Olark

Pros

1) User-Friendly: I've found Olark to have a very simple and user-friendly interface for both - the recipient and the sender.

2) Affordability: Olark gives you the opportunity to look much bigger and way more professional than you already are! All of this at a very nominal price, of course. As of April 2019, Olark has one pricing model that can either be billed monthly, annually or for two years straight. As you choose a longer commitment, the prices reduce accordingly. Also, if you're not sure about what chat client is best suited for your business, you can always try Olark for 2 weeks, absolutely free. What I like the most is that there are no "Starter", "Pro", "Enterprise" discriminations!

3) Intelligence: Olark allows you to pre-assign quick responses that keep your customers from having to wait for an answer. Our employees love this feature because they don't have to type the same response again and again. Another smart feature is the notifications that our employees get when they leave their workstations and forget to log out. Olark gives the customer a quick response, giving them an option to send the chat as an email instead. This is great for a future follow-up.

4) Reporting Feature: Olark gives the administrator the option to assess the quality of an employees' chatting capabilities as well as his/her productivity levels. An employee can also learn from any feedback that's left by their customer with regard to their chat experience.

Cons

1) No Image Sharing: This may not be a necessity for all businesses, however, we occasionally require our customers to send us screenshots of the issue that they are facing. This can help us serve them better. We have makeshift walkarounds for this, but having an image sharing option would be great.

2) One User At A Time: Unfortunately, only one user can be logged on to the agent at any given time. This could be a deal breaker larger businesses that have more than one customer care representative.

Pros

Chat worked exactly as expected, allows our CS team to respond to customers chatting in on our website. Can see customers locale which is helpful to discern scam/junk chats.

Cons

This isn't a fault of Olark, but it didn't integrate with our email client so we had to keep Olark open in a separate window/tab.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

Easy to use
Through metrics and reporting
Easily integrated with other ticketing and metrics tracking programs

Cons

Unable to post images (from the chat rep side)
Performance/ functionality somewhat inconsistent
Limited ability to create personalized macros
Agent visibility (knowing when teammates are online) often unreliable/ not functional

Pros

Olark is amongt the simplest helpdesk applications to try. It is intuitive and has a very short learning curve for new support staffs I have introduced to Olark.
Olark has got an array of smart features , which helps the conversion rate on our website and also helps the sales team better improve the quality of customer service offered to customers and clients.
I like the searchable transcript feature , which ensures every conversation between sales agents and web. visitors are saved in the cloud. Thereby allowing anyone on the sales team to search through the chat transcripts either for analysis purposes or to follow up on previous conversations. It has an efficient mobile approach ,which has ensures users who communicate with the website team via mobile phones, have a quality experience just as someone communicating via pc or tablet.

Cons

Olark automatically closes open chat conversations if agents have not responded in over five minute. I wouldn't know why this was introduced ,however it does not do the sales team any good.

Pros

When working with businesses of all kinds, especially the one that is linked to sales and customer service, one of the aspects imposed by the criterion of a good or bad experience is customer service. That's why I like Olark a lot, because you can offer an exclusive experience, which translates into higher sales. Since we used Olark, we have attracted more people, because thanks to its platform, it allows you to respond in record time, all those doubts about your products or services. Another thing that I like, is the ability that offers you to customize the chat to the corporate image of your company. Also, when you start communicating with any visitor, it allows you to know valuable data for your work, information such as location and contact details. Live chat is so important to us, and the best option you can find is Olark.

Cons

All their years of experience offer you a shielded commercial option, which makes me not identify negative aspects of their platform or their services, quite the contrary, I have compared them with others and greater are the profits, a marvel.

Pros

Olark is hands down the best chat software we have used based on functionality, ease of use, and price. We have used 2 other softwares and none compare to Olark.

Olark is easy to customize to fit your website (color scheme, style, design, etc) and it is easy to use (for both back end and front end users). We found our users are more engaged when chatting to us through Olark.

Cons

The only complaint we have is that we can't share seats. This makes sense. Olark doesn't want you to only purchase one seat, yet have multiple users using it. I guess we were blessed in the last software we used which allowed us to have 2 people for one seat. The other software failed in other regards though, so we are fine paying for multiple seats with Olark.

I guess we actually have one more complaint: people who chat with you can upload screenshots, but not the other way around. We cannot upload screen shots into the chat while chatting with people. This makes it difficult sometimes. We have to explain via words where to click on our website or where to sign a document. We would love if a feature was developed where both front end and back end users could attach screenshots.

