know why. I understand that- cool.

My second email:

We have decided to go with a solution that has 100% access to the source code unencoded. We have already made this decision and migrated to the new solution.

Please cancel the account immediately.

The key phrases in this email being “we have already migrated to a new solution” and “cancel the account immediately”.

Their second response:

In case of the Owned license, you will get 99% of open source code. You can modify the source code to customize the software as per your requirement. The 1% source code which is not provided includes the license management files and they are not provided to stop the piracy of the software. Please let me know if you are interested in buying the Owned license as we have some special offers for the day or you want us to cancel your eSupport Monthly Leased license.

Awaiting your response.

I’ll be the first to admit I snapped a little bit after this one. I already told them twice to cancel the account, I already told them we migrated to another solution. I know that in a couple days I am going to be re-billed for the leased license if they do not cancel my account. Now it just smells like they are trying to draw this out and get another payment from me when I have already removed their software from my server, installed another solution, and just want to move on with my life.

My third email:

I can not believe you badger your customers like this. I don’t want to talk about it or see special offers.

CANCEL THE MONTHLY LEASED LICENSE NOW.

If I receive another charge from your company I will file a fraud claim with my bank and perform a charge back. You have guaranteed that I will never be a customer of Kayako in the future, and I will go out of my way to share this experience with others.

Today I was billed again after repeatedly asking them to cancel the account. Kayko has not replied to my previous email or canceled my account.

My final email before I perform a chargeback with my bank:

I was just billed again for this license after I have asked you repeatedly to cancel.

You have 24 hours to refund my payment before I file fraud with Worldpay and my credit card company.

I am waiting for your response.

Screw you Kayako. Take it from someone else who runs a service that does monthly billing- This is not how you treat customers.

You have effectively taken a customer that was pleased with your software but couldn’t use it due to a compatibility issue and turned him into someone who is going to badmouth you to everyone he comes in contact with everywhere he goes online. I’ll get my money back anyway, and all you will have to show for it is bad press. Keep up the good work jerks.

My Experience with Kayako – A Warning [jccommerce]

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