

Olark launches "Targeted Chat" - nbashaw
http://www.olark.com/targeting

======
bryanh
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.

~~~
bcx
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> )

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

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mvkel
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.

~~~
mjpizz
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.

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dangrossman
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.

~~~
steiza
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. : )

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pbreit
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.

~~~
moe
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.

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

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snprbob86
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!

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

~~~
rogerbinns
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.

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prezjordan
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.

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

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noelwelsh
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.]

~~~
oz
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.

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

~~~
kanamekun
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.

~~~
lukevdp
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.

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latchkey
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.

~~~
mjpizz
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...](http://www.olark.com/spw/2011/10/lightningjs-safe-fast-and-
asynchronous-third-party-javascript/)) 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

~~~
latchkey
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.

~~~
bcx
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?

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

<script
src="[http://server.not.responding.com></script>](http://server.not.responding.com></script>);

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.

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

~~~
latchkey
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.

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corkill
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.

~~~
nbashaw
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!

~~~
corkill
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!

~~~
daniellemswank
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".

------
frankdenbow
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.

------
sandstrom
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!

------
flatline3
Or, build it yourself _very_ easily (I did so in a weekend) using XMPP +
Strophe.js:

<http://strophe.im/>

~~~
ktr
Any interest in sharing the code?

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alphadog
Reminds me of LiveZilla's visitor monitoring.

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

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webwanderings
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.

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selvan
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".

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BryanB55
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.

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bill-nordwall
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.

~~~
nbashaw
That'd be my fault :(

Fix is forthcoming - thanks for reporting

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massarog
Is this just proactive chat which snapengage already offers?

~~~
nbashaw
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.

~~~
massarog
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?

~~~
nik_0_0
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".

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

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twakefield
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?

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zaroth
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.

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bullcrab
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.

