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Olark Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 10 out of 10
Score
10 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Olark are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

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.

Reviews

18 Reviews

Everything you need in one place.

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Olark to communicate with our clients on our website to help them locate anything on our website. We also help them problem solve directly through Olark's chat. Olark's chat is indeed top tier and makes our day to day operations much easier because of the effectiveness of their program. In 11 years, we have only experienced a couple of outages and they were resolved in less than 10 minutes. It is indeed a great program that every business needs to have.

Pros

  • Ability to create commands to make responding easier
  • Chat transcript report after each chat
  • The accessibility to Olark's staff is amazing.

Cons

  • We should be able to transfer a chat and the transferred recipient should be able to see the context of what was previously said.

Likelihood to Recommend

Olark creates a chat that you are able to customize and create an atmosphere that makes it easy to be successful.

NW
Nicole Whitten
Account Manager in Sales at OPPLUS (11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Olark
11 years of experience

Olark is worthwhile!

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Olark is an incredibly useful resource in our organization as it allows us a quick bridge access to our customers through our website.

Pros

  • Live chat with customers / visitors to your website.
  • Customer Service.
  • Location services - can see IP addresses/approximate locations of visitors.

Cons

  • Interface when dealing with a huge influx of visitors.

Likelihood to Recommend

Olark is great for scenarios that require businesses to maintain a live chat feature with customers/visitors to their website. It's a quick way to potentially address questions and concerns with your clientele.

VU
Verified User
Administrative Assistant in Research & Development (201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Olark
8 years of experience

Great tool for basic chat communications! Not robust enough for a large corporations needs though.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Olark is well-suited as a Live Chat platform for most small businesses and some intermediate-sized businesses. I don't know if we were using their most premium version, but regardless, it was not designed for a large corporation, for reasons mentioned previously. It is not a robust enough platform to scale your business too much. It's great at what it does though, and if I started my own small business and needed to offer live chat support to my customers, I would absolutely think about implementing Olark.<input value="true" id="hippowiz-ass-injected" type="hidden"><input value="none" id="hvmessage-toextension-listener" type="hidden">

VU
Verified User
Manager in Customer Service (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Olark
3 years of experience

Olark Makes it Simple to Chat with Customers in Real Time

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

VV
Vivian Vassar
Owner in Corporate at Hey Viv Inc (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Olark
3 years of experience
View profile

Olark for Customers

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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!

Pros

  • It is easy to learn and implement.
  • It is easy to set up and create shortcuts.
  • It is very affordable!

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is a great tool if you are wanting to add it to a website so you can provide quick answers to your clients/customers/guests. I would not recommend it if you don't have a website. If you wanted this for internal use I would recommend a different service. It is quite affordable, so if you want to test it you would not lose much by doing so.

VU
Verified User
Manager in Customer Service (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Olark
2 years of experience

Chatting Made Easy

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are looking for a turnkey chat live chat solution, then I could not recommend a better tool than Olark. It is so intuitive and useful that your team will be up and running with a chat tool on day one of installation. The installation is also quick and painless.

AM
Adam Montgomery
Energy Efficiency Consultant in Engineering at SEMCO (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Olark
1 year of experience
View profile

Olark - A must have for your business!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you want to have the option to chat on your company website and keep track of those chats, the customer's satisfaction, your employees' capabilities and the repetition of certain inquiries, Olark can truly help your business. We have 4 employees at any given time dedicated to our chat function during business hours. After hours if offers the option to send our customer service team an email with your question on your behalf. Everyone wins.

VU
Verified User
Representative in Sales (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Olark
4 years of experience

Olark, your household chat platform

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • Ability to chat via mobile web browsers.
  • Ease of implementation.
  • Their support is very courteous and eager to assist.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Olark is well suited for an implementation. The ease of applying their SDK into your website takes minimal effort.

Also, you're able to observe which site your guest is viewing and a trail of sites they've visited prior to engaging the chat.

Their support is superb because they're always courteous and willing to help.

QM
Quinton Myers
Director Of Support in Customer Service at Appetize (201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Olark
2 years of experience
View profile

Olark is Okay...

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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!

Pros

  • 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...

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Olark is suited well for those that want an affordable option for a live chat solution. Olark is really just "okay" and I'm 100% positive that we can find a better solution for our team's live chat needs. Olark still feels clunky by its limitations. If they were to give us a means by which we could use page breaks and share files with users, we'd be good to go!

VU
Verified User
Employee in Customer Service (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Olark
3 years of experience

Olark - Cheap and simple. Don't get fancy though....

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Pros

  • Reliable for the most part
  • Limit the number of chats
  • Integrate with outside platforms

Cons

  • Chatbots
  • Prediction of time to chat

Likelihood to Recommend

Olar is perfect if you want to have a basic chat channel for incoming volume. If you want to do fancy advanced things I would go with another vendor. If you want something that allows users to click chat support on your website and have a rep support them, Olark is perfect!

LF
Luke Ferrel
Global Operations Manager, Analytics and Process Automation in Information Technology at Qualtrics (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Olark
2 years of experience
View profile