It is a great program, with lots to offer, and from what I have seen, the company is amazing to it's employees, which can effect the clients, since you can often tell based on customer service experiences. It allows us to keep track of all of our chats, as well as allows the guests to grade their experience. Plus it has generated a ton of new leads for us!
The only feature I wish existed was a way to put a chat on hold, or allow them to put their info in and let them know that someone will be with them momentarily, instead of getting multiple chats at once. We often have to all be offline to finish what we are doing, which doesn't allow the clients to use the chat feature. It would be useful for those companies, like us, the only usually have 2-4 people online at one time.
Make sure you will have enough staff to man it, in case you are getting a large influx of chats. It can be hard to handle 3 or more at one time.
It helps us catch those guests who don't want to call in and talk to someone real. We are able to give our information at the click of a button, and then eventually get more leads out of it. We require at least their email address, so they also get put into our mailing system, which also helps to generate leads.
I like how easy this was to install on my site. The analytics are great - especially the integration with Google Analytics. I like several of the extensions and the possibility of integrating chat with other applications. I like that they have free trial. The chat interface and its behavior are customizable to match our site's look and feel and business workflow. You can define the number of users and get billed based on the actual number of users. You can go up and down on the number of of users depending on your needs. Olark's customer service is helpful and responsive.
This product affects page load speed (which slows down my site, although it's true of many website add ons). I wish the pricing was more affordable with larger number of users. I'd like to see more integrations with CRM's - especially with Zoho CRM. Pulling up transcripts is a little slow, but fortunately we don't need to do this very often.
Look for integrations with your CRM.
Helps conversion of website visitors to better sales leads. We are able to track conversions on Google Analytics which is quite helpful for optimizing our pages and even digital advertising. It's also works well when an agent isn't available to respond by taking a message via the chat window. It will send an email to us when someone wants to chat (and there is nobody available to take the call).
Olark makes the conversation with the customer effortless and easy. With a polite bubble ping, the employee is not only notified of incoming messages but also able to reach out to existing users that have yet to reach out. You can push the customer to certain pages as well as allow them to share their screen with you. Simple commands using a "!" at the beginning allow for automated responses created by the admin.
Transcripts easily upload into customer management platforms such as SalesForce to allow for documentation practices to be upheld. Each chat offers an opportunity to review at the end. This can be monitored by the admin on the home page when the admin logs in. Low chat scores are easily identifiable.
Should off-hours be present or they just barely miss an available agent, the chat is swiftly converted into an e-mail that requires follow-up by an agent.
My preference would be for Olark to have its own built-in spell checking method. For example, if the agent had 1-2 typos, it would refrain from allowing them to click on send without fixing them. I would prefer that it would be advanced to check for incorrect use of words or grammatical errors. Although the normal computer program tracks this, I'd recommend installing an add-on to the web browser to ensure additional accuracy when managing a larger team.
The notification integration is also poor as it can only be used in specific browsers. Desktop notifications need work.
Make sure your team has awareness of the notifications - I have found it is often hard to hear/follow when using a phone system on the same pair of headphones.
Olark made us available to our customers in as many forms as possible. For those that prefer online communication, it allows a safe and easy point of contact with freedom to speak without constraints that many chats give. You're speaking with a LIVE person - not a bot!
Olark gives you the ability support your product via live chat. This is huge for our team as we get so many phone calls and emails from users about very small questions or requests that can be answered quickly. Phone calls and email are no where near as quick as live chat! Olark has an amazing interface and user experience.
Olark also gives our team sufficient analytics on our users! Pretty awesome stuff.
I would like the ability to have multiple paragraphs in a response to a client. The number of seats you can buy is a bit frustrating, as it doubles from 4 users to 8 users. We have 6 potential users and would be paying for 2 extra accounts. We choose to just make due with 4 users on live chat.
From my experience, Olark is a top notch product from a top notch team. I highly recommend their chat feature.
My goodness! Live chat has tremendously allowed for our team to cut the volume of phone calls that some in from our customers. It gives our customers a quick and reliable way to reach us.
Olark is simple to use and fairly unobtrusive visually (and I know you can configure the look to fit your site's motifs). It's a lightweight widget that we use for customer support on our eCommerce website. I like that it's configurable so you can have both live chat and after hours messaging. I also love the way chat logs are archived for easy reference. We have a large customer service team across several offices and it meets our needs admirably.
It has a ton of integrations possible, so if you're way into Slack or Hubspot or Salesforce or whatever, you should be able to plug Olark into any of those things. Frankly, my company isn't even using it for lead gen and we probably should be. We're Hubspot fans over here and we haven't even scratched the surface with Olark and Hubspot integrations.
Honestly, I've never had any complaints about the service from either users on the site or our customer service team.
Obviously chatbots are all the rage now and I don't know how well Olark integrates with those since we aren't using that yet. It does integrate with Hubspot (which should have some bot features soon) and a webhook API so it might work with a chatbot but you'll have to do your research on that. We only use it with live reps and it works great.
We use Olark to provide real-time customer service via chat (and archiving of chat logs for research and training purposes)
This service has completely changed how we interact with prospective clients. There is a feature that prompts a chat with the prospect after so many minutes and has proved to be a total game changer for us. Also - to start the chat, the prospect is required to enter in a bit of personal information which allows us to capture their info and market to them again.
I do wish there was more customization available as far as the look goes. You also have to have a certain amount of users to be able to remove the Olark branding.
Give it a try with the free version if you are unsure. The premium features are more than worth it as well... capturing contact info, receiving an email of the transcript, additional customizations, prompt chats. I believe anything you can do increase your engagement with your prospective clients is win. Olark support is great. The chat is also very easy to use on the consumer end.
We are turning leads into prospective clients by engaging with them as soon as they visit our website. We are also able to capture their contact info and target market them once they leave the site. Our website leads have increased by ~80% just by adding the Olark chat feature. The cost is so low compared to the payout for us.