Olark Review

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Olark is a live chat software service that will allow you to better interact with your customers, close more sales, increase customer satisfaction, and build massive rapport with your website visitors.

Olark’s motto is that your customers are already on your website, and they want to chat with you. Olark has a really clean, beautiful interface, so if you want to engage with your audience, without integrating any ugly chat bots, then Olark might be one of your top choices.

With Olark, it won’t take more than two minutes to get up and running. Their simple JavaScript code is simple to embed, and you can add it to any website, ecommerce store, blog, or web presence in a snap.

Olark has an awesome team of responsive customer support agents, so if you ever have any questions, need any help, or just want to ask about how they can help build your business, you’ll never be left in the dark or otherwise be disappointed after speaking to the Olark team.

If you’ve ever been discouraged because you’ve left your customers (and website visitors) high and dry, then you owe it to yourself to give Olark a shot. Their team is awesome, their interface is beautiful, the chat integration on your website can be designed however you like, and you can get up and running 5 minutes from now. (No, that’s not an exaggeration).

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Olark Advantages

Full Visitor History – Each time a website visitor starts a chat; you’ll be able to tell exactly which websites they’ve visited. Why is that so powerful? Well, imagine if one of your customers is engaging in a chat, and you see that they’ve been browsing 10 of your most popular product sales pages.

Don’t you think you might tailor their message just a bit differently, so you could work on closing the sale, and providing topnotch (and expedient) support?

Beautiful Customizations – One thing you’ll have to do, is visit Olark’s “customization” section on their website. You’ll see a ton of real life examples of how their customers are using Olark “out in the wild”. You might be shocked to see all of the different implementations, and yes, you’ll probably agree that they’re all more beautiful than the last.

Immediate Feedback – One of the most important things you can ever do in your business, is track customer satisfaction. Do your customers hate you, or love you? How do they respond to different style interactions?

Knowing this data can be the difference between building a raging following who loves your every move, to a lukewarm audience who thinks that your support leaves much to be desired. With Olark, you’ll never have to worry about knowing exactly where you stand, with each and every interaction.

Olark Disadvantages

Email Marketing Integration Is A Tad Tricky – It would seem that you can integrate Olark with certain email autoresponder services, however overall email marketing integration doesn’t seem to be a top priority. Olark integrates with Nutshell, which allows you to connect with Mailchimp and Zapier, however overall the email autoresponder integration isn’t as intuitive as it should be.

Olark also offers a well-documented JavaScript API, so you could probably integrate on your own (or with help), however it’s important to note that Olark offers a lack of out of the box email marketing service provider integration at this time. (Services such as ActiveCampaign, Aweber, Constant Contact, and GetResponse seem to be missing direct integration). So, email autoresponder integration is possible through Nutshell and Zapier, but it’s not as easy as it could be.

Limited Free Plan – It’s always the acme of churlishness to nitpick at any “forever free plan”, which Olark does generously provide. That being said, many of the best features are locked out of Olark’s forever free plan. Features such as the ability to get chat statistics, transcripts and reports are “locked out” of Olark’s free plan, which might dampen your experience. Thankfully their premium plans are available at quite frankly paltry rates, which you can learn more about further along in this review.

Competition – Olark is beautiful. The interface is intuitive, it’s super easy to install, and they even provide a full boat API so you can integrate with almost anything that you want. That being said, there’s such a massive wealth of other live chat helpdesks, which may lead you to wonder which one is ideal for you. The aim of this review is to provide crystal clear insight so you can make the best decision.

Who Is Olark Ideal For?

If you’re in the business of selling anything, whether you’re an affiliate marketer, Internet marketer, instructor, teacher, eCommerce vendor, network marketer, local business owner, coach, or consultant, then you can benefit tremendously by having an Olark live chat box on your website.

So if you’re an independent webmaster, or otherwise are part of a team who operates any type of web presence, you’ve probably noticed that not being able to interact with your customers in a timely fashion can be a death knell to your business.

The last thing you want to do, is neglect red hot prospects who are itching to buy. For that reason, Olark might be the saving grace for your business. So you can better impress your visitors, sell more products, and make their experience all the better, for a ridiculously low cost.

