Olark vs. Plone

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

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The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.

• 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.

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• Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
• Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
• Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.

• 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.

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• Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
• Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
• Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).

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.

We have critical systems running on Plone so will need it in the future.

Free to use since its Open source, so we don't have to worry about licence costs.

We know how to use and develop Plone and it has no limits.

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

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Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small.

The new user interface in Plone 6 is even better, it is super fast, has lots of different blocks for enhancing the page, has flexible layout system and is easy to extend with more features.

Our Plone sites are very robust. We have critical systems on Plone and we have been running sites on Plone for over 20 years with very little unexpected downtime.

Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.

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.

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There are not too many Plone companies in the world. But the ones who are, are high level professionals

I have been participating Plone training and the trainers have always been professional. Materials were good and the instructions clear

Well organized, professional training with good materials and instructions

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.

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Drupal: Plone is cheaper, so with Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However, Drupal has a lower learning curve WordPress: For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone. Joomla, is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better

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Plone has no limits. We have massive sites and can run them just fine

• 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.

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• The impact Plone has had at the University of Oshkosh is as follows: this software allows student workers to learn about IT departments and CMS's in a user-friendly way. It gives many students great jobs that look great on their resumes.
• Since there are great training manuals for Plone, there is increased employee efficient in the workplace. Training doesn't take long, and if there's ever a question, the Plone manual is a great tool to refer to.
• If an employee using Plone quits, its easy to find someone to replace them with quick training and great resources.