Small bug: the fixed-position "See Plans & Pricing" link that shows up at the bottom of the page when you scroll is partially hidden by the fixed-position "Talk to Us" link when the browser window is narrower than 1245px or so.
Olark launches "Targeted Chat"
11–20 of 65 posts
Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"
#12Small bug: the fixed-position "See Plans & Pricing" link that shows up at the bottom of the page when you scroll is partially hidden by the fixed-position "Talk to Us" link when the browser window is narrower than 1245px or so.
That'd be my fault :(
Fix is forthcoming - thanks for reporting
Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"
#13Scaling is the issue I have with things like Olark. One-to-one chat is an expensive way to get customers. Does anyone have experiences on the effectiveness and cost of customer acquisition using something like Olark? [Let me say I love the concept of Olark. I'm just not sure how it plays out in practice.]
We brought on a dedicated sales guy last month and he's been using Olark. It's been successful and he's made sales right from the chat window.
We get about 300 uniques a day and he hasn't been overwhelmed at all.
The biggest issue (IMO) is making the distinction between sales and support. We don't use Olark for support (and don't want to). But for sales, it's awesome.
Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"
#14Scaling is the issue I have with things like Olark. One-to-one chat is an expensive way to get customers. Does anyone have experiences on the effectiveness and cost of customer acquisition using something like Olark? [Let me say I love the concept of Olark. I'm just not sure how it plays out in practice.]
Noel,
If the cost of offering chat is The trick is to understand that equation for your business.
We launched targeted chat to help you focus your chats on just particular visitors. One could argue that the value talking to customers who land on your pricing page, while ignoring everyone else always works out.
Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"
#15Is this just proactive chat which snapengage already offers?
Good question! We already had a feature called "greeter" that was on par with snapengage's proactive chat. Targeting is something bigger. Targeted chat lets you take a variety of actions other than just automatically starting conversations (label visitor, hide chatbox, show chatbox, route to operator/group) based on a wider variety of conditions about the user (too many to list here). Take it for a spin and let me kn…
Anyway to make it so that if a user tries to abandon our shopping cart by clicking back or X out of the page the chat box will popup asking if they need any help?
Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"
#16I had Olark on my site for a brief period to try it out. I really like the functionality that it provides and I think they are doing a great job.
That said, I ended up removing it after finding that the javascript service was rather unreliable and would cause delays for the loading of my site. I'm sure it was just a brief outage or whatever, but it does me no good if I can't get my pages to load.
I'll probably revisit it in the future as olark definitely had the best product out of all of them. The integration with jabber is key.
Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"
#17The surprise and delight that users express when they realize a human is on the other end of that chat window makes Olark worth every penny!
Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"
#18I had Olark on my site for a brief period to try it out. I really like the functionality that it provides and I think they are doing a great job. That said, I ended up removing it after finding that the javascript service was rather unreliable and would cause delays for the loading of my site. I'm sure it was just a brief outage or whatever, but it does me no good if I can't get my pages to load. I'll probably revisi…
Matt here: I work on a lot of our JS here at Olark - would love to dig into any loading issues you saw! We spent a lot of time ensuring that our latest stuff loads async (http://www.olark.com/spw/2011/10/lightningjs-safe-fast-and-a...) so it'd be great to ensure that we're actually succeeding there :)
Feel free to come on over and chat, or shoot an email to support[at]olark.com
Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good question! We already had a feature called "greeter" that was on par with snapengage's proactive chat. Targeting is something bigger. Targeted chat lets you take a variety of actions other than just automatically starting conversations (label visitor, hide chatbox, show chatbox, route to operator/group) based on a wider variety of conditions about the user (too many to list here). Take it for a spin and let me kn…
Anyway to make it so that if a user tries to abandon our shopping cart by clicking back or X out of the page the chat box will popup asking if they need any help?
Do you really want to override browser functionality? I could imagine more people being frustrated by that than the additional sales it may generate.
From the demo, they offer a rule based on referring and current URL (you may be able to use this in order to determine if a user has already pressed back). Nothing I can see regarding closing the window, your best bet may be to use the given example: "number of seconds user is on page".
Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"
#20I had Olark on my site for a brief period to try it out. I really like the functionality that it provides and I think they are doing a great job. That said, I ended up removing it after finding that the javascript service was rather unreliable and would cause delays for the loading of my site. I'm sure it was just a brief outage or whatever, but it does me no good if I can't get my pages to load. I'll probably revisi…
Matt here: I work on a lot of our JS here at Olark - would love to dig into any loading issues you saw! We spent a lot of time ensuring that our latest stuff loads async ( http://www.olark.com/spw/2011/10/lightningjs-safe-fast-and-a... ) so it'd be great to ensure that we're actually succeeding there :) Feel free to come on over and chat, or shoot an email to support[at]olark.com
It wasn't the async stuff. It was more like olark##.olark-server.com not responding randomly which would cause my page load to block waiting for the server to respond. Probably just a server down or temporary outage, but it was enough to shake my trust a bit and just remove it since we were just starting out with it.