Olark Signup Process

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Olark has a few different pricing plans that you shall learn more about later in this review, for now, find solace in the fact that you can register for Olark without paying a single red cent. In fact, you can subscribe to any of their plans without even pulling out your wallet or entering your credit card number.

So, the signup process couldn’t be any easier. Upon visiting Olark’s (admittedly beautiful) homepage, you’ll surely encounter several calls to action inviting you to register for their website for absolutely zero cost.

Upon clicking on any of those calls, you’ll see a tiny registration form that won’t take you more than a minute to fill out, and then you’re off to the races.

Olark Ease of Use

In all probability, after registering to Olark, you’ll find yourself up and running with a fully integrated chat on your website (whether you’re an independent blogger or an ecommerce power house) in a matter of minutes.

That’s because the very moment you access the Olark member’s area, you’re encountered with a tutorial showing you how to get the chat integrated on your website fast. It’s as easy as inserting a tiny snippet of JavaScript code in your website’s body.

The entire process is truly intuitive, the learning curve is near zero, and you’ll experience a seamless integration regardless of your skill level, or your website’s complexity.

After your live chat helpdesk is up and running, you’ll be able to take chat requests, and interact with your website visitors via the Olark website, so there’s never any ugly software that might complicate the process, or otherwise prevent you (or your live chat agents) from interacting regardless of where you are, or what hardware you may be using at the time.

Olark Features

Insights And Ratings – Are your responses doing more harm than good? Are you end users loving your service, or do they secretly think that your live chat representatives are deplorable? Olark will help you better gage the answers to these questions, so you’re never guessing as to how your customers really feel about you.

Cloud Based Access – It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from, with Olark you can instantly tap into a conversation with your end users without ever installing anything. So you can get in front of your customers when they need you the most, without messing up your operating system with potentially clunky software.

Target Your Visitors – Maybe you want to reserve your live chat technicians for sales pages only? Or maybe you want to interact with a certain segment of your audience who deserves higher profile chat respondents? Regardless of your intentions and area of focus, you can cater Olark so that your resources never get squandered and you only use them at the perfect time.

Tons Of Integrations – Whether you’re an ecommerce powerhouse or a master blogger, you’re going to find an abundant wealth of integrations so you can get Olark up and running on your platform with the few clicks of your mouse.

Beautiful Customizable Design – Is the appearance of your live chat helpdesk important to you? If you need to look good throughout your entire flow of operations, then you can proceed with the utmost confidence, because customizing Olark to your website is a breeze, and you simply must check out Olark’s “Showcase” section of their site so you can see for yourself.

Response Shortcuts – Do your website visitors frequently ask the same questions over and over? If that’s the case, you can easily establish shortcuts, so you can craft the perfect response to almost any array of questions, and then deliver them for the utmost response, sales, customer support, and growth.

Detailed Statistics – You’ll be able to spy on not only your website visitors, but your individual chat agents. So you can see exactly which of your agents are outperforming the others, which ones are potentially underperforming, and how this effects the behavior of website visitors.

Away From Keyboard Messages – Face it, regardless of how good your intentions are, or how successful your businesses are, you (and your agents) need time off. That’s why your Olark live chat helpdesk automatically turns into a contact form when you’re not present, so your end user questions never go unaddressed, and you can quickly contact them upon your arrival.

Enhanced Spying – Every time a website visitor starts a chat with you one way or the other, you’ll be able to see exactly what’s on their screen. So you can better help them with any questions they have.

You’ll also be able to control their mouse cursor so you can guide them through checkout, or almost any other process. This is made possible by the single JavaScript snippet that you installed initially to get the chat on your website, and absolutely no further coding (or action) is required for this functionality.

Intuitively Designed – You might be looking over this list of features and suffering from a panic attack. “You never told me that you had to be a master rocket scientist to use Olark!” The truth is, that Olark is simple to use, the learning curve is near zero, and all of the features are available under one easy to use umbrella.

