Businesses are now prioritizing positive customer experience more than ever. Customers are looking for brands that make them feel heard and continue to provide value even after the purchase. As customer patience while seeking support continues to decrease, brands have started using live chat to connect to their customers in real-time.
PRO TIP: Olark is a great solution for customer support and chat, but it’s missing one essential feature. Click here to scroll to that part of the article right now.
Olark presents itself as an affordable and versatile live chat tool to help you increase your conversion rates, gather user insights, and do more than just reply to customer queries.
Why Great Customer Support Matters
What exactly makes customer support “great”?
The answer to that is getting the right information to the customer in the shortest time possible.
Businesses often consider customer support as an afterthought when it comes to designing customer experience for their product or service. But according to Microsoft’s Global State of Customer Service report, customer service is a decisive factor for 90% of Americans. Especially when providing remote customer service.
High-quality customer service not only helps to differentiate your business from your competitors but also gets you more loyal customers. The State of the Connected Customer report by Salesforce says that 89% of consumers are more likely to make repeat purchases after having a positive experience with customer support.
Taking Customer Support To The Next Level With Live Chat
When you think of customer support, the first thing that comes to your mind is waiting impatiently through call transfers or an email response.
According to Hubspot, an immediate response is a priority for 90% of customers when they have a customer service question. So the best time to respond to a customer is the moment they make the request. Live chat makes this fast response time possible by having a real-time conversation with your customers.
Providing a real-time channel to your customers makes sure they can access customer support at their own pace.
You will need additional tools to incorporate live chat in your customer support. Olark has established itself as one of the most popular live-chat tools that helps your customers reach you directly from your website.
What is Olark?
Olark is a cloud-based live chat platform that lets you chat with your customers from your website. It offers more than just live-chat features, along with a clean and intuitive design.
Getting started with Olark is pretty simple. After you’ve logged into your Olark account, go to the Settings section, and click Installation. You can install it in two ways: paste its embed code into your website, or add it as a CMS plugin.
What Olark Offers You
Reach Customer In Real-time
Customers can interact with the support staff, allowing them to get their issues resolved in real-time. The interface of Olark isn’t intrusive, and customers can keep on browsing while chatting with the customer support staff. You can set a chat schedule to allow your customers to submit an email in the chatbox when your staff is offline.
The Missing Olark Feature - In App Image and File Annotation
Ok, imagine this. You're responding to tickets and chatting with customers like a ninja. Your customer sends a screenshot showing an issue they're having. You know how to solve it, but writing out the solution in a chat message is much slower than just adding some arrows, highlights and callouts on top of the image they sent you.
If you could just click to annotate and send the image back to the customer with all your markup on it – that would be sweet. That's what's missing from Olark. Image annotation directly from chat and tickets, without leaving the tool. And that's what Markup Hero's image annotation API does. They just need to integrate it and it's super easy.
Here's a video showing how it would work inside a typical customer support platform like Olark.
Or better yet, just try it for yourself. Here's a quick demo showing the annotation library in action. Just click the annotate button, add whatever annotations you want, click done and watch the magic.
Automate Customer Interaction
You’ll often notice similar queries made by customers after taking specific actions on your website. In this case, you can automate messages to reach them in the most relevant time possible. Automated messages allow you to use user activity as triggers. For example, you can send a message to a website visitor after they have spent a certain amount of time on your sales page.
Gain Insights Through Real-time Reporting
Real-time reporting is one of the unique features of Olark that lets you analyze customer support interaction to craft better strategies. You can monitor metrics such as peak customer activity hours to ensure that your staff is available when your customers are most likely to seek support. You can also identify opportunities to improve your product or service by assessing the frequency of different issues raised by customers.
Use Co-browsing To Guide Users
Olark’s co-browsing feature allows visitors to share their screens while chatting. This helps your staff to guide the customers through any issues they are facing. For example, if a customer is facing trouble completing a purchase on your website, you can start a co-browsing session and provide step-by-step guidelines on how to complete the purchase. You can further assist them by taking control of the session using the buttons at the top of your co-browsing page.
Interact Efficiently With Targeted Chat
You can automate the interaction with your customers based on multiple conditions using the targeted chat feature. You can block an IP address, hide the chatbox for unsupported locations, show the chat box in specific pages, and send marketing messages based on user activity. Engaging with your customers based on their actions makes your interaction more relevant and meaningful to them.
Keep Track Of Conversations With Searchable Transcripts
You can find all the conversations that took place in your Olark chat box in the transcripts dashboard. The transcripts are recorded along with the visitor name, email, location, and chat rating. This helps you keep track of your interaction with a customer and refer to it if needed. You can also filter these conversations by tags, keywords, and date range.
Monitor Staff Performance Using Team Management Tools
Olark’s team management tools allow you to see how your support staff is performing and ensure that they are not overwhelmed by support requests. In your dashboard, you can see the volume and rating for each agent. You can also set a limit on the number of chats handled by your agents at any time. Olark has a Groups feature that lets you assign visitors to agent groups based on conditions set beforehand.
Customize The Chat Window To Match Your Brand
You can customize the appearance of your chat window in multiple ways. You have the option to use a color wheel or enter a hex number to match the primary and secondary colors of the chatbox with your brand.
Olark allows your agents to upload their pictures as an avatar to make the conversation feel more natural. You can also localize your chat app language by picking one from a list or use the Olark API to customize it in another language.
Get More With Power-ups and Integrations
Olark power-ups allow you to add specialized features designed for sales, growth, and customer service, which you can add to any Olark plan with a flexible monthly subscription. You don’t need any third-party add-ons to install these power-ups and have the option to add or remove them any time you want.
Olark offers integration with CRM software like Salesforce and Hubspot, e-commerce platforms like Woocommerce and Shopify, analytics tools like Google Analytics, publishing platforms like WordPress, and many more.
How Much Does Olark Cost?
Olark offers all of its features, including unlimited conversations at $19/month per seat. You also get discounts for annual subscriptions. Its Enterprise version, named Olark Pro, offers training for your support team, access to a personal account manager, priority support, and more. You have to contact the Olark team for a price quote.
Final Word
When it comes to choosing a live chat solution, you need to consider your business needs and if the tool is capable of catering to them. For example, your goal might be to generate leads or provide an interactive FAQ solution. Look for features that help you meet your customer support goals.
Olark offers a smooth, affordable, and feature-rich live-chat solution. Features like co-browsing and real-time reporting make it a very attractive option if you are looking to take your customer support to the next level.
However, as we point out, Olark is missing inline file annotation. If you’re an Olark client, and you like the Markup Hero API integration, please contact them and ask them to integrate Markup Hero!
