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Olark launches "Targeted Chat"

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Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"

#21

Post by dangrossman »

I tried Olark once long, long ago and had multiple problems with it -- if there were more than 10 simultaneous visitors on my sites, which there usually were, the whole thing would get wonky and send me the wrong chat info or overlap conversations from different people... I don't remember the details, except that it didn't work. And that wasn't with trying to talk to more than 10 people at once, just having more than 10 on the site.

I switched to SnapEngage, which also has a proactive chat feature that lets you automatically initiate chats on certain URLs and such. It just worked and, I think, was cheaper too... been using it ever since.

I don't actually spend many hours online available to chat, so most of the time the little widget in the corner of the page says "Live Support Offline" and clicking it pops up a contact form instead of a chat. I get mails from that every day, where almost nobody used the contact form built into the websites. It's worth the $19/month just for that.

I'm assuming Olark has long fixed those issues I ran into, but I've no reason to want to switch back now.

Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"

#22

Post by mjpizz »

latchkey wrote: post #20
mjpizz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, how long ago? This kind stuff should be resolved in the latest editions. We load all those requests async now, and recently we started pre-loading a few of them to improve performance further. If you have any more details, shoot 'em over. Thanks for keeping us accountable!

Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"

#24

Post by bcx »

latchkey wrote: post #20
mjpizz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not sure how long ago you tried Olark out, but we've made a lot of improvements in how the RPC servers work.

I am still a little concerned about a slow request blocking your page though. What's your URL? Do you know if you are using JSONP?

Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"

#25

Post by burningion »

mvkel wrote: post #2

Olark has, by far, affected our ability to communicate with prospects. Instead of sitting in the dark, passively mulling over Analytics numbers, we can put our finger on the pulse of a potential customer. We have several productive chats per day; if nothing else, they reinforce the decisions we're making, or provide great feedback on what we can do better.

Agreed. It's a great way to bootstrap the initial conversations with customers, and to find out just what, exactly, your customers are looking for. With the right approach, this really is a huge leg up in customer acquisition in the early stages of a startup.

Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"

#26

Post by steiza »

dangrossman wrote: post #21

I tried Olark once long, long ago and had multiple problems with it -- if there were more than 10 simultaneous visitors on my sites, which there usually were, the whole thing would get wonky and send me the wrong chat info or overlap conversations from different people... I don't remember the details, except that it didn't work. And that wasn't with trying to talk to more than 10 people at once, just having more than…

Zach from Olark here, sorry to hear you were having issues some time ago! Honestly, I'm not sure what could have been causing issues for you back then, but rest assured we take message delivery extremely seriously - whenever you're using Olark if you ever have any issues please let us know so we can dive in to the logs and take a look!

Most of our users routinely have many, many more than 10 simultaneous visitors - I can assure you we work in that case. : )

Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"

#27

Post by latchkey »

bcx wrote: post #24
latchkey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not sure how long ago you tried Olark out, but we've made a lot of improvements in how the RPC servers work. I am still a little concerned about a slow request blocking your page though. What's your URL? Do you know if you are using JSONP?

Again, it isn't the async stuff. It is:

http://server.not.responding.com>;

That causes the browser to block waiting for a response.

It was a couple months ago, but I think it was olark19 not responding.

While I appreciate what you guys are doing a lot, I'm not willing to be a beta tester for your networking. Stuff like that absolutely needs to be hosted on an architecture that just doesn't go down. Ever.

Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"

#28

Post by bryanh »

We at Zapier love Olark. Rarely a day goes by where we don't proclaim to each other our undying love for all that is Olark. Its invaluable. Oddly enough, it is one of the most expensive SaaS apps we pay for, and if they doubled prices, we'd still pay for it.

One humble request: a REST API that just spits out recent conversations. Basically a JSON version of https://www.olark.com/transcripts. Lots of Zapier customers want to send their Olark transcripts into service X, Y, or Z but without that endpoint we can't... [1]

Keep it up guys. :-)

[1] Well, they could use your email feature to send it to our inbound address.. but that isn't intuitive at all.

Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"

#29

Post by biot »

snprbob86 wrote: post #17

The 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!

Does Olark do something different than other chat providers to indicate that a human is on the other end?

Re: Olark launches "Targeted Chat"

#30

Post by bcx »

bryanh wrote: post #28

We at Zapier love Olark. Rarely a day goes by where we don't proclaim to each other our undying love for all that is Olark. Its invaluable. Oddly enough, it is one of the most expensive SaaS apps we pay for, and if they doubled prices, we'd still pay for it. One humble request: a REST API that just spits out recent conversations. Basically a JSON version of https://www.olark.com/transcripts . Lots of Zapier customers…

If you guys create a tutorial for [1] we'll promote it on our blog and twitter.

To do the json version of http://www.olark.com/transcripts we'd need to expose an Oauth endpoint and do a few other things that would probably take a while :-)

(Also have you looked at http://www.olark.com/help/webhooks )

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