We woke up no power today.  Apparently there was a small plane that knocked out high voltage lines for Palo Alto.  See the attached photos.

Our hearts go out to those involved.

     

Click here to download:

Power_Outage_in_Palo_Alto.zip (36 KB)

Don't be!

Canned messages (via autocomplete or text expanders) are clearly a mixed bag; save some time as an operator, risk sounding like a robot.  When used in moderation and with the proper phrases (keep it friendly and casual!) one can shift more comfortably to the saving time side of the spectrum.

Since Olark doesn't yet support system-level canned messages (coming soon!) we recommend using the following programs within your IM client of choice.  Most of these work by replacing short snippets of text with longer ones (some are fancier than others).  

At Olark we've struggled to figure out the best way to capture statistics about how our visitors use our live chat solution.  We've tied our chat events into mixpanel, and Google Analytics -- explored all kinds of tools for optimizing our funnel, and even thought about rolling our own analytics product.

However, with the advent of a few recent features to Google Analytics,  we found the perfect platform for integrating statistics about live chat with the information that is important to you as a business owner.

Most live chat providers provide a simple graph of chats per day or chats as a percentage of visitors.  We don't.  Sure you want to know how your visitors use Olark, but what you really want to know is how effective is Olark at helping your customers reach their goals.  That's where our Google Analytics integration comes in.

Internally we have configured Google Analytics to record sales, signups, orders, and other goals on our website.  Primarily because we wanted to understand how our customers were using our site.  (I'll write a blog post about this sometime, google analytics is quite flexible).  A lot of our existing customers have integrated Google Analytics into their websites as well.

A few weeks ago we started piping Olark Events into Google Analytics, and keeping track of the sales that were the result of a conversation on the Olark Chat box.  We found these statistics fascinating, as they help us answer questions like "How does having Live chat help me?", "Which one of my operators has the best conversion rate?", "Does having Live chat increase conversion?", "Which of my goals are most effected by a conversation?", and much more.

We've found Google Analytics invaluable for helping us answer these questions.  So now we want to help you answer your own questions about Olark, and your conversion process.  And, we've made it incredibly EASY to do.

Just signup for an Olark Account and add your Google Analytics information to the customize tab of your Dashboard.  Make sure you enable the additional tracking features if you want to know how Olark effects your conversion rate.  Read the olark google analytics tutorial for a more in depth overview of the setup process.  (It's really simple).

Now you'll be able to see how talking to your customers with Olark affects your goal conversion rate, and if you see something exciting be sure to let us know.  (Most people do see an exciting increase in conversion from the people they talk to -- or at least the people who they talk to are more likely to have completed a goal).

My favorite report is viewing  Visitors --> User Defined and selecting the Goals tab in the middle left.  Here I can see exactly how talking to our customers correlates with signing up, and ordering a plan from Olark.

About 8% of the people who come to our website end up signing up for a plan.  As you can see the people who talk to an operator, are much more likely to convert than the average visitor to our website.

Our premium conversion rate is a bit lower than our signup rate, but visitors who have spoken to an operator are 4 times more likely than the average visitor to convert to paid.  Admittedly their is a potential for some spurious correlation, i.e. visitors who are likely to signup for a chat product are likely to want to have a conversation with an operator -- but, this is ONLY measuring people who went to our site and had a 2-way conversation with an operator.  I.e. visitors who attempted to chat, but did not reach an operator are not included here.  (They will be included in a separate category as soon as Google releases the view portion of some of there latest API features).  There is even more information in the dashboard, such as event tracking for customer interactions with your Olark Chat Box, read more in our  Olark Google Analytics Dashboard Tutorial.

The great thing is, with this latest release we've exposed ALL of this information to ALL of our customers.  Anyone with a Google Analytics account, and Olark on their site can add these great new statistics to their account in under a minute (depending on how fast you copy and paste your ID from your google analytics dashboard).  Just follow our Google Analytics tutorial to get started.

What else would you like us to track in Google Analytics?  Let us know?

