Announcing the brand spanking new Olark Help Center!

Ta da! http://help.olark.com/ gets you to our new support page where we’ve carefully arranged and indexed pretty much all there is to know about Olark — there’s always something new though, and we’ll add articles the moment a new use case or new corner of our app is uncovered.

The support portal is organized so you can find quick and easy vital info like set up and connecting chat clients and the most frequent questions that come our way through chats and support emails.

But it’s so much than that.   We cover an array of topics like:

• customizing appearance
• chat transcripts
• integration tutorials for CRM/Chat clients/Web site.
• API hacks and tricks

Browse the categories or use the super fast search field to find specific and useful bits of information.  It’s fast, easy and super helpful. There is also a user community where you, the esteemed user can add to the KB or ask a question if you’re stuck on something. We heartily welcome input and information from everyone.

As with anything new this is well, new to everyone.  If you have suggestions on how we could have done this better or organize it into a format that you’d find easier to navigate, please speak up.  We’re always happy to listen to our friends out in the wild who are actually using what we build.

Thanks a million,

–
Team Olark

Well, you can funnel your chat transcripts to an email address of some guy in Marketing  and have him manually pour through them mining for data. That’ll work when your site traffic and chats are relatively low, but that doesn’t scale and there are just too many opportunities for info to fall off the table and be lost. The solution is to get your chat info/transcripts into a CRM program.

What the heck is a CRM

….you might ask at this point? Cultivated Robot Man? Concentrated Rubber Money? Clean Red Mountaineer? Close, but nope. Customer Relationship Management.

A CRM platform allows you to store, manage, respond and update all facets of your customer interaction. Be it sales data and history of contact and deals, customer service or tech support cases. You get all your customer interaction in one trackable, searchable and super manageable place. This is vital to the process of excellent customer service in that nearly every interaction requires some follow up.  Getting your data in to the CRM also enables analysis via metrics gathering to help you to better understand your site visitors; what they want, what they need and if they are getting just that in a clear concise manner. Miss that and you miss the opportunity to create truly happy customers.

Olark – CRM Integrations

At Olark we are proud to integrate seamlessly with a number of major players in the CRM world.

In alphabetical order (cause we love you all equally):

Also, if you’re a Zendesk customer, you might be interested in learning more about our integration with Zendesk.

The best time for any customer to visit your website is when they’re ready to spend. But not all buying decisions are based purely on price. It’s important to make sure you’re competitive, of course, but if you put all your energies into selling on price, you’re missing something vital that could affect the type of clients you attract.

Of course, some people only have small budgets. To them, cost is the biggest factor in their purchase. Other clients will be looking to spend a little bit more to develop a relationship with someone they can trust. They want someone who is easy to contact, easy to work with and happy to solve their problems without a fuss. These clients will be keen to build up a long-term relationship with you, and as such, they represent the most valuable conversions.

If you’re not seeing a good conversion rate from more selective customers, it may be that you’re pushing hard on price and not showcasing your customer service skills. You may not be giving clients a chance to find out how friendly you are, or how you like to take care of people. Don’t let your website become a barrier between yourself and these valuable clients.

Humanise your contact options

Every website has a contact form. Contact forms are dull – we all know this. They also require that the person using the form has a well-rounded idea which they can put into words quickly. Not everyone does. A short contact form means your client won’t give you much information, but a long contact form will be intimidating to clients who don’t write well.

Olark’s live chat box is obviously one way you can humanise your contact page. Live chat is less rigid than a contact form: your client can start a conversation without really knowing what they want to ask. The Greeter is ideal if you want to give your visitors an extra nudge towards sending that vital first message: set it to display only on your contact page if you’re concerned about troubling people before they’re ready.

Analyse your content

A client who is looking for a good relationship with a supplier will make decisions about the supplier based on their marketing material and website. That concept applies equally to customers who visit an ecommerce store. What do you show those clients? Are you giving them the impression that you’re happy to help?

Look critically at all the written material you send to clients – particularly material you might send them before they’ve made a buying decision. Loosen up the tone of your website and re-write your terms and conditions so that the client isn’t scared away before they’ve picked up the phone.

It’s also a good idea to make your routes to order pages and contact pages as clear as possible to maximise conversions, and put email addresses and phone numbers on every document you send.

Show signs of life

An active blog isn’t just good for SEO. It can show that your company is healthy, busy and engaged with its customers. Blog posts don’t really need to be about your company: you can blog about all kinds of relevant topics, as long as you bear in mind the kind of clients you are looking to attract. (There’s no point in blogging about soup if you sell trainers.)

If you pitch your blog posts at the right level, you can also use your blog as a sounding board to impart friendly advice or invite users to contact you by name. Users really like having a named person to deal with, rather than an email address for a generic department.

Make sure blog comments are always open, and don’t make clients log in to comment. Barriers make people nervous and less likely to trust you. If your customer makes a complaint or seems angry in your comments, swallow your pride and put their pride ahead of your own. Treat an unreasonable person well and you’ll make a great impression on everyone else who comes across that post.

