Olark is a web-based live chat solution designed for small to medium-sized businesses and their sales and customer support teams. It allows these organizations to interact with and provide adequate support to customers and clients through their own website.
The Olark brand is quite prominent in the industry and highly regarded by a vast number of businesses and organizations as one of the favorites when it comes to chat support platforms. Olark offers a simplistic yet very effective design. It has a clean interface with an easy to understand layout.
The functions and features are intuitive and they allow users to do more than just interact and engage customers in real time. The solution actually promotes proactive chat sessions and a more informative environment.
Olark Features
Olark is a feature-rich cloud-based live chat platform. It is loaded with robust and highly efficient features and capabilities specifically tailored to sales and customer support teams and agents. Olark allows for seamless integrations that make for a quick and easy implementation and adoption process for any organization.
Olark as a whole helps businesses to effectively nurture and manage customer relationships, gain comprehensive valuable insights, and figure out the issues and concerns of their clients. You can actually see what your customers are seeing on their screen and even take control of their browser when troubleshooting.
The cloud-based live chat solution comes with a wide array of features, including automated messages, real-time reporting, searchable transcripts, team management, and so much more. Additionally, Olark also offers targeted chat, analytics, and chat monitoring all in a single easy-to-use suite.
With simple integration with the HTML code of your website, you can easily add live chat options on all of your web pages. Olark also comes with trigger-based chat capabilities, enabling your sales agents and customer support team to actively engage site visitors.
When you have no agents currently available to address customer questions and concerns the platform takes all the messages and stores them for later viewing, providing your agents the ability to reach out to the clients at a later time to provide support and answer some of their questions.
Olark provides clean and organized dashboards and customized reports to help managers and administrators keep track of agent activity and chat performance. Users, especially the decision makers, get a comprehensive view of the customer service process, which allows them to make the right decisions when it comes to improving services and customer satisfaction.
Automated Messages
Interaction with an actual human when communicating through chat is always the preferred option and perhaps the most ideal, from the customer’s perspective. When you visit a website and a chat window pops up on the bottom left or right corner of the page, you want someone on the other end to communicate with when you have questions and concerns about a product or service.
While Olark allows you to communicate with your customers in real time, the platform does offer automated messages capabilities. It allows you the ability to automate messages based on the visitor’s behavior or activities while on your website. Having this option allows sales agents and customer support teams to effectively serve the appropriate message at an opportune time to the right prospects.
Seamless Software Integration
Olark is designed to seamlessly integrate with other existing software solutions most sales teams and service providers may already have in their system. The platform works well with some of the most popular and widely used software solutions currently on the market, including sales, CRM, eCommerce, analytics, marketing, email, and support systems.
Some of the key integrations supported by Olark include HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, Help Scout, SugarCRM, Groove, MailChimp, JIRA and JIRA Service Desk, Shopify, WordPress, ActiveDEMAND, BigCommerce, Microsoft Dynamics, Nutshell, Webhooks, GreenRope, and so much more.
Real-Time Chat
Providing customer support in the form of email messages is a proven solution for most businesses. However, waiting for an email response is not as practical or convenient. Customers generally don’t want to wait. If they have questions or issues, they want them answered right away.
With Olark’s real-time chat, you can quickly address your customers’ concerns and issues without wasting their time or yours. The software solution makes the process of communicating with your clients a more convenient affair.
In turn, this benefits your business as you are able to uncover more leads and perhaps even close more sales down the road.
Real-Time Reporting Capabilities
Unlike some of the web-based solutions out there that refresh on a daily basis, Olark offers real-time updates and reporting on crucial data users might find useful. This includes chat volume, the busiest time of day, the performance of individual agents, and even customer ratings on your service. You can use all the data you acquire to help improve agent/team productivity, service performance, and customer experience overall.
Simple and Straightforward Customization
Consistency in terms of the design and experience across your website, including your chat box, is important if you want to improve customer engagement and sales. With the Olark live chat software solution, you are able to easily and effectively customize the aesthetic design of the chat box, such as adding custom texts, matching colors with your company’s or your website’s color scheme, as well as changing the language according to your target customer.
Team Management Capabilities
In addition to a wide array of features and tools that focus on improving your customer support service, providing a better quality experience for clients and making your day-to-day processes a lot easier, Olark also provides a sundry of useful team management capabilities to benefit your sales agents and support teams.
The developers of Olark clearly understand that customer service efforts are only as good as the team providing those services. The product provides you with the right tools to properly monitor agent/team performance, keep agents from being overwhelmed, and maintain team consistency when it comes to responding to issues and concerns.
Olark Benefits
One of the most common questions often asked when it comes to evaluating any software solution is, “how does it benefit my business?” The benefits or the advantages software platforms provide largely depends on the absence or the availability of some features and capabilities. No software solution is perfect. All of it is subjective and heavily relies on the needs and preferences of the organization. If providing customer support or doing 1:1 sales are not part of your company’s forte, then this solution may not be beneficial to you.
On the other hand, if customer support is an important part of your business process—especially when it comes to closing more sales—and you want to provide the best quality support service in the most efficient and practical way, then Olark might be the solution you need. The solution comes with a wide range of features to help organizations customize and manage the experience customers get when dealing with their company.
Olark Pricing
Pricing for the Olark live chat solution is available in three different billing methods. Monthly billing costs $17 per agent per month, annual billing is priced at $15 per agent per month, and bi-annual billing (billed every two years) costs $12 per agent per month. They offer a 2-week trial for interested parties.
These plans come with premium features, which include reporting, automated messages, transcripts, agent groups, shortcuts, unlimited chats, chat ratings, integrations, and pre-chat survey.
You may visit the Olark official website for more information about the features and pricing.
Conclusion
Even though Olark provides real-time reporting, the analytics options are nowhere near as comprehensive as some businesses would like. However, Olark’s real-time visitor tracking, available templates, CRM and other third-party platform integration, targeted chat option, customizable design, and quick setup options are more than enough to get any SMB started with providing quality customer service.
The platform’s customizable and intuitive chat interface, along with the plethora of features available, make it a decent web-based solution for sales and customer service teams. Certainly a product worth considering.