-Ben

Olark is on Posterous! Now we can do nifty things like post on our
iPhones, email posts, and syndicate posts, which means posting on the
train, posting at the coffee shop, posting at the park, posting while
riding bikes posting while...... All we need now are some good posts.
So come back soon, because we've got some really exciting stuff
coming down the pipeline :-)

Many of our customers try to user Google Apps for your domain with Olark. Unfortunately Google does not tell system administrators to configure Google Talk to work with external XMPP(Jabber) networks by default. This leads to a lot of problems when a customer has Google Apps for their domain, but does not have the required SRV records to work with Olark.

We’ve always pointed out customers to: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34143

But, this doesn’t always solve the problem, because sometimes it takes a while for ISPs to update their DNS cache, and it’s hard for our customers to double check their ISP, or their own attempts at setting SRV records. That is until now!

Introducing the Olark Google Apps for your domain SRV Checker. Using the below tool, you can now finally see if your SRV records are set correctly.

Olark Google Apps for your Domain SRV Checker

I’ll admit that I had a hard time switching from Linode to the Rackspace Cloud. Both because moving datacenters (even in a cloud world) is still a big pain and I really did like linode. Linode still has a few features that I really miss, like graphs of CPU usage and disk IO, and a control panel that’s fairly fast and responsive.

However, while Rackspace’s control panel might fall short there overall service has been amazing. 24/7 live technical support, really clean implementation of daily and weekly backups, and automated server upgrading (like slicehost, I can migrate from a 2 GIG to 4 GIG instance with a few clicks, and minimal downtime).

Enough about rackspace. Today Rackspace launched their Tools.rackspace.com directory of products. It’s quite the line up. They have deal from CloudKick, MixPanel, and a few other companies that we respect and think are awesome. So if your looking for solutions that are using Rackspace as their backbone, and are pretty damn awesome you should check out that directory.

I can tell you this much, we are based in the cloud, and have found rackspaces services to be pretty unbeatable. So if you have a problem with one of these services, it’s definitely not the hosting infrastructure’s fault ;-).

So – a few of our users have reported problems logging into Olark and hab.la (for older users) with the most recent edition of pidgin (2.6.1 and 2.6.0).

If you are using pidgin, and your connection to Olark is hanging, it is probably because of this problem.

There’s even a bug report filed at: http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/9956.

As far as we can tell the latest version of pidgin (2.6.1) is requiring SRV records. Rather than just ignoring SRV records if they don’t exit.

One of our customers has reported that you can fix this problem by copying over libpurple.dll. http://www.olark.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=576

In addition we have added SRV records to olark.com and hab.la. Which should solve this problem for good as soon as your DNS is updated.

If you run a jabber server, and your customers are having trouble connecting to it with the latest version of pidgin. I recommend that you set the SRV records on your domain. I found: http://www.jms1.net/jabberd2/srv.shtml to be a great guide for generating jabber SRV records.

Here at Olark we are all about simplicity - both design and functionality. When we discover that our customers are struggling with any feature of our product, that’s our cue to work really hard to make it easier.

One thing we’ve noticed over the last few months is that many of you cannot easily add Javascript to your website. Sometimes it’s because you might not know how to add code to your website. Sometimes it’s because a separate team manages your website. It boils down to this: we needed to create an easier non-technical option for using Olark.

Last week we built a dead-simple solution. We call it ChatLinks - an easy way to use Olark without ever touching your website. Making a ChatLink is simple:

1. go to the dashboard
2. tell us a webpage where you want to add chat
3. we give you a link (called a ChatLink) to share with other people

When other people visit a ChatLink, they will see the original webpage with the Olark chat widget floating in the corner. And that’s all you need to chat with your visitors. No need to contact your tech guy, no need to learn any code.

How can you use ChatLinks? Here are just a few examples of the cool things you can do:

1. Promote your latest real-estate listing with a ChatLink. Be available to chat immediately with interested home buyers.
2. Use ChatLinks in an AdWords campaign. Offer to chat with potential clients as soon as they click from the advertisement. Great for lawyers, lenders, and insurance providers.
3. Email your customers with ChatLinks to new products in your store. Talk to those customers when they visit your product pages from the email.
4. Share your latest for-sale painting on Twitter with a ChatLink. Allow potential buyers to ask questions and learn about the inspiration behind your artwork.

Give it a try!