About the Author: Claire Broadley writes for experience day site Wish.co.uk and is passionate about using content and customer service to bridge the gap between website and consumer.

Topspin is the premier direct-to-consumer solution for music artists, filmmakers, comedians, writers and anyone else who might want to sell stuff directy to their fans. We work with all types of artists, across many genres and of all sizes. Trent Reznor, Beastie Boys, Madi Diaz, Dillinger Escape Plan, Paul McCartney, Andrew Bird, Umphrey’s McGee, Kevin Smith and Ron White are just a few of the thousands of talented folks with whom we work. In addition to helping them utilize the platform, we often interact directly with their fans. We want to make sure we’re doing everything possible to ensure that their fans have a great experience. That’s where Olark comes in.

We had been considering the idea of binging live chat capabilities to the Topspin platform for some time. Late last year we decided to test Olark on a campaign that we did with a little band called Pixies. Maybe you’ve heard of them? We did a blog post that detailed the campaign. Because the band was offering a very limited amount of tickets to their fans, we wanted to make sure that any customers that had an issue could get their questions answered immediatley. Additionally, we wanted to make sure that chats were logged in Zendesk, which we use for all Artist and Fan Support inquiries. Olark was a simple, straightforward solution for customers and it proved to be very effective for this campaign.

Due to the great experience we had with Olark on the Pixies campaign, we decided to use it on a few other select campaigns like Smashing Pumpkins and Justin Bieber.

Complete Topspinmedia Pixes blog post

In addition to utilizing Olark to help the fans of our clients, we’ve also implemented it for our own clients, which means it’s directly integrated with the Topspin application for our Plus and Enterprise customers. This allows them to reach someone quicker when they have an urgent issue. On average we see between 5-10 chat requests per day from the Topspin application with an average of 11 messages exchanged versus an average of 20 artist support tickets per day created on Zendesk. We have seen the number of tickets go down since we implemented Olark, but if anything we are spending more time on artist support overall, which is fine. We would rather spend a little more time and have very happy clients. We measure satisfaction via Zednesk and our satisfaction rating for Artist Support is 96%.

Thanks to our Olark integrations, we’re able to serve our clients and their customers faster and provide a better customer support experience all around.

What next? Organizing your team into well, a team.  Sounds simple and sometimes it is if your business only requires an operator or two to handle all the sales and customer service inquiries.  But if you’ve got a high traffic site with quite separate areas for technical support, sales, developer support or any other variations, it becomes vital to organize in such a way to get the proper live chat operators connecting with the right site visitors.

Olark has a solution in one word:  Groups!

By using Groups you can designate chats originating on specific pages to go to only members of a specific group.

For instance on a page dedicated to sales info you might want only your crack sales team folks to get chat requests, and your tech support guys to get the how-to questions from your help page(s).  Or perhaps your CEO has offered to participate (we highly recommend as a best practice everyone in your company playing a role in interacting directly with your customers) but doesn’t want to get flooded with tech support chats – so you can segregate him/her to a special “Chat with the boss” page.  Use your imagination.

So how do you accomplish that?

In your Olark Dashboard in the Operators tab (where you’ll set up your sales and support reps with their operator accounts) you’ll find a button to “create groups”

Be brave and click on “Create Group” to  create your first group.

The Group is created as “New Group” (creative, eh?) but you can name it anything you like right away by clicking on the edit icon next to the default snappy name.

You can add as many of your operators to a group as you like by clicking on the add to group drop down menu which will show all your current operators  (ops can be members of multiple groups of course, if that fits your schema).

A small snippet of code (seen in the gray box above) is automatically generated, which you can copy/paste to place on the page right below the Olark chat code.  Put that in place and you’ve got team organization, baby!

Team organization via Olark Groups;  as simple as pie.

If I’ve said this once, I’ve said it a thousand times:  All the cool/slick technology still is dependent on having the right people on the spot using it in such a way that it best represents your company.   It’s vital that the people who have boots on the ground, first contact with your customers and clients be truly excellent at their jobs.

So how to make sure you get:

* actual greatest CS rep known, Miranda D.  from Topspin Media in Santa Monica!

Instead of this:

What are those intangible, yet highly critical traits to look for when interviewing and choosing members of your support/CS team?  Is there magic involved and is there a way to quantify the data in  your search and make sure you never make a mistake?   Well no, no magic involved…..

I stick to a pretty basic set of  6 personality traits, which I endeavor to bring out from the interview process:

1. Genuine warmth: A person that exudes friendliness, caring about other people and an upbeat and outgoing personality.
2. Empathic: Able to understand other people’s feelings and relate well and be sympathetic to someone under stress.
3. A good listener: A person who trends toward active listening in order to fully understand an issue or problem before acting
4. Conscientious: It sounds basic, but it’s vital to have people who by their nature take pride in taking care of every little detail perfectly
5. Anticipatory: This sounds as though it’s antithetical to #3 but it’s slightly different.   A person who is excellent at anticipating cause and effect can save much time in not just answering the main question but also digs deep to make sure every corner of the customer’s problem is fully resolved by the time the conversation is over.
6. Optimistic: Again, it sounds basic, but an optimistic attitude is vital in avoiding burn-out as the daily exposure to people sometimes in stress and not acting in tune with their better angels can drag a person down.

