Olark Reviews: 4.3/5 — Solid Choice

Olark's a terrific tool for any business looking to connect more closely with its customers. Easily deployed and economically priced, it's on par with many chat services used on enterprise websites. We advance many deals that would otherwise have been lost—simply by offering assistance in real-time to confused prospects.

While no fault of Olark, using it effectively requires organizational planning and commitment. You need staffing, obviously—ideally 100% dedicated but fractionally dedicated if need be. You also training to ensure your team is as helpful as possible. Lastly, you need to make time to look for patterns in what you're hearing. These patterns indicate problems with your product or website.

We use Olark as a live chat solution on our website. It gives users a chance to ask questions if they're confused.

Olark is a service that I've now implemented and used at 3 different companies. That alone suggests that I like the service. Olark strikes me as the kind of company (like Avis) that could wear the moniker, "We Try Harder." I've had nothing but good experiences with their support staff and other parts of the company; And the features just keep on a rollin' along... Much like you'd want from any SaaS based business over the course of time.

Some of the backend admin console looks like it's been through the Google-school of slap-dashery-- more functional than beautiful. Which is odd, contrasted with their front-end UI deployment choices, which appear to be very well thought out.

Biz problem is simple: Human touch on a digital canvas (your website). People like chat because it is A) immediate, B) personal enough--I'm dealing with a live human being, C) impersonal enough-- I don't have to talk and D) trackable. For the digital native (I consider myself one), chat is a table-stakes feature for dealing with a business. Email is often too slow, phone is better or worse depending on so many factors and no customer touchpoint = no business. Period. So the benefit to using Olark is substantial, albeit not entirely quantifiable.

Once you get the code dropped onto your site by your website administrator, a layperson can use the Olark back end to change a lot of different variables without having to pay for development hours. For example, you can try different calls to action, different types of pop-ups and attention grabbers, different auto text, and different colors. You can also check out transcripts and see when your users are most likely to engage your brand through chat, which takes the guesswork out of your call center live chat schedule.

Pidgin, Olark's preferred chat client, has given us some trouble in the past. You can get around this by integrating with gchat (or another service) instead.

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Olark offered the basic features that you'll need for your business to start chatting with customers on your website. It has an easy-to-use interface. Chat is another avenue to engage with customers who are not willing to call or email.

It was disappointing that there isn't a mobile app to use to capture chats when away from the computer and the options are very limited. I really think that a major milestone would be to have an app where agents can respond to customers or perspective customers when not at their workstations.

Olark was a chat platform recommended to us by someone with a small business. They said not having chat could result in lost customers. I never knew how many people would rather chat with an agent instead of calling or emailing until I saw it for myself. We captured a lot more leads when it was active.

Ability to create auto responses. Copy of the chat convo is sent to the email.

I think it can help to include a few themes to make it look perky?

Communicating with clients with immediate concerns.

I really like just how simple and easy it was to pick up and use. We didn't have to have a long training on how to use the software, you just start using it. I also like how you could create custom responses in the software to make things easy.

We would put a limit on how many users you could connect to at once, and sometimes that wouldn't work correctly so you would have multiple users you are trying to talk with at the same time. That was really the only issue I had.

We are a support team so we are solving issues over chat with Olark. It's a great interface to help users in a low stress environment where they can just easily chat with us.

Olark is extremely easy to install and simple to use. We have used for online events during COVID and I was able to train different volunteers on how to manage the chat feature through Olark easily. Love that they make a free trial available.

I wished I could put the chat on one page on our website, but it seems like you have to do all or nothing. We use Squarespace, so I'm not sure if it's that specific integration only.

Facilitating questions during online events during COVID; helps us to better engage with folks virtually, which has been tough.

Easy to set up, works pretty well. Not expensive versus some chat solutions.

A proper desktop client would be useful for our customer service team.

Live chat is useful for our customers.

Olark is very easy to use. I like the different chat features like automatic pop-up and the ability to toggle it on/off.

Lack of metrics. I wish there was a way to group similar keywords and measure by them.

We are solving our inability to chat on our website. Benefits include people chatting with us because of automatic pop-up when they arrive to the site.

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