Pros

Olark is a very easy-to-use platform with a simple interface, it is quite accessible since it is relatively cheap, it has excellent functions and features for a very low cost, you can use it completely free for 2 weeks, with Olark you can create quick answers for basic questions This is excellent because if a customer asks a question, they do not need to wait for an answer since quick responses are pre-assigned, with this platform you can offer the customer an excellent experience to increase sales.

Cons

I have not obtained negative aspects of this software, it has offered me a fairly protected commercial tool, I have been able to increase sales and obtain better performance in terms of communication with my clients.

Pros

The UI is clean, easy to use, and is honestly just pleasant to log into every day. Beyond that though, the shortcuts are helpful, and the storage of past chats is really advanced for the price point, and easy to sort through and keep track of. Lastly, the reporting and metrics are helpful in making informed decisions.

Cons

There isn't a lot to Olark. It's a chat tool, pure and simple. The integrations are available, but they aren't easy to connect, and they don't provide a lot of output for the trouble.

Pros

Easy to set up and run with a distributed support team across the world.

Cons

No real downsides. The software worked exactly as advertised.

Pros

I enjoy the reliability of this livechat solution.
Olark is so amazing to use.

Cons

Olark has never been problematic to us.
Olark is effective.

Pros

Olark has been our chat platform for three plus years and has proven itself to be a time saver, a great sales tool, and it has been an easy resource for our existing clients and CS Agents to utilize. Their ";" shortcuts are the easiest tools to use on many platforms we have tried. Aside from a few short outages, they are extremely reliable and their support team is responsive and very helpful.

Cons

The limitations of Olark include the lack of ability to share graphics with our clients. We can receive images from them, but not being able to respond has been a severe limitation on our staff as we have to switch to email in order to send graphics. Their Screen Share option is nice, but with new contacts, this is a hard proposition to sell on letting a new company "take control" of your PC. If Olark allowed us to send graphics, screen caps, images, it would be the perfect platform as my team loves the ease of use and friendly tools.

Pros

The biggest advantage of Olark is how easy it is to install and have it running in no time. The dashboards features pretty extensive analytics and chat history. Customer support was also pretty quick when I had an issue. They also have a mobile app but I rarely used it.

Cons

I think the biggest con is that very same simplicity that makes it easy to use. I have had hard time generating a really detailed CSV report about the chat history of our team with timestamps, client emails, names, etc. The customization of the whole Olark experience for both us and the client is also pretty lacking.

Pros

VERY easy to implement and customize. Great use experience.

Cons

Can't think of anything right now.

Pros

Interface and ease

Cons

Yikes. I'm not sure. Maybe how often and loudly it pops up every time you open our page! That might be an option we can change though.

Pros

This program is so easy to use that everyone in our office has taken a turn! We love that it can be a subtle, yet helpful, add on to our website. We also like seeing who is on our site and being able to recall past chats. The price point is also very affordable.

Cons

Probably the most frustrating part is that we had a few times when the alarm noise just shut itself off and we missed a few chats before we realized what happened and turned the alert sound back on.

Pros

Super easy to use, but loaded with powerful features.

Cons

No Slack integration and the Salesforce integration is a bit clunky.

Pros

I like that this was simple to install, plus it integrates with Google Analytics, which allows you to build data on where you chats are being initiated. I love the fact that it's unobtrusive on my website - some of the other chat services out there were too big and cluttered up my site. Olark doesn't.

Cons

I wish that there was a way to put chats on hold, or at least give the person chatting the option to leave information for a follow-up email later. I also wish that it allowed you to customize just a little bit more. It's important from a design standpoint to have the chat box match your website.

Pros

Simple, easy and reliable chat tool that integrates well with CRM and other Help Desk software. Olark has been a game changer for us, we now can offer support right in the moment as customers need it to keep them running smooth with our product. The Olark team also provides stellar support over live chat to their own customers.

Cons

There much more designed for smaller chat teams, and lack a few features. They've just now implemented file sharing with in chats, this has been a huge help, and is something we've needed. They also don't quite have a note feature yet which would be very handy for our internal communication.

Pros

Olark is a great way to engage with prospective customer and current users of your product. It provides a different method of engagement than the traditional email or phone-based contact and can help better capture online prospects and solve simple support requests.

Cons

Solving more complicated issues via a chat feature can be difficult, and recently we have had issues with our customer base being able to access our chat.

Pros

A lightweight async chat client that does not slow down your website load times, the UI can be customized to match your brand. Many plans and features including team management, transcripts, visitor page and cart tracking.