Olark Integration's

Pidgin – It’s true that Olark is entirely cloud based. Meaning, you can interact with your website visitors from anywhere in the world as long as you have Internet access and a web browser. That being said, Olark also integrates with Pidgin, which is a hugely popular instant message client for Microsoft operating systems. Olark also integrates with any XMPP or Jabber based instant message client, so clients such as Adium, iChat, Trillian, Jabiru, Xabber, BeeJive, or Yaxim will be simple to integrate; so you can close sales, and interact with your website visitors on almost any modern instant message application if you’d like.

Google Analytics – Maybe one of your sales pages is getting a ton of traffic and that one area results in the highest demand for live chat customer service? Knowledge is power, and with Olark you’ll be able to use that knowledge wisely. With Olark’s Google Analytics integration, you’ll be able to improve the flow of your business by wisely managing your live chat response.

Salesforce – Salesforce is one of the leading CRM (Customer Relationship Management) cloud services on the planet, and if you’re currently using that tool and love it, you don’t have to give it up. Olark integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, so you can focus on delivering the best in class support, using the exact tools that you want, while at the same time offering beautiful live chat options across your entire network of web properties.

Nutshell – If you don’t see your preferred service on this list, worry not. Because Olark integrates with Nutshell and Zapier, so you can connect to countless third party services that you might not see on this list. So don’t panic. Simply check out Olark’s well documented tutorials on how to interact with Nutshell and Zapier, so you can make your Olark live chat helpdesk work precisely the way you envision.

Zendesk – Do you like to followup with your customers and keep tabs on them with Zendesk? Maybe your business uses Zendesk now, and the idea of abandoning their service is the epitome of madness? If that’s the case, you can proceed with Zendesk and have it integrate with your Olark live chat, so you can connect with your audience on your live chat, and then keep tabs (and followup) with Zendesk, easily and automatically.

Groove – If you have a ticket system using Groove and you’re using it to collaborate with a team, then you can enhance your Groove helpdesk big time by integrating it with an Olark live chat helpdesk. So you can automate your data flows, get the benefits of highly detailed customer support metrics, and type less while at the same time developing massive goodwill and prestige among your audience.

Magento – If you use Magento to integrate your ecommerce solution, and need to offer better customer service, then Olark might be the secret weapon that you’ve been looking for. So you can better interact with your website visitors, offer them superior support, make more sales and upsells, all the while being super awesome to your website visitors.

PrestaShop – It’s so easy to fall in love with PresataShop’s mobile responsive design, ecommerce capabilities, SEO optimized landing pages, and real-time analytics. The one thing missing from your store, is a live chat. So you can be there the very moment one of your website visitors is hesitating, or has a question about your awesome products.

Unbounce – Do you run beautiful Internet marketing sales pages with Unbounce? Or maybe you love to split test different marketing pages to see which one is the clear victor? One thing that can help any sales page or split test, is the ability to ask your website visitors in real time if they need help with anything. For that reason, Olark integrates with Unbounce with the click of a button, so you can offer superior support, while being better equipped to sell more products and services.

Pardot – A lack of email marketing integration was referenced earlier in this review, which is why Pardot is a breath of fresh air if you’re an email marketing powerhouse. Pardot is a fully fledged marketing automation suite that allows you to follow up with your customers and buyers via email marketing, so you can nurture your leads, build unshakable rapport, authority, and respect, all the while selling more products.

So if you use Pardot, or want to, proceed with confidence knowing full well that your entire sales funnel will be more active with a live chat helpdesk.

Olark Pricing

Olark pricing is based upon your number of operators who can use the system at the same time, and whether you want to pay monthly, annually, or two years in advance. All of the Olark plans contain the same core features, so the only variable to consider is the number of live chat agents that you want.

Olark offers a bronze a plan, which costs $17 per month if you pay by month, $15 per month if you pay by year, and $12 per month if you pay 2 years in advance. The bronze plan allows you to have 1 chat agent.

Then there’s the gold a plan, which costs $49 per month if you pay by month, $44 per month if you pay by year, and $34 per month if you pay 2 years in advance. The gold plan allows you to have 4 chat agents.

