Conspire used Olark to answer questions during a 100x traffic spike, and continues to use live chat to keep its massive (and growing) database up-to-date.
Conspire is an intelligent networking platform - an "introductions platform" - that builds a social network for each of its users. When a user signs up, Conspire pulls down email information for that account and adds it to a giant graph of other users. Users then tell the platform, "I would like to be introduced to XX" (XX would be the name of anyone) and Conspire traces a path through that users graph so they can see who to talk to get that introduction.
Jeremy Frazao, VP of Engineering, and his team at Conspire used Olark live chat to talk to customers periodically as the company got started. But on the day Conspire was featured on Techcrunch, the company saw a 100x traffic spike in site traffic.
"Having Olark on our site made our service response time almost immediate," said Frazao. "That was huge for us because the platform is highly nuanced and requires a little extra explanation on how it works. It also helped us assure potential customers that their personal data would be safe."
All images in this post by 23rd Studios | Paul Talbot
As Conspire saw more users come onto the platform, its next challenge was ensuring its massive data graph was accurate. "We have information associated with more than 30M emails now," says Frazao. "All of that data corresponds to a real person, but not all of those people are Conspire users. So we have to build profiles for those emails automatically using scripts. In a lot of cases, those profiles end up being dramatically wrong and we have to manually fix them."
Customer feedback about incorrect profiles was, and still is, vital for Conspire since customers tend to be the ones who discover incorrect profiles first. Frazao and his team did some DOM manipulation to augment the Olark functionality and make it easy for customers to report an incorrect profile in a chat. "We set it up so when a user clicks the 'report this profile' button, it fires the Olark chat box," says Frazao. "If we're online, we can chat with the user and make changes in real-time. If we're offline, the customer can submit an email via the chat box. We just add a little metadata to the email so it's easier to find that profile, and then fix it."
Frazao isn't sure how many profiles have been fixed since implementing this system, but believes it to be in the hundreds. While the chat box is helpful for customers, he admits that he also really enjoys the chats. "I'm usually writing code all day, so when a chat pops up, I drop what I'm doing to talk. I usually have a few lengthy conversations each day, and I'll take the time to try to research that person while we're chatting. Someone started chatting me the other day, turns out they were the owner of Bosco. How cool is that?" 
Conspire used Olark to handle a massive influx of customer inquiries, and live chat continues to help them maintain their database.
Ever had a huge rush on live chat? Or used live chat to make real-time edits based on customer feedback?
