Olark launches "Targeted Chat" | Hacker News Reader

Olark launches "Targeted Chat"

olark.com

158 pointsnbashaw62 comments

We at Zapier love Olark. Rarely a day goes by where we don't proclaim to each other our undying love for all that is Olark. Its invaluable. Oddly enough, it is one of the most expensive SaaS apps we pay for, and if they doubled prices, we'd still pay for it.

One humble request: a REST API that just spits out recent conversations. Basically a JSON version of https://www.olark.com/transcripts. Lots of Zapier customers want to send their Olark transcripts into service X, Y, or Z but without that endpoint we can't... [1]

Keep it up guys. :-)

[1] Well, they could use your email feature to send it to our inbound address.. but that isn't intuitive at all.

If you guys create a tutorial for [1] we'll promote it on our blog and twitter.

To do the json version of http://www.olark.com/transcripts we'd need to expose an Oauth endpoint and do a few other things that would probably take a while :-)

(Also have you looked at http://www.olark.com/help/webhooks )

Wasn't aware of the webhook integration. Very cool! I think we can use that.

Olark has, by far, affected our ability to communicate with prospects. Instead of sitting in the dark, passively mulling over Analytics numbers, we can put our finger on the pulse of a potential customer. We have several productive chats per day; if nothing else, they reinforce the decisions we're making, or provide great feedback on what we can do better.

It warms my heart to hear that :) Chat has built so many relationships for us too, and you just get much richer feedback (or praise!) from a "real" back-and-forth discussion with a customer.

Agreed. It's a great way to bootstrap the initial conversations with customers, and to find out just what, exactly, your customers are looking for. With the right approach, this really is a huge leg up in customer acquisition in the early stages of a startup.

Thanks :-). What can we do to make Olark even better for you?

What's your business and what kind of chats are you having?

I tried Olark once long, long ago and had multiple problems with it -- if there were more than 10 simultaneous visitors on my sites, which there usually were, the whole thing would get wonky and send me the wrong chat info or overlap conversations from different people... I don't remember the details, except that it didn't work. And that wasn't with trying to talk to more than 10 people at once, just having more than 10 on the site.

I switched to SnapEngage, which also has a proactive chat feature that lets you automatically initiate chats on certain URLs and such. It just worked and, I think, was cheaper too... been using it ever since.

I don't actually spend many hours online available to chat, so most of the time the little widget in the corner of the page says "Live Support Offline" and clicking it pops up a contact form instead of a chat. I get mails from that every day, where almost nobody used the contact form built into the websites. It's worth the $19/month just for that.

I'm assuming Olark has long fixed those issues I ran into, but I've no reason to want to switch back now.

Zach from Olark here, sorry to hear you were having issues some time ago! Honestly, I'm not sure what could have been causing issues for you back then, but rest assured we take message delivery extremely seriously - whenever you're using Olark if you ever have any issues please let us know so we can dive in to the logs and take a look!

Most of our users routinely have many, many more than 10 simultaneous visitors - I can assure you we work in that case. : )

For some reason, Olark tabs really bug me as a user. They seem extremely intrusive and distracting sliding in on every page and invariably blocking content.

You are not alone. I hate them with passion, just as those sticky sidebars.

When I need support then I'll go looking for it. For that case, please have a visible link somewhere in the header or footer. There is absolutely no need to stick your 200x400px "SUPPORT!!!"-link into my face permanently. Many of them even perform idiotic gymnastics during scrolling or accidental mouseovers, in order to maximize the distraction.

However, there's one thing even worse than that: Automatic chat popups (Hello Rackspace!).

If you're at the receiving end of such a popup and get some really nasty text from a stranger, then that's probably me.

You can hide the widget by default and then show it with javascript when the user clicks a link/image/etc.

Isn't the look of Olark customizable? I guess it depends upon how much work you want to put into it.

I started looking but didn't find much. And wasn't sure what was possible in the free tier.

I'm not a big fan really of any of the support tabs and am sorry they have gained so much traction (thanks UserVoice, I guess?). But thankfully they are not present on the more legit sites.

Above the free tier you can start Olark hidden, and show it only when a "live chat" link is clicked. Shopify (one of our customers) does just this.

