TrustRadius Insights
Olark is a versatile live chat software that is widely used by customer service teams to provide immediate support to customers during the …
Starting at $15 per month
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What is Olark?
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.
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Pricing
Self Service
$19.00
Cloud
Per Agent Per Month
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $15 per month
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Olark?
Olark Video
Olark Demo
Olark Integrations
Olark Competitors
Olark Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Olark starts at $15.
SnapEngage, LivePerson Conversation Cloud (LiveEngage), and ClickDesk are common alternatives for Olark.
The most common users of Olark are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
(36)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
Olark is a versatile live chat software that is widely used by customer service teams to provide immediate support to customers during the checkout process. By utilizing the chat widget on their website, customer service staff can engage with potential clients and address any questions or concerns they may have. The software also offers the option for screen sharing, which proves to be particularly useful when clients struggle to describe their issues. Additionally, Olark's chat archives are highly regarded for their convenience, allowing customer service representatives to reference past conversations and follow up with customers effectively.
Furthermore, Olark is praised for its ease of use and reliability, making it a popular choice among businesses of all sizes. The software offers a range of customizable features such as initiating conversations based on specific customer behaviors and storing chat transcripts. It also integrates seamlessly with popular platforms like Salesforce, Desk.com, and Zendesk, further enhancing its functionality and versatility. While some users have noted that stronger analytics capabilities would be beneficial, Olark has proven to be effective for companies with up to 15 employees actively engaged in chat support. Overall, Olark not only improves customer support but also helps businesses capture more leads and increase sales opportunities.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-17 of 17)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
April 25, 2021
Olark is worthwhile!
Olark is an incredibly useful resource in our organization as it allows us a quick bridge access to our customers through our website.
- Live chat with customers / visitors to your website.
- Customer Service.
- Location services - can see IP addresses/approximate locations of visitors.
- Interface when dealing with a huge influx of visitors.
January 23, 2020
Great tool for basic chat communications! Not robust enough for a large corporations needs though.
Olark was used by our entire Customer Support team for communicating with our customers via Live Chat. Olark provided our customers with a quick and easy way to communicate their questions as well as make small modifications to their orders. On the organizational side, having Live Chats available during our business hours greatly decreased our incoming phone call volume. Without it, we would have had to hire several new employees to cover the added phone volume.
- Olark makes chat communications as simple as it should be. The user interface is extremely easy to learn and to use.
- Shortcuts. Olark makes it very easy to create and store your own customized pre-written responses to allow for quicker/efficient assistance.
- Screen-Sharing feature. I previously mentioned this as a positive and certainly meant it. The issue is that is doesn't work as intended 100% of the time. I think a bit more work could go into that feature so it's more consistent.
- Reporting. Olark could use more robust reporting. The metrics that they do show are accurate and easy to view, but our organization likes to dive deeper into the metrics to better understand the impact of a program on our operations.
September 19, 2019
Olark Makes it Simple to Chat with Customers in Real Time
We use the free version of Olark on our website and it is monitored by our customer service staff. It allows our customer to chat with us immediately if they have a question or issue with checkout. Because it is so quick and easy to chat we are able to turn problems into sales. We can also see what page the customer is on in the website and what pages they have visited. This lets us suggest other products for them to look at based on their browsing.
- Showing us what page the customer is on the website lets us track the path they follow through the products. It lets us know what what page they looked at and what they are looking at next, or if they are stalled on one page.
- Yotpo chat lets us know how the visitor came to our site - we can see in real time what the search query was.
- The away feature lets us put up a message on the chat about how to contact us while we are away plus links to commonly asked questions.
- The version we have does not allow us to set up a list of common responses to pop into a chat. We keep them handy on a separate document so it makes for extra steps.
- We have not been able to add html for clickable links in the away window even though the site says you can do it.
May 08, 2019
Olark is Okay...
Olark is used in two instances for our team. One I can speak to more than the other. In the first instance, our sales teams use olark to answer prospective customers questions while they view a tour of our product.
My team (support) uses Olark to support our product via live chat. Chat allows us to serve more than one customer at a time and still gives the customer direct access to a real person at the click of a button!
My team (support) uses Olark to support our product via live chat. Chat allows us to serve more than one customer at a time and still gives the customer direct access to a real person at the click of a button!
- Gives analytics of the chatter's internet browser and what page they are using in our product.
- Users seem to be able to locate chat and use it without too many questions or instructions.
- It's affordable...
- Image sharing is a must.
- Text breaks. Come on! This should go without saying that a chat program should allow for you to hit "shift return" to put a page break in your text. How are you supposed to send step by step directions?
- Olark has been very unreliable as of recent. Messages sending and receiving at an alarmingly delayed rate.
January 31, 2019
Olark for Customers
We use Olark to interact with our online visitors. It is used by our Guest Experience team and it has really helped elevate our guest service even more. We have real people providing answers to guests that would not necessarily call in for their quick questions. We have also increased our number of reservations by really focusing on converting those visitors into guests!
- It is easy to learn and implement.
- It is easy to set up and create shortcuts.
- It is very affordable!
