Olark

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reliable for the most part

Limit the number of chats

Integrate with outside platforms

Chatbots

Prediction of time to chat

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

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)

Easy to use for customers and staff

Affordable

Scalable

Nothing comes to mind!

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

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.

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.

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

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.