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Olark

Score10 out of 10

35 Reviews and Ratings

What is Olark?

Olark is a website live chat tool for engaging website visitors while they browse. It can be used to to track leads, drive sales, provide support.

Categories & Use Cases

Top Performing Features

  • Chat history and transcripts

    Enables users to visualize past conversations and notes.

    Category average: 7.9

  • Chat reporting

    Standard or customizable reports with user engagement metrics.

    Category average: 7.6

  • Chat and web analytics

    Analytics that enable the tracking of user website visits and chat box interactions.

    Category average: 7.5

Areas for Improvement

Everything you need in one place.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Olark to communicate with our clients on our website to help them locate anything on our website. We also help them problem solve directly through Olark's chat. Olark's chat is indeed top tier and makes our day to day operations much easier because of the effectiveness of their program. In 11 years, we have only experienced a couple of outages and they were resolved in less than 10 minutes. It is indeed a great program that every business needs to have.

Pros

  • Ability to create commands to make responding easier
  • Chat transcript report after each chat
  • The accessibility to Olark's staff is amazing.

Cons

  • We should be able to transfer a chat and the transferred recipient should be able to see the context of what was previously said.

Return on Investment

  • The ROI is definitely a positive because of the ability to communicate effectively

Usability

Other Software Used

DDMSPLUS

Olark Makes it Simple to Chat with Customers in Real Time

Pros

  • Showing us what page the customer is on the website lets us track the path they follow through the products. It lets us know what what page they looked at and what they are looking at next, or if they are stalled on one page.
  • Yotpo chat lets us know how the visitor came to our site - we can see in real time what the search query was.
  • The away feature lets us put up a message on the chat about how to contact us while we are away plus links to commonly asked questions.

Cons

  • The version we have does not allow us to set up a list of common responses to pop into a chat. We keep them handy on a separate document so it makes for extra steps.
  • We have not been able to add html for clickable links in the away window even though the site says you can do it.

Return on Investment

  • We've been able to turn around sales we might have lost when the customer has trouble with payment. This is very frustrating for them and you can loose them quickly.
  • By offering a coupon when the customer chats with us we have a better chance of keeping them on the site and completing the sale.
  • I wish the chat alerts were more visible. When you are working and concentrating on other tasks you can miss the sound. We have missed chats.

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk

Other Software Used

Zendesk, Yotpo, G Suite

Chatting Made Easy

Pros

  • Its ease of use and simple design is a huge plus.
  • Their customer support is top notch. They have always been super responsive and helpful.
  • Past chats are stored and easy to search.
  • It's easy to customize to fit the look and feel of your website.

Cons

  • It would be very helpful to send graphics (like screenshots) during chat sessions. Olark allows you to receive graphics but not send them.
  • There is the occasional outage/downtime but it's usually back up and running pretty quickly.
  • It would be nice if multiple users could share one seat, but they only offer one user per seat.

Return on Investment

  • Olark allows my customer support team to respond to inquiries much faster than before.
  • We have seen an uptick in sales as we are able to address more questions from website visitors.
  • We have changed the design of our website based on chat feedback and questions obtained through Olark.

Other Software Used

Zoho CRM, Insightly, Dropbox

Olark is worthwhile!

Pros

  • Live chat with customers / visitors to your website.
  • Customer Service.
  • Location services - can see IP addresses/approximate locations of visitors.

Cons

  • Interface when dealing with a huge influx of visitors.

Most Important Features

  • Live chat feature.
  • After hours messages.
  • Visitor locations / IP addresses are visible.
  • Blocking feature for inappropriate content.
  • Ability to send links/photos/documents instantaneously.

Return on Investment

  • More accessibility in terms of addressing customer/client questions.

Other Software Used

HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM, Mailchimp

Olark, your household chat platform

Pros

  • Ability to chat via mobile web browsers.
  • Ease of implementation.
  • Their support is very courteous and eager to assist.

Cons

  • More options to edit the theme of the chat widget.
  • They lack a Mobile app for end users to chat with the individuals that reach out to them via chat.
  • Their Slack integration needs some work, or I need to make sure all of the settings are in place correctly.

Return on Investment

  • An easy alternative for our end users to engage support without having to pick up a phone. We've seen an increase in how many chats vs email and phone calls.
  • ROI is definitely a plus as the pricing for olark is very competitive.
  • Even our internal stakeholders utilize the platform to contact the help desk, thanks to olark.

Alternatives Considered

UJET

Other Software Used

Google Drive, Zendesk, JIRA Software