- There is not a way to add a queue. We have guests that get a little impatient when we are very busy. This would allow for the guest to know that we are working on getting to them and not ignoring them.
- We have experienced outages this past year, and the communication in regards to what is happening is not the best.
January 08, 2019
Chatting Made Easy
Olark is used by our customer agents and sales team to address questions and inquiries from visitors to our web site. It allows us to provide better and more timely customer support. We have also noticed that we are able to capture more leads and increase sales opportunities by having Olark on our website.
- Its ease of use and simple design is a huge plus.
- Their customer support is top notch. They have always been super responsive and helpful.
- Past chats are stored and easy to search.
- It's easy to customize to fit the look and feel of your website.
- It would be very helpful to send graphics (like screenshots) during chat sessions. Olark allows you to receive graphics but not send them.
- There is the occasional outage/downtime but it's usually back up and running pretty quickly.
- It would be nice if multiple users could share one seat, but they only offer one user per seat.
March 16, 2018
Olark - A must have for your business!
Olark is mainly being used currently by our customer service team via the chat option on our company website. It is professional, very user friendly, whether you are the customer or the employee and the reporting features are great. We did not have to incorporate programming our site and reprogramming as we changed web providers, instead, we have Olark and it works with it all. So convenient and a program you can trust to offer an additional means of communication for the customers.
- 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.
- I have not found anything that does not work the way we need it too with Olark in our organization. I was concerned that it would not be able to accommodate our tremendous and somewhat unexpected rapid growth because so many of the programs we have used early on were failing us, but Olark has done just fine. Better than fine, excellent.
February 15, 2018
Olark, your household chat platform
Olark was previously used as a chat widget our clients and end users would engage my support team for help desk related inquiries. Our sales team also uses olark as a chat widget on our homepage to engage potential new clients. The problems olark helps us address is allowing our client base to communicate to us via our CSM or homepage so we can answer any questions or concerns they may have.
- Ability to chat via mobile web browsers.
- Ease of implementation.
- Their support is very courteous and eager to assist.
- More options to edit the theme of the chat widget.
- They lack a Mobile app for end users to chat with the individuals that reach out to them via chat.
- Their Slack integration needs some work, or I need to make sure all of the settings are in place correctly.
February 02, 2018
Olark - Cheap and simple. Don't get fancy though....
We use Olark to manage our chat channel for technical support. Overall Olark is a very solid, no-frills application. We are able to limit chats at any given time, as well as integrate with our WFM provider. They don't have higher level capabilities (Chatbots, predictive chatting) but it works as needed
- Reliable for the most part
- Limit the number of chats
- Integrate with outside platforms
- Chatbots
- Prediction of time to chat
August 16, 2017
Olark gets it done.
We practice all-hands support so Olark is currently being used by the entire team. We use it to talk to prospective customers and answer quick questions.
- Telling us where customers are located
- Saving conversations
- Telling us the page customers came from
- More than 1 team member cannot be signed on at a time
- I'd like to see a history of the pages customers visited
July 25, 2017
Reviewing Noah's Olark - A Live Chat Tale
Used as a live chat tool, olark has the ability to show service agents that a customer is typing and also has great searchability when digging through archives. [It's] Very easy to use and great for automated chats as well. [It's] Still fairly manual when customizing, so could use improvements there, but good for startups etc., searching for an easier-to-use product.
- Live chat automation
- Visual customization (holidays, etc.)
- Easy integration
- Still very manual when customizing
- Web only shows 5 visitors on site
- Searchability is limited (keyword)
June 10, 2016
Olark is great!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Olark is used by the customer success team at TrackMaven for communicating with customers while they are in our application. We use it daily. It's reliable and integrates with our systems.
- Easy to use for customers and staff
- Affordable
- Scalable
- Nothing comes to mind!
August 17, 2014
Chat and your users will like you better.
I have used Olark in my past two companies' customer service departments (which I managed) to interact with customers in real time.
Pros: Olark is very reliable, has many well thought out features and has very helpful customer service (via chat of course) when you need them. Its very customizable, intuitive and quick and easy to set up and maintain. Olark's features include - starting conversations when customers preform specific behaviors, storing transcripts, noticing when a customer is back for a 2nd visit, and acts as a "contact us" box when your chat agents are offline. You can have multiple employees on chat at the same time - though you do have to pay by user. They also integrate into a number of other platforms such as Salesforce, Desk.com and Zendesk. Though these integrations are rather limited.
Cons: I would love to see them get a bit stronger on analytics - they don't offer much in that department but you can include them in Google Analytics which gets you most of what you need to know. It'd be great if their integrations were a bit stronger (or if you could use more than one at a time). It can also be tricky to use if you have more than 15 employees that will be on chat.
All in all I highly recommend Olark and have enjoyed working with them over the past years!
Pros: Olark is very reliable, has many well thought out features and has very helpful customer service (via chat of course) when you need them. Its very customizable, intuitive and quick and easy to set up and maintain. Olark's features include - starting conversations when customers preform specific behaviors, storing transcripts, noticing when a customer is back for a 2nd visit, and acts as a "contact us" box when your chat agents are offline. You can have multiple employees on chat at the same time - though you do have to pay by user. They also integrate into a number of other platforms such as Salesforce, Desk.com and Zendesk. Though these integrations are rather limited.
