We've talked before about how to effectively automate a live chat greeting, essentially sending visitors a pop up message. Today's guest post comes from Grant Thomas, Marketing Manager for JustUno, who offers 12 more ways for eCommerce businesses to use website pop ups.

The Customer Support community is much different from other 'hard' tech communities because of the emotional involvement of the day-to-day work. Support can be very rewarding, but it can also be a grind. In a recent study, 45% of Customer Support professionals found maintaining and improving team morale challenging. (source)

This article is a prequel to my eBook, "Persuading Customer Support to Sell." In the book, I share how to get Support to contribute to sales in a non-salesy way. Why should they do this? Because it helps you fight churn, and churn is slowly but surely killing your business.

Customer Support doesn't bring in new sales prospects - they prevent churn. They're talking to customers after the purchase to ensure customers are happy. If they're not, then they work to quickly help or appease them so they're either happy again, or not mad enough to leave. 

When a customer leaves you, this is churn. Churn is people falling out of love with your company. Churn is the biggest problem for the lifetime value of a customer.

Getting frustrated at work happens to everyone, and everyone should prepare their own survival tactics for feeling overwhelmed or frustrated.

When your work is customer support, and your job is to wear a happy face while dealing with angry customers, well it can be challenging to say the least. Heck, sometimes I get overwhelmed and frustrated when I get two chats at once and they're not both asking, "Where is your pricing page?" DO I LOOK LIKE I HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS PEOPLE?

I digress...

Lucy's story is not unique to those of us providing Olark support. We wish we could have helped Lucy get started on the right foot, and saved her some frustration - her bad day on chat could have been avoided had she taken a few small steps! The names and events you're about to read have been changed to protect the Olark innocent.

Our friend, Matthew Harris is the founder of sendwithus. He recently wrote an article for Venturebeat about social engineering - using a human interaction, like live chat, to trick people into providing security information.

In this follow-up article, Matt explains how the extra data his team populates in the olark UI helps identify customers and mitigate the risk of an intrusion via chat.

February might seem a bit late to reflect on the holiday shopping season, but many SMBs say their holiday season actually ends in January.

Now that we're actually clear of the holiday rush, I checked in again with a few Olark customers who signed up for our Cyber Monday Survival Kits this year. I wanted to know - "What did you learn this holiday shopping season?"

When learning how to handle customer complaints effectively, you have to be prepared for the customer typing in all caps. 

Dealing with these customers, especially on live chat, is an art. Some times customers have a problem and need to blow off some steam, and they're going to blow that steam off in the face of the first person they can reach on live chat. 

Is it fun? No. Does it happen? Yes, some times. Can they be reasoned with? Absolutely.

An Olark user recently asked me the following: "If you had a customer who was talking to you in all caps and that customer clearly isn't mad, would you ask him to politely turn off caps?"

My response? "No. I would continue the conversation and not call attention to the fact that the customer was using all caps."

In December, I (Karl) had the opportunity to sit down for coffee with Felix Thea - host of the Shopify Masters podcast and founder of TrafficAndSales.com. Through his podcast, Felix has talked with hundreds of different store owners and has a few thoughts on the trends of 2016, particularly a renewed focus on personalization.

As someone who interacts with the Shopify community on a regular basis, I'm always looking at how the eCommerce ecosystem is driving innovation for online retailers.

Today's post comes from Johnathan Dane, founder of KlientBoost. His company got some surprising results after experimenting with the Olark Greeter...

If you're like me, you already have a healthy list of 'to dos' you're working through to grow your business  — all the the latest and greatest marketing tips and tricks from across the Internet.

And if you're like me, there just isn't enough time in the day to put all of these new marketing discoveries to use. You want something that will get results, but you're not sure where to start.