Cons

For our free legacy installation the visitor page and geolocation tracking is no longer working, not sure the reason.

Pros

1. Easy setup to get started
2. Lots of features/settings to customize
3. Easy to review chat history as a manager

Cons

1. I would like a summarized list of things customers asked and rep was not able to provide with.
2. Also things that reps did well and vice-versa.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Olark

Pros

UI is really easy to use and customers like it. The implementation was easy to do and customizing it to match the color scheme for our site.

Cons

Think the short codes could be easier to lookup. I only know of a few ones off the top of my head where would be nice to be able to click from options to execute

Pros

Cost, Connectivity, Functionality

Cons

Can't honestly think of anything.

Pros

Chat functionality

Cons

Away messages/email functionality

Pros

We use Olark for our online chat software. We love the ease of use especially the short cuts. We have experienced no downtime with the software and our clients love that they can chat in if they have a quick question versus calling or emailing us!

Cons

There are no cons to speak of for Olark software.

Pros

easy to use and always improving

Cons

multiple operators can start a response to an inquiry and the first one to hit enter wins. Would be helpful if the operator who will deal with it can click on a button 'respond' so that other operators will know and won't

Pros

Live chat option and analik module. It's easy to use and mobile application works fine for me. I can be online all the time.

Cons

No phone app, so I can't be online always. Not good analys and didn't like the chat module. Cancelled after trial.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Olark

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Olark

Pros

Support is very responsive. Company uses Olark chat service itself for support - so you always end up getting a real person in real time during (West Coast) business hours.

Cons

Occasional service disruptions, but rarely longer than a few minutes.

Pros

Eease of use and integration.

Cons

Some stability issues and outages.

Pros

The cute little touches

Cons

You can't block pervs longer than a mere 24 hours

Pros

Olark allows you to create a pre-chat survey to get leads. The fallback message is cool too specially if you're not able to answer any chat within a span of time. You can also forward the message to the right department that must take care of any request from a possible customer or existing customers. The Pro version allows the chat support to access the scree of the customer with the customer's approval. You can also transfer the chat to another chat support member. Their cobrowsing is super duper useful.

Cons

The chat window templates doesn't really look good and their design are not that attractive. The design of the templates should be improve so they can be attention-grabbing and appealing.

Pros

Very user friendly and easily customizable website live-chat feature. You can easily add your own branding/styling to the look of the chat, as well as customize the automatic replies and opening line. Rules also give you lots of ways you can fit Olark to your specific website or needs- i.e. we've setup different rules for visitors who reach different pages on the site, so we can help direct them to what they might be looking for there.

Cons

Wanted to use Olark on multiple sites owned by the same company, but was difficult to manage multiple accounts at the same time- costs more to add to each new site, and can't share the same settings. Would like to organize the past chats a little more.

Pros

It's simple, easy to use and allows you to store frequently used responses to speed up communication.

Cons

Visitors can send you files but you can't send files back to visitors. It is a bit difficult because if you want to send a PDF or a screenshot, you have to e-mail it or have it stored on a Web server and give the visitor a URL.

Pros

Olark is very easy to use for all participants. We were concerned that it would be difficult for our website visitors to get the hang of, but we’ve not had any complaints so far! It’s very easy for us to use as well. We especially like the chat log feature. It helped us create a database of commonly-asked questions, which helps us when we have a new employee answering the chats.

Cons

We’ve experienced a few outages, but they weren’t very long. We were able to get back up and running within minutes, which is very important. The ability to share images with the visitors to our website would be handy. Other than that, we haven’t had any issues.

Pros

It works and the vendor does not continuously pester us to upgrade.

Cons

I would like greater flexibility to change its appearance. This Christmas the festive themes were non relevant to Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere

Pros

Easy to install. Both desktop clients as well as web clients available. Can set up default response templates. Nice back end reporting. Various configurations are available for the customer user interface depending on your preference.

Cons

Needs an auto responder. If it has one, I don't know where it is. I want it to auto-reply to the customer with a message such as, "Thank you for your message. Please give us a couple minutes to reply." We have customers who expect an immediate response and don't want to wait more than 15 seconds.

Pros

Olark is the best application to chat with customers and to engage with them so that we can generate more sales, Olark is also a great tool to manage the users who are currently visiting our website and to have their issues solved on real time. We are using the tool to solve issues which our customers raise when they visit the website. Olark seems to fulfill all our needs are we are happy with it.

Cons

The main issues is that the chat has a delay of more than 2 minutes, this makes the customers annoying. Please try to fix this issue asap.