Having a 6 point plan is easy.  Making the right decision isn’t always an exact science.  I use a combination of carefully crafted scenario questions  (thank you Psych 1A in college) and trust my gut above and beyond trying to quantify sometime soft traits.  I recommend bringing the whole interview team in on the 5-6 traits you’re looking to find and trusting your staff to give you strong backup during the process.   When you get one of the greats (like Miranda above) you often know it instantly.  Others you need to try out, guide and develop more slowly into becoming standout superstars on your CS team.

Good luck to you in building your team. It’s both harder than you think to find a pool of the right people, yet relatively easy to make the right decision once you know what you’re looking for.

Later,

Bill T

The holiday season may be done, but it’s always good to reflect on what we’ve learned in order to make improvements and resolutions for the new year. First, let’s look back at the holiday season. On my blog over at Software Advice, I suggested some last-minute help desk checklist items for companies to do in order to prep for the increased volume of inquiries. Companies that employed these found that they improved help desk management, making things run even smoother, and boosting performance going into the new year.

Here is the last-minute checklist that helped companies have a much happier holiday:

• Create a holiday FAQ list – If you think about it, you can probably guess the types of questions you will be getting during the holiday season. Customers will have more requests in regard to gifts, shipping and product availability. Creating a FAQ list for your help desk and service center employees will help resolve more issues on the first call.
• Cross-Train Staff – Many companies will hire seasonal employees to help manage the higher volumes of the holiday season. Another suggestion is to cross-train all of your employees to be a support agent. This provides even more service touch points in the organization, improving overall service across the organization.
• Communicate availability – Everyone needs a holiday, even businesses! However, customers are generally under a lot of stress during this time of year and will want answers immediately. They understand that you may not be available 24-7, but it is important that you make is extremely clear when you will/will not be available, and let them know ahead of time. This will reduce confusion and stress for your customers.
• Support your agents – Customers are stressed, but your agents are, too. It is important for companies to develop a plan of agent support, such as rewards, bonuses, in-office “treats” like chair massages or lunch. Keeping your service team relaxed and happy will ensure that they are able to provide the best possible service.

Another great use of the hectic holidays is to see how well your service center and other departments are performing. The holidays may be a crazy time, but they are actually a great occasion for performance monitoring. Why? Because it’s basically your day-to-day business activities on max speed. So you had 72 percent first-call resolution rates in August. Great. What about the day after Christmas?

I suggest five areas to monitor:

• Employee onboarding
• Internal collaboration
• Peak load management
• Emergency response processes
• Customer satisfaction

You can read about each of these in more depth on my blog, but by analyzing these areas and identifying both high and low performing aspects in each, you can go into the new year with improved operations, resulting in improved overall performance.

We can tell you, it’s not easy. But the payoff can be enormous- the better you understand your customers, the easier it is to build something to delight them. Many of our ideas (for everything from new features to slight tweaks) came from talking with you. And by being responsive to customer requests, you start building a relationship so in turn customers will be responsive to your requests for feedback.

Please Hold for the Next Available Service Representative

So how do you do it? Here are some of the things we’ve learned along the way:

- Spend your goodwill wisely. Every support request has a limited attention span before they give up and go away. Make sure you do the most work reasonable before e-mailing them back. Did you check the debuglogs for errors associated with their account? Did you run experiments to try to reproduce the issue? Did you check their account configuration? Don’t leave debugging up to your users.

- Drive the issue through the R’s: research, request more information, re-assign, and (hopefully) resolution. Can’t understand what they’re asking for? Do some research, and if necessary, spend some of that goodwill to request more information. If the issue is beyond you, make sure it gets re-assigned to someone what can handle it. And of course the end goal is always resolution.

- Use a tool! If you’re just starting out, an e-mail inbox works okay, but most people outgrow it quickly. We just switched to Assistly and have been loving it; they really nailed what it means to have a good support workflow. It’s set up so multiple operators can easily work on inbound requests at the same time without conflict, you can assign issues to specific operators, and you can easily set up specific rules to get custom behavior that works for your organization.

We’re far from perfect, but with these guidelines we think we’re on the right track. Let us know anything we missed in the comments.

Oh, and if you’re an Olark and Assistly user, be sure to check out our killer integration with them.

That’s where you come in: Please pipe up and let us know your thoughts and ideas. There are a bunch of ways to do this.

1. Go to our UserVoice community and add an idea or vote for one that is already posted — add comments too, we LOVE comments  <http://olark.uservoice.com/forums/15121-feature-suggestions/filters/new>

2. Send us an email to support@olark and put “feedback” in the subject line.

3. Click on the live chat button on our web site and tell us face-to-face.  We’d love to hear from you directly and someone from our team is on the chat 7am-6pm PST Monday through Friday.

4. Send an email directly to me, Guru of Customer Happiness  <bill@olark.com>

Thanks a billion,

Bill T