It is well suited for communication with existing customers and prospects. It is less appropriate for people just looking to visit our website to get up to date with the latest team news or those who aren't at a computer.
Olark chat is easy to set up and use. You can have more than one user logged in to monitor the chat on different computers. This makes a fast response time more likely. Although you have to be sure to keep your volume up on the computer so you hear the sound letting you know there's a chat waiting. I like that you can see the customers path through the website and you can put clickable links while you are in a chat to guide the customer to a product or a help page. Plus you can see if they actually went there. This makes it easier to upsell
Mobile compatibility - AliveChat has a dynamic user interface which makes its popup chat widget display and work perfectly on all devices - mobile and desktop. Thus web visitors get a complete experience no matter the device from which they use in accessing our website.
Analytic - AliveChat provides us with a dynamic set of website analytics that helps us in analyzing our progress or decline in a timely manner. With the analytics provided by AliveChat, we are able to monitor the number of visitors on the website at a particular time, the duration of which they have been on the website, the number of times they have been on the website in time past etc.
Feature packed - AliveChat is packed with features which makes the job of the customer care agents easier. For instance, with AliveChat it is very easy for an agent to transfer a web visitors chat to another agent that has better answers to the agent's query. We are also able to introduce short survey questions to web visitors, which they respond to before they begin chatting with a customer care rep.
Olark is user friendly for both sides of the CHAT conversation. If you are initiating the chat, or the one receiving the chat, it is extremely easy to follow and use. There are many different levels of computer use comprehension and Olark is for every level.
Olark has reporting features to allow you to check the quality of your employees chat abilities as well as their productivity. It provides feedback for the employee themselves to also see how they are doing and take any suggestions the customer may leave for them regarding their chat experience.
Olark is very affordable and offers you the option, at a low cost, to look bigger and more professional that you even are. We were a smaller company and has the chat option with Olark and now have grown tremendously and STILL have the Olark chat option. Olark allowed us to grow and provide professionalism to our customers .
The Olark program allows you to set up quick responses to keep your customer from waiting, and to allow your employees to not have to retype the same response over and over. It is a great program that the employees really enjoy as well. It reminds you if you forgot to log out when you left your desk and provides your customer a quick note giving them the option to send the chat as an email inquiry instead, so you don't miss a thing.
Not really an area of improvement for Olark specifically, but I will offer that it is incredibly important to keep in mind your company's "shopping hours" or peak traffic times (there is a Reports feature on the software that allows you to analyze peak traffic times).
Transcript history can be a little tricky - if you're searching for a specific past conversation, sometimes you may get multiple search results and have to sift through them until you find exactly what you're looking for.
I'd also offer that you will occasionally come across folks that are on your site to cyberbully or say nonsensical things. While there isn't an absolute fullproof way to deal with this, Olark does offer a nice "block" feature to disregard any unwanted conversations.
To be honest, renewal decisions are not currently within my power. Hypothetically speaking, I'm very comfortable with the platform, have used it daily for nearly a year, and would see no reason to switch to anything else. The small criticisms I had are not significant enough to deter me from using Olark. It's a user friendly, effective tool for our department.
Our organization does not have any complaints about Olark's Support. Anytime we reached out to them for assistance, we received a prompt, helpful reply! As mentioned previously, we used Olark fairly basically so we didn't have too much need to work with their support team other than a few general questions here and there. They were always pleasant to work with.
AliveChat really serves a different purpose than other products. Very few products offer the ability to chat through our website, so it compliments our phone, text, and email options very well.
Olark has an easier implementation process and has better functionality such as the ability to send commands through the platform to either create a ticket in your CRM or push an opportunity to salesforce; you're even able to 'push' the end user to a web page. Implementing their SDK is a snap as well.
AliveChat has made it easy for us to track the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. As the real-time number of visitors on the website gives us insights into the performance of ongoing campaigns.
AliveChat also makes it possible for us to have an idea of where our web visitors are coming from i.e. via the pre-chat survey form for instance. We are able to generate important data like how a web visitor got to know about us, their expectations when visiting our website etc.
AliveChat makes it easy for web visitors to get a real-time response to their questions, with a delay of probably a few seconds.