Olark also offers a platinum a plan, which costs $129 per month if you pay by month, $116 per month if you pay by year, and $90 per month if you pay 2 years in advance. The platinum plan allows you to have 8 chat agents.

Finally, there’s the ultimate a plan, which costs $243 per month if you pay by month, $219 per month if you pay by year, and $170 per month if you pay 2 years in advance. The ultimate plan allows you to have 15 chat agents.

Olark Support

If your business demands high quality documentation and support, then Olark might be the easiest decision you make all year, because they’re well-documented, well-designed, and well-staffed.

So if you ever have any questions about customized API integration, or just want to get your blog up and running with a live chat helpdesk fast, then you won’t be disappointed with Olark.

Olark comes stuffed to the brim with support functions. So if you want to schedule a support call, or a sales call you can easily contact Olark and they’ll get back to you using their call scheduling system.

Olark also offers a massive RFO (Request For Olark), which is a massive cheat sheet packed with just about every answer to any question you might have, so be sure to check that document out on their support page before you do anything else.

Olark also manages a system called “Olark Academy” which is a fully featured video training academy that covers topics such as using Instant Messaging Clients, to advanced features and even operator commands, so if you want to become an Olark power user without any learning curve, definitely check out the Olark Academy.

You can even schedule a training session from within Olark Academy, so to say that Olark bends over backwards to ensure that you’re fully educated and happy, would be the understatement of the year.

Finally, the final line in the Olark’s support defenses are their live chat helpdesks, their email ticket office, and their searchable help knowledgebase. You can contact Olark via email or phone from 6:00 am to 4:00 pm (pacific time) Monday through Friday, and you can bet your boots that their staff will truly care about you, your questions, your results, and your satisfaction.

Olark Reputation

Upon first glance, you’ll easily determine that Olark cares deeply about their audience. They have over 10,000 happy customers, over 30 happy staff, and they’re continually innovating and bringing more clients on board.

You probably realize by now that it’s not easy to acquire 10,000 happy customers. So maybe you’re wondering how Olark has amassed such an impressive assemblage of fans and clients. The truth is that, Olark offers a quality service, and they’re known for being ultra-responsive with their customers.

Make no mistake. The online customer service world is growing faster than ever. More companies, organizations, institutions, Universities and small businesses are experiencing higher demand for real time interaction on their websites. Additionally, staffing an online helpdesk is far cheaper, and more effective than almost any other type of support method.

For that reason, Olark has a reputation for being at the right place, at the right time, and for offering a beautiful, easy to use live chat helpdesk that has helped thousands of businesses (of all shapes and sizes) from every inch of the globe.

Olark Conclusion

Have you ever woken up, checked your support desk, and saw incoming questions from website visitors asking about your products and services, only to have those same visitors totally abandon you by the time you get around to answering them?
That’s because timing is everything.

If you neglect your audience, they’re probably not going to stick around. You realize how stiff competition is. Your competitors are chomping at the bit to steal your best customers, visitors, clients, and leads.

That’s why offering live chat support on your website is no longer just a good idea, it’s mandatory. So, the question then becomes, which company should you choose to do business with.

If you choose Olark, you’ll be integrating a live chat helpdesk that has engaged over 51,900,135 (that’s fifty-one million) live chats. They handle over 63,000 (sixty-three thousand) live chats per day. About 1.2% of all Olark chats have a smile in them one way or the other.

So ask yourself this one question. Are your end users, and website visitors smiling? Because if not, you might risk losing them.

So, at the end of the day, ask yourself this one last question.

Would it be easier to sell more products, or harder to sell more products, if you were on your website available to answer any questions, using a beautiful looking live chat helpdesk, so you never left your customers hanging ever again?

If you think it would make your life easier, and your business better, consider trying Olark.

Their support is some of the best you’ll find, they’re free to try, and you can get up and running in just a few minutes from now. Absolutely risk free, and without even opening your wallet.

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About Mike DeVincent

Mike researches and reviews products for Top 10 Marketing Software. Mike has vast experience in blogging, teaching and internet marketing. See Mike's profile on Google+.

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