Tech Support’s Greatest Hits – Your Weekly Olark Tip

Posted on April 20, 2012 by bill_t

Usually when you get a hot tip it’s something like “buy low, sell high” or  “Easy Dancer to place in the 5th race.”   But this is more valuable.  Every Friday we’ll be bringing you an Olark usability tip — highlighting features old and new, work-arounds to corner case issues, API hacks and anything else we feel it’s important for you to know.

Set your alarm clocks to go off every Friday morning and learn more about how Olark works.

This week in Tech support @4/20

Why Is My Pidgin Being Set to Away?

If it seems like every time you turn around you’re set to away status in Pidgin and your Olark chatbox is showing in Offline messages mode, it’s likely a set up problem with your Pidgin chat Client.

Pidgin has an auto set to idle mode which is on by default, set to kick in after 5 minutes of inactivity (no mouse or keyboard).  Taking a walk to get a fresh cup of coffee, or taking a phone call is often long enough to for it to be set idle which sets your Olark chatbox connection to away mode. Frustrating.

But never fear, with a couple of deft moves you  can reset these preferences to something more functional.

1.  Go to your Pidgin preferences


I threw in a pointer to the basic status setting button. You’ll need this if you’ve been set to force away, or if you want to take a lunch break and not answer chats for a while (or at end of day).

2.  Here are the default settings you’ll find in the status/idle tab:

3. Some sample settings to change that will keep you online and answering chats

That really all there is to it. Experiment a bit and find what time range works for you as some folks like the auto set to idle mode so they don’t miss chats when they go to the kitchen to heat up some hot-pockets for a snack while answering chats.  Just remember to set the status back to “available” when you return.

Bill T

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Olark Best Practices – part 4: Proactive messaging

Posted on April 17, 2012 by bill_t

Back to the previous post in the Best Practice series: Offline Messaging

Olark Best Practices — Part 4:  Proactive Messaging

In an earlier post in the series we talked about user engagement and making your visitor aware that you’ve put live chat on your Website and that you’re standing by, ready to answer question and help people out. But sometimes that is not enough to get people started having a conversation and to that end we’ve provided a couple of more proactive approaches to get them chatting and letting you now what they need.

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

2. The Olark Greeter utility

3. Targeted chat  (the Greeter on steroids!)

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.

The Greeter

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.

Targeted Chat

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.

Have fun and be sure to tell us of creative ways you’ve found to use targeted chat to ramp up chatting with your site’s visitors.

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Olark Best Practices – part 3: Offline Messaging

Posted on April 6, 2012 by bill_t

Link to the previous post in the Best Practices Series (Part 2: User Engagement)

Olark Best Practices – Part 3: Offline Messaging

Okay, you have to go offline sometimes, it’s inevitable. Even the Spartans at Thermopylae had to take a lunch break now and again.

So what’s the best thing to do with your Olark Live chat when you’re out recharging your batteries?

Offline messaging

Yep, the best thing you can do is to make sure your site visitors have a clear path to contact your with their issues and questions regardless of your  instant availability via chat.  To that end we’ve set the chat box to instantly change to an offline email submission form that you can set to send to an address(s) whenever you log out of your im chat client.   We think that’s a pretty perfect one-stop solution for customer interaction.

However….

Not everyone agrees and so we’ve built in the option to hide the chat box when you’re offline.  The use case for this is a strong one. You may have a rich content Help Center with Knowledge base, FAQ, Community forums AND email/phone contacts that you’d like to funnel users to when you’re not available to live chat with them. In that case, hiding the chat box when you’re unavailable makes perfect sense.

Whichever way you chose to serve your visitors is up to you as you know your customers best. We only suggest that if you choose the latter meme,  you pay special attention to daylighting the path so that people initially looking for that Olark live chat box will have no problem finding their way to your Help Center.

Olark Best Practices — Part 4:  Proactive Messaging

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