Olark vs. Swift Digital

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

it's well suited to a business that relies on constant email marketing and to keep in contact with leads or customers. This is the heartbeat of business and suits us. We can segment qualified leads, data scores, track campaigns and effectively save time to work on other customer campaigns. If you are a smaller business that only sends one email a month, it's not for you. This software is very sophisticated and can be technical in the beginning.

• 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

• drag-and-drop campaign builder
• email templates
• lead scoring
• Analytics

• 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

• More email flexibility would be good.
• Simplify the modules-there is a lot, and it can be overwhelming.

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

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

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

We looked into Swift based upon a recommendation. We have previously used ActiveCampaign but found it very clunky for what we wanted to use it for. We also looked into Pardot, but was on the other end of the spectrum, it had far too many features, complexities and required an implementation specialist at our expense of $15K. Swift was just the right fit for us, and we like knowing that our data is kept in Australia

• 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

• Better lead quality
• Has allowed us to close clients quicker.
• Higher ROI
• Access to much more targeted customer data
• Getting used to the software took more time thn anticipated