Last week, I started a trial of Kajabi - an e-commerce platform that integrates course creation, marketing, and sales, all under one roof. My business coach highly recommended it, advising me that unlike with other e-commerce options, I would not have to patch together the moving parts of developing and promoting multimedia courses.
My experience with Kajabi so far has been mixed. I came in with a very specific vision and need, namely, to develop, market, and sell a live video conference series - do-it-yourself PR intensive training programs - which I would then record and sell on-demand, for a fraction of the cost of the live version.
After registering for Kajabi, I watched an educational video series in their “university,” entitled “Course Creation 101,” whose purported goal is to inform new Kajabi users how to create a course. The videos were engaging, clear, and informative. They additionally modeled for me how to create a video course, as they were broken down into very clear and bite size pieces, which were laid out methodically and sequentially. The videos did not, however, explain anywhere how to create a live conference call program or how to market and sell that program.
I poked around on the site and found that there was email support. I did not see a live chat or phone support option, so I went ahead and emailed my questions. Responses typically came a few hours later, and to my repeated frustration, never actually answered my very pointed questions, but rather, answered other questions that I had not asked.
So I asked the same questions in different ways, in follow-up emails, hoping to get the information I needed. It didn’t happen, and I felt increasingly frustrated. I then discovered another video series in the “university,” called, “Building Blocks 101.” Those videos were more helpful in facilitating an understanding of exactly what Kajabi is and does. With these videos, I was able to ask even more detailed questions, in direct reference to what I saw available, and what I did not see available, on the Kajabi platform. Still, no resolution.
A couple of days into this back-and-forth emailing with the support team, I tweeted Kajabi about my frustrations. Right about then, I also received an email asking me how satisfied I was with the support experience. I replied that I never received answers to my questions, that I was increasingly frustrated, and that I wished they had a live support option via chat or phone. I’m not sure if the support team was replying to my tweet or survey, but either way, I quickly received a reply that they were installing live chat on my dashboard. I was super excited and immediately jumped on chat, pelting the poor Kajabi support guy with my litany of unanswered questions. Over the course of the next hour or two, he answered them all, patiently and clearly.
I then understood that while Kajabi offers numerous integrated platforms, and while it walks users through the process of creating, marketing, and selling their programs, Kajabi does not integrate live video conferencing into its platform. Instead, one has to create the program separately, through a platform like Zoom, and manually patch it together.
Still, Kajabi has many features that are essential to an online business. For example, customers can bundle together courses in their purchase; business owners can receive newsletter subscriptions automatically, when customers make a purchase; and Kajabi walks users through setting up the whole world of upselling, through additional offers in checkout and through follow-up emails. For these reasons, I am excited about the tremendous potential Kajabi offers my business, and I plan on sticking around after my trial period ends.
That said, I continue to be frustrated by the support response, or lack thereof. Live chat, it turns out, has limited hours during the week and is closed during the weekend. So I’ve been emailing the support team again since Friday, asking the myriad of questions that have arisen as I have put together my offer page and sales page. It’s been 48 hours, and I have yet to receive one response to any of my four accumulated emails.
Which all goes to say, Kajabi is a bit of a mixed bag. I think the concept is outstanding but that it needs improvement in a few areas:
- Given Kajabi’s stated goal of serving the spectrum of businesses, it should incorporate live video conferencing platforms. Business coaches, life coaches, health coaches, and more regularly use these platforms as a core part of their multimedia offerings.
- The support team needs to power up its game – becoming more accessible to clients and more precise in its response to client questions.
- Kajabi needs to have an in-your-face introductory page that outlines, in bullet point form, what it does do and what it doesn’t do, so that first-time users can get an immediate hit and bird’s eye view about how the platform will and will not serve them.
With these improvements, I think Kajabi will be a stellar platform.
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