Cons: I would love to see them get a bit stronger on analytics - they don't offer much in that department but you can include them in Google Analytics which gets you most of what you need to know. It'd be great if their integrations were a bit stronger (or if you could use more than one at a time). It can also be tricky to use if you have more than 15 employees that will be on chat.
All in all I highly recommend Olark and have enjoyed working with them over the past years!
- Customizations - It's easy to get it to do what you want it to.
- Intuitive features to get your customers to interact
- Customer Service - they are there when you need 'em!
- Nice clean design
- Analytic - They don't give you much, but you can tie it into Google Analytics
- Integrations are basic
- Difficult to use with > 15 employees
August 13, 2014
Try Olark On a Lark
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Olark is primarily used in the customer service department of our company. Olark allows us to directly connect with and support our customers. As our website performs a variety of functions, we have a wide array of issues that arise that Olark allows us to resolve quickly and efficiently. There is nothing more frustrating for a customer than to want to use a tool, but unable to due to either lack of know how or technical difficulties. Additionally, as we are directly connected to the entertainment industry, much of what we do is extremely time sensitive. The immediacy of Olark allows to put out small fires quickly rather than wait for them to turn into full blown five alarm nightmares.
The screen share option has proven to be particularly helpful - especially with those clients who are not used to describing, in detail, the issue they're having - obviously compounded by frustration. The archives of all chats prove to be helpful as well when referencing past conversations for following up.
- Screen share is an invaluable tool for offering that support to customers who are not completely computer savvy and require some special TLC.
- Provides a user-friendly chat window - easy to read, and navigate.
- Also, Olark customer service whenever I've had an Olark question proves very helpful.
- Doesn't easily allow you to email a transcript of the chat you've had to a customer.
- Copy and pasting of chat information is difficult.
- Screen share sometimes does not work.
August 11, 2014
This Little Birdy Says...
We utilize Olark to provide customer support to visitors on our website. It's a positive asset because it allows us to answer questions online rather than on the phone in our offices, and it occasionally will funnel customers directly toward someone that can walk them through the sales process. Some of our best leads come through Olark chats. We don't have specific departments here, but it is used for sales and customer support.
- I think Olark does an excellent job of making an easy to use product that anyone can pick up in a matter of minutes.
- Olark's overall site design and layout is clean, tasteful and playfully their own. It's easy to find exactly what you need.
- This doesn't have much to do with the actual use of the product, but Olark has built an enduring brand that I find incredibly charming, relatable, and fun. I love their updates on their retreat and the way that they enthusiastically talk about their identity.
- I hate the fact that I can't create the username I want. Olark only has one server and I have a common name. I'm the only Jacob in our office, but because Olark has one central server, I have to be Jacob10 because one of their other clients has that username.
- I wish I could see more information about previous conversations with returning customers. Simply saying "this is a returning customer" doesn't do me much good.
August 11, 2014
I hope they've added a queue feature
I used Olark in my role as Support Manager at Zozi back in 2012-2013. I liked the level of ease it brought to allowing our customers to contact my team for support, but I was really displeased with the lack of a queue - we often had 8-10 people chatting us at once, and with a super small team of only 3 support agents, this made it difficult to multi-task (we also offered phone support, and often had to juggle both at once).
Other than that, Olark was a comprehensive product with excellent user support. If they've implemented a queue feature, then more power to them! I'd certainly recommend them as an option if my current company ever decides to go the chat support route.
Other than that, Olark was a comprehensive product with excellent user support. If they've implemented a queue feature, then more power to them! I'd certainly recommend them as an option if my current company ever decides to go the chat support route.
- Ease of contact - customers don't have to call
- Easy to understand - click and chat, anyone can understand that
- Good support for users - if something goes wrong the Olark team is on it
- Excellent chat logs
- Queue for customers - instead of piling several customers on a chat agent at once, queue the users for singular service, which actually results in a BETTER overall customer experience
August 09, 2014
Do you want to personally interact with your customer base?
Olark has been specifically used by my organization as a tool to interact extensively with customers - answering questions about our website, services we offer, job opportunities, recruiting a larger customer base, and helping folks navigate our website. Olark is typically only used by a few individuals in the organization itself, although most office employees have a working knowledge of the program. As for business problems, Olark manages to provide instant gratification for those with internet access and burning questions or concerns.
- The program itself entails an incredibly easy set up with user-friendly features. It is also possible for multiple Operators to speak with customers/visitors at once - this particular feature can be useful if there is a large surge in visitor traffic.
- When logged into the LiveChat feature, Operators are able to see the visitor's location in the world, what pages they're looking at on your site, as well as previous pages browsed and lapsed time exploring your site.
- Olark also offers a great deal of custom features - it's a bit difficult to explain thoroughly, but for example, one may choose to customize the site's chat feature by creating a pop-up chat widget, or a "click to chat" feature image.
- 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.