manoloe

Besides just size, you need to look at the industry and calendar cycle.

For example, if it's retail/ecommerce, many of those decisions need to be done early in the year so that they can be implemented in time for Q3, and perfected for Q4. Approaching them in Q2 will often mean you need to wait 10 months.

ah yes, the coffee wars are alive and well here in San Francisco. what is it about their coffee you like more... you get heart swirls on top of the blue bottle mocha!

i also think it's a good idea to get a 'bootstrap startup' partner on the side that can help keep your project moving forward when you get stuck with real work (and can't get back to startup for a while), smooth out the burnout risks, and help overall momentum and morale when things get tough.

ideally, it would be someone that shares your 'ramen profitability' and complements your skill set.

Our main objective is really to get to know our customers. We've been working on the platform for a fair amount of time, and we need interactions to tell us how we can make it better.

Also, we do rotate accounts among the team which helps some.

Finally, we don't see them as 'random people' -- we see them as developers like us, using a service we built. WE LOVE THAT.

That's a great catch. We chose the name for the account when we started using Olark, and labeled it with the company name. We decided initially to have only three accounts and rotate them among our team, so all of the accounts were given IndexTank labels. As we are expanding our use of Olark, we will give each of our developers their own account, and they could put in their first name there.

We will test it out. thanks.

even Deckard thought he was human, and we don't know if he passed the Voight-Kampff machine test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themes_in_Blade_Runner#Deckard:...

A great point. We have come across some situations where we are asked where the team lives, and we tell it like it is. Developers are pretty positive about us being both in Buenos Aires and in SF. I think the global community is a nice plus.

Interesting... we'll do some tests on alternate ways to introduce ourselves. Being able to test out different approaches real-time is another benefit from live chat. thanks!

I am thinking it would be nice to have a 'best of olark transcripts'collection. Surprising customers with free-flowing interactivity is what this is all about.

+1 for your 'only on the dance floor,man' response

Our development team at IndexTank handles our customer questions. The training they've received comes from working alongside client development teams for years (our team has been together for 4+ years handling search problems for many companies). So we trust each other to type freely.

The misspellings is an interesting suggestion. Since our team originates from Argentina, English is our second language, and we do make mistakes. But we try not to. But now maybe we should ! Thanks for your advice.

Not exactly. As you see in the transcript on the blog, we responded with a simple "Hi, how can I help you?" and then we're asked if we were a robot. We don't use pre-written responses, nor do anything else like you suggest. We're just online, working away.