Happy New Year! In the past, we've talked about why it's important to connect live chat with a CRM: it helps keep sales leads and customer records in order; and will make future customer conversations more personalized, increasing the likelihood of closing a sale or keeping a customer. In short, a live chat CRM integration will help you achieve your business goals. If one of your resolutions this is to integrate with a CRM then it's best to start at the beginning, with a quick overview of the history of CRM software.

In our increasingly over connected world, there are more opportunities for business people to develop relationships with prospects, customers and their influencers than ever before. Therein, however, lies a daunting challenge: how do businesses cut through the noise to effectively develop relationships with customers, prospects and their influencers that help them grow?

How do you cut through the crowd to connect with the right customer?

Advancements in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software are helping us find answers to this question.

Can you believe that it's almost 2017?  At Olark we end each year with a reduced support schedule to give our entire team an opportunity to reflect and spend time with their families.

Starting Monday, December 26 our team will be taking time away from the computer to join family and friends for the holiday season. Our regular support schedule will resume on Tuesday, January 3.

Over on the Zapier blog, we were recently reminded to maximize taxible deductions by purchasing software subscriptions before the new year. Good advice to follow, but where should you invest your money?

We're coming to an end of a busy, busy year here at Olark Live Chat, but before we close the books on 2016, we have one more integration partner to add to our redesigned Integrations Portal.

Today we're announcing that we've teamed up with Front to launch a native integration that makes it easy to access all of your customer conversations and messages in one place.

More choices. More power to you. 

We've talked before about why it's important to connect Olark Live Chat and a CRM or help desk solution. It makes the qualitative data contained in transcripts actionable and more valuable, improving retention and increasing the likelihood of future sales.

As an independent live chat platform, our value is multiplied by the number of platforms we enable our users to connect with. By offering you more platform options to connect with, we increase the power you have to provide a high quality customer experience.

Today's blog post comes from Olark user Timesheets.com who shares how businesses can prepare for balancing employee time off requests during the busy holiday shopping season...

Congratulations - Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over! But as you know, we're not finished with the holiday shopping season yet. As Jordan Vidra said in a recent Olark holiday ecommerce webinar:

"Customer interaction volume at Homage goes up starting with Black Friday and stays high through Christmas, and even after Christmas with returns and exchanges."

This sustained increase in customer interactions makes staffing customer service over the next month tricky. Many employees want to take vacation to spend the holidays with friends and family, leaving businesses with fewer staff than is ideal for helping holiday shoppers.

This is part 2 of our holiday shopping season ecommerce webinar series. In part 1, StellaService discusses why retailers are discontinuing email support and instead adding more help on live chat. In today's discussion, Jordan Vidra of Homage talks about how his company creates unique connections with every customer, and how their lean team staffs accordingly to handle the holiday shopping rush. [-Karl]

Last week I sat down with Carol Krakowski of StellaService to discuss data and trends that are driving change in the retail customer experience. We covered a wide range of topics, from eCommerce to live chat to Facebook Messenger. You can view our entire conversation in the video below, or scroll down to the highlights. [-Karl]

Do you have enough staff to handle customer service?

Are you letting customers fall through the cracks because you can't respond to their questions fast enough?

Are you holding back from fully staffing live chat because you need all hands to focus on email or phone?

[Editor's Note] Today's article comes from an Olark friend, Mr. John Dubock, a software specialist for BuildTools.com. John first wrote us to share some of the huge sales numbers he was getting from chat on his company's site, so we asked him to share what his sales day on chat is like. If you have questions about his setup, or specific tactics for selling, leave them in the comments and John will get back to you like he does on chat...ASAP! [-Karl] 

Salespeople today have amazing selling tools to choose from, but they really only need two: a chat platform and their favorite CRM.