Olark

Olark Chat is definitely one of, if not, the easiest chat platform for your website. I've helped many clients implement this chat feature on their site. It's easily deployed through Google Tag Manager or directly in the site code. The chat is managed through Olark's interface/portal. It's easily customizable from a design and functionality standpoint and requires no additional change in code on the site. It also is the best out-of-the-box chat solution I've encountered. It's my first recommendation for chat for clients, especially those wishing to test it out. Very affordable, and a month-to-month solution.

I really don't have a negative to report for this chat platform with exception that the script does slightly slow down your website. I suppose it's not made for enterprises, but that's very clear in the marketing language that this is ideal for small to medium size businesses.

I used Olark daily while working at my first company. I used it almost daily and the good thing about Olark is it isk very simple, easy to learn/understand UI and gets the work done. It would be great for a small company/start up.

Overall, it does get the work done but I didn't see any advanced functionalities like getting analytics of usage. May be text analytics to understand the most common type of concerns etc.

We wanted to offer our software customers a channel for support and Olark seemed like a good choice. The interface is easy to navigate, and they have done a good job of thinking through the experience, like being able to customize and "away" message and the confirmation message. It is also very easy to implement with just a couple lines of code.

The biggest problem with Olark is its reliability. We are currently in the process of switching away from it because we would be online, ready to chat, and customers would tell us that on their end it wasn't showing up. There were multiple planned and unplanned outages, and it cost us some good will with our customers.

We liked the notifications for the incoming chats as well as the option for all our representatives to control their availability.

We didn't like the fact that it wasn't possible to transfer chats from one representative to another while in the middle of the chat.

Love the ability to transfer conversations to the various offices the individual is asking for information from - this would be amazing for the military to use now that they don't have AKO IM!

There is not a single thing that I can say in a negative light about this software. We are beyond pleased and recommend it 100%!