Help Scout is help desk software. The vendor’s value proposition is that that their solution reduces time spent on training users because Help Scout is simple to use and set up and scales like any enterprise product. This solution includes multiple mailboxes to support as many email addresses as needed in order to work collaboratively across teams, and manage several products or brands from one account. Reports on conversation trends, team performance, productivity, and customer happiness are…
$30
per month starts with 100 contacts
LiveChat
Score 7.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
LiveChat serves as a customer service platform with live chat support, help desk and web analytics functionalities, with the goal of allowing users to provide 24/7 support to customers. The core feature of the software is its chat tool, where both service and sales team can answer customers' questions in real time. Online businesses can interact with customers on their website, to be more accessible. With LiveChat, users can identify people on the website and engage…
$25
per month per user
Olark
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
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.
They all had their positives and negatives. For us, it came down to signing a BAA (Zendesk wanted $28,000 to sign one). We enjoy working with vendors who can support healthcare initiates such as we are building.
Small businesses that want a conversational type of customer support experience. Nothing wrong with support tickets, but it does make you feel like a number. Also, we needed to get up and running quickly so the "inbox" feel of the dashboard was already familiar with the team so they could adopt the new software quickly.
We needed a mechanism in place to make contact with visitors to our website easier. What we discovered is that it's an excellent tool for creating reports and dashboards that show how soon issues are handled. Our website can now be updated in real-time, and all of our internal teams are really excited to use this fantastic technology. I really recommend [LiveChat] to many friends and past colleagues.
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
Extremely simple to use and understand as a user - treats communications like human beings and provides a much more personal feel to communication (as opposed to making people feel like numbers).
The email newsletter.
They are super responsive. They are pretty rad and transparent: if something goes wrong on their end they are not afraid of admitting fault. Which leads me to trust them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little about the product, but as leadership, that's something that I really need
Help Scout does exactly what it needs to (facilitate organized, efficient conversations between customers and support people) without getting in the way.
The most important factor of Livechat is their own chat support, I had many requirement from the Sales Head, Support Head to implement features that I was unsure if the product could do. However, as I did the implementation one by one I constantly used the chat support which helped me step by step all the way.
The UX of the product is pretty simple and intuitive to use. There are quite a few features that we could easily plug and play. We tried going to the market to find a solution that could help us but they did not have as many out of the box features and simple to use
Their integration between LiveChat and Chatbot is pretty seamless and since both of them are from the same company, it's works pretty well.
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.
Trying to group tickets is a bit unflexible. You can create folders which can be part of a workflow (automatic trigger) but you can't create a folder based on tags. This needs to be improved because there's a need to create smarter segments and mix them.
Metrics are useful but there needs to be more details about them. You can drill down in some but others are still not very actionable or visible (ok, that number went down, but what was the cause? what's the criteria with what you measure that?)
It has a limited amount of agents, so when you have many customer care employees during one shift it is hard to manage the quantity of active agents.
When system is overloaded and many customers are waiting in a queue it starts to works slowly (sometimes the program even lags) and you need to refresh the system to write a message.
Occasionally when you open a new tab, you might lose your current conversation.
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.
We are receiving feedback from the organizational level that they may want us to transition to a different solution to provide consistency across the company.
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.
Help Scout is a great solution for support teams. There are many articles and webinars to help you learn how to use Help Scout. There are also many features to help make your workflows easier and more efficient. I would readily recommend Help Scout to any small or medium-growing support teams.
The only issues I have had with LiveChat are the technical glitches within the program. These are not common as in everyday occurrences but when the glitches do happen they tend to have very negative repercussions. This is due to chats with customers being dropped, this may be an internal server issue though and may not happen for everyone.
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.
Only have minimal experience with G-Suite for a much smaller company. This worked well for that organization but did not have similar specialization functions that suite our larger organization very well. Help Scout's pricing makes sense, and continues to service our needs well. Minimal usage of other programs, but have no need to explore alternatives at this time.
Overall very similar in design, but LiveChat had a better interface, better reporting and analytic tools, better mobile support, and just an easier overall feel. The two products are very much alike in the vast majority of ways, but I ended up preferring this product overall. Price points were similar as well, as well as the allowed number of users.
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.
We are able to retain our customer base due to the outstanding customer service our Customer Experience department provides. Without an organized tool like Help Scout, this would not be possible. We pride ourselves in quick response times to customers and are able to do so by effectively routing tickets to the right agents.
We have a small team so the overall impact is that it is easy for one or two employees to handle a large number of tickets without hiring more people. Plus, you can use this software remotely, save a ton on traveling to and from and office.
