

Olark Review: 25% of our Customers Live Chatted with Us Before Buying - JoelSutherland
http://www.gethifi.com/blog/olark-review-25-of-our-customers-live-chatted-with-us-before-buying

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storborg
Has anyone A/B tested the presence of the Olark widget on their site?

We're getting ready to roll out Olark on our site, but I'm kind of wondering
if it will just increase the support workload without actually improving
conversion rate much. When I was first checking out Olark, I'd pretty much
decided to buy it, but because the widget was there (on olark.com), I spent
some time chatting with one of the founders and asking questions. We'll
probably start off with something like 20% of visitors getting the Olark
widget.

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mjpizz
sounds like a good experiment - conversion improvement certainly depends on
the site as well. Mind sharing your results afterwards?

For us, we also get a lot of solid suggestions and feedback from chatting with
customers, so the benefits are not always solely in the conversion improvement
:)

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StavrosK
How many of those wouldn't have bought if there weren't a chat option? Who
knows? Without that detail, however, this statistic is useless...

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JoelSutherland
Author here. Correlation/Causation is certainly something I wonder about.

I can say anecdotally that the conversations were worth having. Most started
neutral and ended with excitement.

Given that this is so easy to try, I recommend doing it. You'll also learn
what things your customers wonder most about prior to buying.

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StavrosK
Oh, I agree about having a chat option on your website, I just don't agree
that that statistic is very significant, and it certainly doesn't mean that
Olark increased your sales by 25%, I just wonder if people will take it that
way...

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davidedicillo
I'm not sure about purchases but I can tell you that installing Olark on
SyncPad's website saved us some bad reviews from people who didn't read the
instructions.

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benatkin
What percentage of people chatted with Olark before buying Olark service? I
wouldn't be surprised if it was lower than 25%. :)