This. I didn't know what Olark was until I clicked on the link here, then I saw that all-too-familiar box that I try to avoid out of the corner of my eye. It's great that people are getting real feedback and having conversations with their customers, but in my experience, it doesn't distinguish itself from "Hi! Click here to talk to a REAL LIVE person!" chat windows that you see on so many ecommerce sites that either direct you to a new page entirely, bounce up and down continuously or create a modal after a few seconds of surfing to remind me that it is there.

The surprise and delight that users express when they realize a human is on the other end of that chat window makes Olark worth every penny!

Does Olark do something different than other chat providers to indicate that a human is on the other end?

No. But if there are no humans available it will ask you to leave a message. I've used olark as a user several times and always been delighted - the person you talk to is usually one of the techies so you can get straight down to the issues.

At my current startup I insisted we use olark and have been very happy.

Olark lets me use my normal chat client via Jabber or GTalk. It provides a !command interface. Most (all?) of the other systems require a special application.

I use Olark for my hobby programming blog - http://programthis.net and I love it. Problem is that I don't have my account set up on my work computer, but when I'm home I love chatting with readers.

They've got a neat product, and this is an exciting change to see.

Competition lets you chat from the mobile app, you should check it out.

Scaling is the issue I have with things like Olark. One-to-one chat is an expensive way to get customers. Does anyone have experiences on the effectiveness and cost of customer acquisition using something like Olark?

[Let me say I love the concept of Olark. I'm just not sure how it plays out in practice.]

We brought on a dedicated sales guy last month and he's been using Olark. It's been successful and he's made sales right from the chat window.

We get about 300 uniques a day and he hasn't been overwhelmed at all.

The biggest issue (IMO) is making the distinction between sales and support. We don't use Olark for support (and don't want to). But for sales, it's awesome.

Noel,

If the cost of offering chat is < value you get from chat it works out.

The trick is to understand that equation for your business.

We launched targeted chat to help you focus your chats on just particular visitors. One could argue that the value talking to customers who land on your pricing page, while ignoring everyone else always works out.

It depends on your business. I'm not an Olark user, but I've been running some back of the envelope calculations.

One year of the Bronze plan, at $180, is several orders of magnitude lower than my average customer lifetime value, so it's easily worth it, even if it only gains me 1 customer per year. Your mileage may vary.

But right now, most of my customers are coming through my email marketing, so I won't signup now. But I definitely will in a few months.

You need to also count the cost of your time spent talking to prospects

It can be tricky assigning a cost to something that's so important to a startup (customer development). In almost every startup I've been involved with, the engineers who spent the most time talking to customers ended up being the ones who created the most valuable features.

agreed. I think Live Chat is a great idea (I use it for my own product) for the customer development aspect. I was just saying there is an opportunity cost involved as well.

I don't understand this sentiment. I would kill to be able to talk to prospective customers.

I had Olark on my site for a brief period to try it out. I really like the functionality that it provides and I think they are doing a great job.

That said, I ended up removing it after finding that the javascript service was rather unreliable and would cause delays for the loading of my site. I'm sure it was just a brief outage or whatever, but it does me no good if I can't get my pages to load.

I'll probably revisit it in the future as olark definitely had the best product out of all of them. The integration with jabber is key.

Matt here: I work on a lot of our JS here at Olark - would love to dig into any loading issues you saw! We spent a lot of time ensuring that our latest stuff loads async (http://www.olark.com/spw/2011/10/lightningjs-safe-fast-and-a...) so it'd be great to ensure that we're actually succeeding there :)

Feel free to come on over and chat, or shoot an email to support[at]olark.com

It wasn't the async stuff. It was more like olark##.olark-server.com not responding randomly which would cause my page load to block waiting for the server to respond. Probably just a server down or temporary outage, but it was enough to shake my trust a bit and just remove it since we were just starting out with it.

Ah, how long ago? This kind stuff should be resolved in the latest editions. We load all those requests async now, and recently we started pre-loading a few of them to improve performance further. If you have any more details, shoot 'em over. Thanks for keeping us accountable!

I am not sure how long ago you tried Olark out, but we've made a lot of improvements in how the RPC servers work.

I am still a little concerned about a slow request blocking your page though. What's your URL? Do you know if you are using JSONP?

Again, it isn't the async stuff. It is:

That causes the browser to block waiting for a response.

It was a couple months ago, but I think it was olark19 not responding.

While I appreciate what you guys are doing a lot, I'm not willing to be a beta tester for your networking. Stuff like that absolutely needs to be hosted on an architecture that just doesn't go down. Ever.

Many browsers support an async/defer attribute on script tags now, which will cause them to load without blocking.

As far as I can tell, the olark js block we are asked to copy into the page doesn't set this on the script element that is pushed into the dom.

Super useful, just trying it out.

Using it inside my web app and so want to pop up a chat when the user is on the settings page. e.g. clientname.app.com/settings, anyway to do this? I tried */settings but no luck.

I also think it would be useful if I can say if the client visits any page 5 times start a chat (not a specific page).

Also is their a way I can exclude all the people that are already users of my app from a rule, as I use the chat both on website and in the app.

Nathan from Olark here - make sure you give us the full URL (e.g., "http://clientname.app.com/settings). That should fix your issue.

The second rule you wanted to use probably can't happen just yet, but we'll look into adding it!

The third rule you can do if you use our Javascript API: www.olark.com/developer

Thanks for the feedback, and you can always email us at support@olark.com if you have any other questions!

Thanks, the client name is dynamic, if a wildcard could be used it would help.

btw anyone not using this to get feedback from their app users is missing out!

Danielle from Olark here. I'm one of the engineers on this project.

We have a "contains" selector that works like a wildcard. So in order to do what you want, your rule conditions would look like: "Current Url" "contains" "settings".

I really love Olark, it has helped me close quite a few sales since I am always on IM. I've had the best customer interactions through their widget, pumped to try this out.

Looks great! Somewhat similar to what intercom.io is doing, but I think Olark is further ahead on the chat technology. I'll be interesting to see how this sector plays out!

Or, build it yourself very easily (I did so in a weekend) using XMPP + Strophe.js:

http://strophe.im/

Any interest in sharing the code?

Reminds me of LiveZilla's visitor monitoring.

It's a pity I had to give up LiveZilla because of its terrible UX.

I visited Olark's site today for the first time and not sure why, but oddly enough, now whenever I read my HN feed in Google Reader, my Ghostry is blocking Olark.

Olark should have nothing to do with Google Reader and HN. I wonder, what kind of cookie mess I am in.

Sounds interesting..I have come across " Nudgespot - http://www.nudgespot.com " recently. They are focused on "How to nudge window shoppers of your ecommerce site with targeted promotions to increase conversion rate".

We use the same feature on livechatinc.com and it works great. Olark has done a great job but I must say livechatinc wins my vote because you can see what people are typing before they hit "send" - its a big help in responding faster to questions.

Small bug: the fixed-position "See Plans & Pricing" link that shows up at the bottom of the page when you scroll is partially hidden by the fixed-position "Talk to Us" link when the browser window is narrower than 1245px or so.

That'd be my fault :(

Fix is forthcoming - thanks for reporting

good catch

Is this just proactive chat which snapengage already offers?

Good question! We already had a feature called "greeter" that was on par with snapengage's proactive chat. Targeting is something bigger.

Targeted chat lets you take a variety of actions other than just automatically starting conversations (label visitor, hide chatbox, show chatbox, route to operator/group) based on a wider variety of conditions about the user (too many to list here).

Take it for a spin and let me know if you have any more questions! Always happy to help.

Anyway to make it so that if a user tries to abandon our shopping cart by clicking back or X out of the page the chat box will popup asking if they need any help?

Do you really want to override browser functionality? I could imagine more people being frustrated by that than the additional sales it may generate.

From the demo, they offer a rule based on referring and current URL (you may be able to use this in order to determine if a user has already pressed back). Nothing I can see regarding closing the window, your best bet may be to use the given example: "number of seconds user is on page".

As a customer I hate those things. Doesn't everybody?

Hmm, I wanted to try this but I don't see the "Seconds spent on current page" filter.

Is it only available w/ certain plans?

Now coming to HN... YC company ads are now auto-upvoted to be the top story?

Yes, Olark is neat for some applications, I use it on one of my sites. But I am surprised to see this as the #1 story today.

guys I understand this site has a tendency to like all y combinator companies. But all other plyers in the space do already have that feature. so this is bs.

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