Issuetrak vs. Olark

If someone is looking for a ticket management system or something to keep track of records in a cloud environment, IssueTrak is well suited to handle this need. It's a very simple and basic approach and after using it for 10 years, it is still just as easy to find what I'm looking for on previous tickets from years ago. The setup can get a little bit of a challenge and if you have a need to segregate users/employees into their own areas for workflow, it can be a little daunting trying to get it just right. Where I feel that IssueTrak falls short is if you need to keep track of CUSTOM FIELDS (fields that you input as searchable and trackable information) in the Dashboard area, where you spend most of your time looking to see what your workload and flow are like, is very limited, requiring you to dig a little further for what you want to see. Also, no ability to input physical addresses / GPS coordinates to be displayed on some sort of real-time map is also missing and could really boost what IssueTrak has to offer.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Keeps expansive records over a large period of time.
• Provides a simple way to look at your workload with dashboards.
• Can be used on a company level with employees, but also can be set up to have customer interaction.
• Additional modules are handy as well (Inventory tracking, Surveys, etc.)

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• No place to physically MAP out your tickets (IE: Google Maps / Address Fields / GPS coordinates).
• Dashboards and ticket items do not update in real-time, making users need to REFRESH to for the latest updates/dashboards.
• Mobile app not as good as the desktop experience, especially for Dashboard views.
• Can be a bit complicated to setup and get going. Segregation of departments / users can also be a little on the complex side.
• Dashboards could GREATLY use the ability to display and track CUSTOM fields for quicker access to the information you want the most.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

IssueTrak is good at what it does, but we really needed some expanded functionality out of it that just hasn't organically happened. Having a 'real-time' update of Dashboards and tickets is a piece that is lacking, especially as our organization continues to grow. A lot of times you go to update a ticket and find out it has been altered/closed before you even hit the submit button. Being able to make charts/graphs of custom fields for Dashboard is a feature (that I feel) is long overdue. Also, the ability to capture address information / GPS coordinates to be displayed on a live map is also a feature we really wanted to see.

Incentivized

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.

It is simply easy and customizable to be exactly what you need it to be

Incentivized

They were always very good at getting a timely answer to any questions I had and in cases where I actually needed support to step in and help, they always delivered. I was very happy with the support I received from them.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

IssueTrak shines for basic ticket management and the format in which they display all the information is very well done. I'd highly recommend it to someone that is looking at trying to track information at a ground level (just starting out). While other solutions are not perfect by any means, we just find that it is lacking some key features that we had hoped would have been implemented over the years (IE: More flexibility with Dashboard reporting and custom fields, a way visually look at addresses and GPS coordinates on a display map, more of a real-time approach with data and completion, etc.) This need caused us to look at some other solutions that may fit the bill a little better in the future.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Made tracking individual service changes, adds, deletions, and trouble-ticket very easy to manage.
• We migrated from a paper-based work order system to completely digital and online, thus cutting down on a lot of unneeded printouts.
• Was able to actually validate and see the performance of users and what they were contributing to the department on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis in terms of work performance.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized