Expanded conversationBeginPage support

Webhooks

Last week we deployed a few commonly requested improvements to our webhooks support. Any tags set during the chat (using !tag) will now be automatically sent with the webhook data. Also, the visitor data now includes “conversationBeginPage”, which is the URL from which the chatter sent their first message.

Take a look at our webhooks integration guide to see an example record.

If you’re already happily using our webhooks integration, you most likely will not have to make any changes to your code. You can add support for these new features at your convenience.

Javascript API support

In addition to adding “conversationBeginPage” to our webhooks integration, we also added the field to our javascript getDetails API. Take a look at our API documentation for more information about that field and our visitor details API.

Better transcript emails

We made a small improvement to transcript emails to improve the experience for users with plain-text only emails. Previously, you would receive a blank email or a bunch of HTML if attempting to read transcript emails in a plain-text reader. As of a few weeks ago, we’ve started sending emails that are designed to be compatible with both plain text and HTML email readers.

Live chat has everything to do with marketing your company in a positive manner, bubba.

Good marketing is all about driving traffic to your site, making people think well of your company, promoting trust in your company and feeling confident about using your product, with the final mission being to make them feel like your company is “their” company.  As mad man Don Draper tells us, marketing is selling happiness, telling stories and raising expectations of greatness.  e.g. Turning browsers into buyers.  Live chat is the best path to that particular pot of gold.

How does providing live chat do all of that?

Simple.  Personalizing each interaction and consistently amazing your customers and potential customers with outstanding, go the extra mile chat services puts your company’s best foot forward in a direct way to your potential and current customers far more efficiently than an ad in a trade magazine or a :30 sec spot during the drive time break on the half hour of some random radio stations. This is an opportunity for your team’s great personalities to come through directly to your site’s visitors without spending $1000′s on ads, graphics and whizbang attention grabbers.  People are far more able and apt to remember a great, personalized customer service moment and bond to you like a baby duck from the direct experience — rather than being told how great you are* in an ad on the wall of the subway train with clip art people wearing headsets.  It is to our way of thinking that providing spectacular customer support every day of the week is a far better place to stick your hard earned dollars.

*  Of course they will remember even more vividly a moment of your support chain breaking down and doing a lousy job (have you seen that new Twitter thing, and Yelp?), so it’s also very much about walking the walk and not just talking the talk.

This isn’t particularly a new idea; Zappos has ran with their meme of marketing dollars are best spent in building a large and mighty customer service dept since their inception, and it’s worked out well for them in becoming identified world-wide as a champion of amazingly great customer service. They have a commitment from the top down to care for and treat each customer like gold and to consistently go the extra mile in making people delighted with how they are treated and respected by Zappos. They throw vast resources into staffing and training and maintaining a company culture based around making their customers happy.  Which translates to a returning customer and great word of mouth referrals.

Amazon and Apple are two other companies who are committed to making every customer with a problem walk away a dyed in the wool evangelist. Very few people walk out of a Genius Bar unhappy and Amazon is #1 in response time and resolution of problems, sales disputes and returns.

I don’t have the budget that Amazon and Apple and Zappos have, what can I do to compete for trophy for the best customer service in the world award?

We say, add live chat to your tool belt. Put a chat box on every page of your site, keep it open as many hours a day as you can and staff it with passionate, helpful, skilled communicators. Realize that every chat is an opportunity to make a life-long customer and treat every person like a king and queen. Even if it’s Friday evening at 0:beer:thirty and you’re tired and want to go home. Make that last chat of the week as fresh and friendly as the first.  The pay off to your company will be seen instantly.

Can’t afford to hire a phalanx of customer support people?  Make your whole company a customer service machine. Involve everyone in talking directly to your customers. From the CEO, down through marketing, engineering give everyone a shift on chat. They will all learn tons of info about your customer base, what it is they love, what it is they less then love and ideas for making your product and company better. The best thing is you don’t have to be available all the time. Be available when you can be available, and handle issues as email when you’re too swamped to chat with every singe person.

This is the Olark way. If you’re running customer support for your company it’s important to make this known to company wide. Live chat will help you own a customer’s experience with your brand and help make your company legendary for making great customer service an everyday event.

Come chat with our phenomenal support team today at Olark.com and we’ll show you how we walk the walk.

~and make your customers love you~

DOs!

• Talk to your customers. There‘s no better way to get to know what they want.
• Help customers find things. Ideally on your site, but if you know where their glasses are, they will love you forever.
• Show the customer items you suggest. Give them the links right in your conversation.
  
• Sell things that are good. Really, really good. Or have cats on them.
  
• Use the questions customers ask to update your content. You’ll improve SEO and shoppers will love your site.
  
• Be yourself.  A real person behind your website builds a shopper‘s trust.
• Give special customers a deal in real time. Send them the code while you chat.
• Be available for customers. Make it easy for them to reach you.
  
• Look at shoppers’ carts. Encourage customers that they’ve already made great choices.
• Give customers helpful information. Pass along links to tutorials or knowledge base articles specific to their needs.
• Start effective upselling way before customers reach the register. Advice and recommendations are useful while shopping, not as much when paying.
• Ask questions. About their shopping, not World Literature for 600, Alex.
• Offer options without worrying if it’s too expensive. The customer knows what they can afford.
• Send small gifts to your customers. Not as an incentive to buy, just to make them feel loved

DON’Ts.

• Use a canned script
• Be too pushy
• Offer the same upsell to every customer
• Forget to listen to customers and understand their needs
• Offer a discount or upsell with little value for the customer
• Use high pressure sales techniques

DO!

Chat! Active Olark Customer Chat users see a 48% increase in Cart Order Size and 3x Retention

We here at Olark agree, why sit at your desk when instead you can be out on the town or enjoying a nearby park, and still get all of your daily tasks completed?

With this in mind, we wanted to share with you the most popular mobile client used by our customers in hopes to free you from your tethers to the old ways of having an online presence.

The most popular client by far for our mobile customers is imo.im. This client is available on both Android, blackberry, and iOS, as well as having desktop clients.

With imo.im, set up is relatively painless and straight forward. You can find our walkthrough guide on setting it up here.

The most popular question in regards to this software is how to disable the auto-away feature that is enabled by default. Android and iOS have a bit of a different layout, but some of the steps are the same.

Once logged in, you will be in the Messaging screen. Tap on the 3 horizontal bars to the top left. On the page that slides open:

For iOS:

Tap on the green checkmark in the top left of the screen.

Then, Tap on Enable auto-away to disable that feature.

For Android:

Tap on Preferences.

Then, Tap on Auto-away to disable that feature.

There you have it! All the connectivity you want with your customers while on the move!

If you are celebrating Easter, you won’t want to miss the sweet themes Kyle has created this year.  Happy springtime and don’t eat too many jellybeans!

Turn on an Easter theme today!

Get lucky with your customers this St. Patrick’s Day!

Our St. Patty’s Day themes (or St. Paddy’s Day for real Irish Olarkers) will make your customers happier than green beer. Enjoy a holiday theme on your site today from Olark!

Turn on a St. Patty’s theme now!

User Engagement:  How to increase the number of chats you’re getting

So there you are with a fresh scrubbed chat box on your site. It’s been 10 minutes and no one has started a chat yet. What gives?

The first thing you want to think about is how to present the chat box so it #1 gets noticed and #2 is extremely inviting to your customers and will make them want to click and talk without reservation.

Part One – Setup and Presentation

1. Make the chat box as seamless a fit into your site as possible, but NOT invisible. E.g. use your site’s color theme but try not to make it hard to find – a little contrast/shading difference can work wonders on drawing the eye to the chat box. Or having a slightly different font color for the “click here to chat” messaging on the minimized chat box.

2. Use the Attention Grabber utility which will place one of our stock images on top of the chat box, or one you create yourselves to smoothy

blend in with your site’s design to draw eyes to the chat box.

Or utilize a Click-to-Chat image from an advantageous location on your site (top bar area or side of the page are the most effective) to open the chat box. This can also give you the advantage of having multiple ways to find/start a chat. Your mantra should always be, “Make It Easy”.

Now that your visitor has found the chat box, what to do to make it an inviting experience, to coax the user into making that all important first click to initiate a chat?

Now that you’ve gotten your visitor’s attention

1. As comfortingly middle of the road bland as our default chat box messaging is, you can, and you should, do better than this. Personalize it to you and your site’s unique way of communicating and let people know there is a real human behind that first click. “Click here to chat” is completely understandable and clear. But you’ll get better results with “Hey, we’re here and ready to talk to you and answer your questions” or “Chat live with El Presidente of Acme Widgets.” Have fun and entice people to chat with you. We had one report that a customer with low chat usage quadrupled the amount of chats they were getting when they switched the “Click here to chat” to “Talk with our CEO, Chris A – now.”

2. The same advice extends to your offline messaging. Take it away from the corporate, “We are offline now, send us an email to blah@blah.com and we will answer you as soon as possible” and create something more like my personal favorite (also from real life) “It’s probably 3 am and we’re sleeping, but we super double-dog promise to answer you the moment we get up and to our computers.”

Slight changes like these can make a world of difference in how much buy-in to chat and communication you get from your customers.

Part Deux – Proactive Communication

There are three basic ways to connect with your site visitors and let them know you’re available to start a conversation:

1. Initiate a chat with any visitor via the buddy list

The simplest. It’s as easy as clicking on any user you see in your buddy list to reach out and start a chat with them. We recommend extreme caution in doing this though as people can be touchy about their privacy and not react well to someone suddenly starting a chat with them. I blame the Nigerian bank spammers for this level of paranoia. But if you identify the user as a repeat visitor and someone you know won’t mind (the buddy list user info is powerful Kung-fu!), start that chat.

2. The Olark Greeter utility

The Greeter is a cool little utility that allows you to set a timer wherein a chat box will pop up for a visitor (once per visit, not every time they navigate to a new page) with a message you create. Ex: set your greeter to pop up if when a user has been on your Website =/> :25 seconds “Hey there, can I answer any questions you might have?” It’s simple to set up and many of our customers report up to 300% more chats when they employ the Greeter. You can find The Greeter from the customize tab in your Olark.com dashboard.

3. Targeted chat (the Greeter on steroids!) Initiate a chat with any visitor via the buddy list:

This is basically The Greeter on steroids and a high protein diet. You can employ Targeted Chat to get completely granular with the scenarios for reaching out. A couple of example of things you can do using Targeted Chat rules:

• If a user is on say, his 3rd visit to Olark expand the chat with this message: “Welcome back, can we help you out, do you have any questions?” and change his nickname in the buddy list to “repeat visitor”
• If a visitor has been on “this page” for the second time in one session, expand the chat with his message: “Are you having any difficulties with the download process? Can I help you?”
• “Highlight returning visitors in my buddy list”
• Target my French visitors by sending a custom message in their language: If the visitor’s country is France, send this message: “Bonjour, Comment etes-vous?”
• If a visitor is viewing the page, http://www.olark.com/extensions/targeting, expand the box with this message: “Any feedback on Targeted chat you’d like to share with us?”

You get the idea, the only limits are your own creativity in interacting with your customers and visitors. You can turn the rules off and on as needed and really test out which messaging works best. This is powerful Juju in helping you to make the most of your live chat offering.

Hope this helps get you started on the road to many, many successful chats. Follow our blog for weekly tips from the front lines of customer service.  Our mission is to help you provide live chat service that stuns and amazes your customers……

Bill T

Guru of Customer Happiness

Camp Cody gets around this with one of the most friendly Attention Grabbers we’ve seen to date. These images appear above your chat box while it is minimized.

Using happy faces of their camp directors and kids alike, there’s no doubt in my mind who I’m talking to when I arrive at their site. It sure beats using Smiling Headset Girl (you know the one).

Camp Cody are using the Azul theme with their own colors and a custom width of 350px to fit the image. You can go ahead and upload your own Attention Grabber image.

Change is a good thing. It is always preferable to stagnation, and a heck of a lot more fun than doing nothing!

We here at Olark wholeheartedly agree! With this in mind, I would like to show you what has been changing around our parts to better help serve you right now and into the future!

If you havent been to www.olark.com in a while, then you might be surprised about the new layout of our site! Don’t fret tho, all of the cool things that we offer are still alive and kickin, we just re-organized them a bit to help the setup and configuration flow for all of our customers!

Instead of the links to the different configuration options in our dashboard being all over the place, we have consolidated them to be in the Settings tab! If you had any bookmarks to specific areas in our dashboard, don’t worry, they still work!

Also, you can access our *award-winning web-based IM client, chat.olark.com by clicking the green chat button! To the right of that, we not only provide easier access to your operator account settings, but your billing preferences as well!

We have been playing with our reports feature, and trying to come up with some more helpful data to show you! We have an section in beta called, wait for it, Beta Reports!! Here, we are graphing things like number of chats per hour, and chats per operator per hour, along with data such as chats per operator over the past week!

These reports are just the tip of the iceberg of changes for Olark and the statistics that you can pull! We have a comment section open to your suggestions on what reports to add next and eventually, they may be graduated out of Beta!

Please let us know if these beta features interest you, and we would be happy to enable them for your account!

Happy Chatting!!

* Winner of the prestigious “Ryan thinks this thing is awesome award”

Under Advanced Options turn on Custom Tracking and hit, save.
Look in your website’s source code for where you have embedded Olark. Look for this line:

/*custom configuration goes here (www.olark.com/documentation) */

Immediately after this line, you should add:

olark.configure("GoogleAnalytics.tracking_id", "UA-XXXXXX-XX");

Replace UA-XXXXXX-XX with your own Google Analytics tracking ID.

That’s it!