Pros

We wanted to offer our software customers a channel for support and Olark seemed like a good choice. The interface is easy to navigate, and they have done a good job of thinking through the experience, like being able to customize and "away" message and the confirmation message. It is also very easy to implement with just a couple lines of code.

Cons

The biggest problem with Olark is its reliability. We are currently in the process of switching away from it because we would be online, ready to chat, and customers would tell us that on their end it wasn't showing up. There were multiple planned and unplanned outages, and it cost us some good will with our customers.

Pros

Olark is affordable, easy to deploy & a very stable chat tool. Olark is intuitive for agents using it to assist & customers reaching out via chat

Cons

Olark is missing features like smart assign, complex group configurations & smart bots compared to other chat tools in the market

Pros

Olark offers several useful features, including the ability to attach screenshots to live chat, as well as chat forwarding, message marking, and automated messages.

Cons

One of the notable dislikes of Olark includes limited features when setting up chatbots and more dedicated automated responses. Also, managing large pools of support requests can get overwhelming.

Pros

Olark was simple to install, integrates well with our Wordpress website, and it was easy for our service reps to use. The best part about Olark from a business standpoint is the chat log. You can audit all chats, which will allow you to train operators on best practices for chat. You can also see how many chats go unanswered and when, and try to figure out why.

Cons

My only complaint is that I wish it integrated better with HubSpot.

Pros

This chat software makes bridging that gap between customers and your company easy! I love that I can be assisting guests on the phone, and assisting a guest via chat simultaneously providing better customer service as a whole. I like that it keeps a full history of conversations and contact information for long periods of time. This is great for marketing and follow up.

Cons

I do wish there was a canned response that tells the customer "Agent" is away from her desk, please leave a message and a contact number and she will follow up shortly", as opposed to just saying there are no agents available and leaving customers in the dark.

Pros

Works well. Easy to use. Easy to set up new operators, chat with customers, etc. Integrates with Help Scout, Zendesk, etc

Cons

It goes down at least twice a month for a few minutes to longer.
Can't share gifs/images
Doesn't have a lot of features or functionality to separate themselves from the pack

Pros

Looks better than almost all other products (though I think it's falling behind and needs to update its appearance and UI to the customer)

Cons

Poor reliability

Pros

It's super easy to implement and customize in many ways. The folks at Olark are incredibly responsive to questions.

Cons

Hmmm, can't think of anything at the moment.

Pros

It's ease of use. Setting shortcuts, updating what the end-user sees, changing the overall look, these are all really easy to do with Olark. Having used Zendesk as well, I really believe that Olark is a better all around experience for live chat.

Cons

It's not the greatest for reporting, so it's a solution that can be outgrown. Which is too bad. I've also experienced a bit of outages with it, though they don't last long generally.

Pros

I have tried and administered a few helpdesk solutions over the years and I think Olark stands out for me at this time,it could be different in future though.
I love Olark's simplistic approach ,everything from its user interface ,add-on services and features are simplified for teams and organizations to have a perfect understanding of how they work ,and how best to maximize their impact on an organizations sales(customer service) activity.
With Olark ,I am able to measure the performance of all agents reporting to me , set a limit on the amount of chats an agent can respond to at one time ,access vital analytic which becomes very important to helping my organization better prioritize chats,score our leads and modify our sales strategy by leveraging on the insights in visitor data collected from social profiles and on our website by Olark.

Cons

Olark needs to continuously innovate the Olark helpdesk solution. Over the last year ,Olark hasn't undergone any major change or upgrade in terms of features. An overly confident organization,yea?

Pros

The ease of integration and simplicity of the setup and customization

Cons

The removal of the co-browsing feature. In my mind, that was one of the things that set Olark apart from the other chat vendors. The ability to be on the phone with a customer and be able to see their screen makes customer service much easier and allows us to add a personal touch to our customer interactions.

Pros

Olark is a great and easy live chat software I have ever used. you can easily integrate olark if other CRM software Google analytics salesforce, MailChimp, etc..

for a customer to make the final decision on our product olark has been a great tool for us to chat with customer real time. The most amazing part that I love most is been able to track what people doing at the website, the page they currently visiting and this has been a great tool for us

Cons

excepts for downtime that we experienced in two or three occasions,
everything is great

Pros

I used Olark daily while working at my first company. I used it almost daily and the good thing about Olark is it isk very simple, easy to learn/understand UI and gets the work done. It would be great for a small company/start up.

Cons

Overall, it does get the work done but I didn't see any advanced functionalities like getting analytics of usage. May be text analytics to understand the most common type of concerns etc.