Nick Oliverio is one of only a few Olarkers who straddles the line between support and sales. He's also held sales positions with other companies before becoming the Chief Support Ninja at Olark.

Nick has a unique perspective on what it takes to be successful at both support and sales. While the two worlds are seemingly unrelated, as Nick explains in this interview, support has made him a better salesperson, and sales has changed his approach to customer support. 

Today's guest post comes from Brian Kelly, VP of Product at Nutshell, who explains why end users—not just managers—are the new decision makers for business software purchases. Spoiler alert: vendors are listening...

Today’s guest post comes from Brent Summers who is the Director of Content Marketing at Segment. 

In reflecting on this past year, one of the most notable trends we saw was a focus on enhanced customer experiences. Most consumer experiences with brands begin passively, often online when friends share opinions about products and services over social media.

Once a consumer chooses to express their interest - a click, a like, a retweet, etc. - brands now have a plethora of active ways to escalate a 'passive' relationship, and that is the beginning of the 'customer experience.'

I can't believe we're about to close the books on 2015. Where did the time go?

"I'll be honest - my first thought was, 'What has Marketing done?'"

Just before Thanksgiving, we sent an email to our customers to notify them of our reduced hours on chat support. 

Unfortunately, as it was our first time out with a new piece of software, we made a few mistakes, which resulted in...about a month's worth of email volume in under an hour. 

If you’ve done any sort of front-end engineering work over the past few years you’ve more than likely been inundated by the sheer volume of new technologies at your disposal. From Backbone.js to React, the rate at which new front-end technologies come out is rapid enough to make anyones head spin.

Staying abreast of the latest front-end technologies is hard, but determining which are suitable for your team and product is even harder. Here at Olark our front-end technology stack has evolved quite a bit over the past few years. From our early days of using vanilla JavaScript, to wrestling with large scale Backbone.js apps, to where we’ve landed today with React and Flux, our front-end stack has continuously evolved.

Today Richard Protheroe of Veeqo provides a few easy steps to optimize your Shopify store to capitalize on end of year sales.

From Thanksgiving right through to New Year's Eve, ecommerce retailers have as many as 10 big shopping days to prepare their store for. It’s no surprise then that sales for retailers in the months of November and December can equate to up to 40% of overall sales for the year.

Understandably it can be a very stressful time for store owners, but ultimately very rewarding. This is especially true for Shopify users who have a plethora of apps and add ons at their disposal to help increase sales, as well as some general ways to increase traffic and sales over this holiday period.

We may not always use live chat here at Appcues. But it sure has been helpful in onboarding new users throughout the early days of growing our SaaS business. 

Live chat has been an ideal medium to help us garner product feedback and onboard new users, which has been crucital for our growth.

The following is an excerpt from The Cyber Monday Survival Manual.

With more customers comes more typing. And the time you spend typing your holiday hours for the 20th time, could be time spent helping another customer buy something new.

Canned responses help solve that problem.

"When I feel overloaded, I get tunnel vision. It becomes harder and harder to jump between tasks quickly and, more importantly, continue to provide quality service."

In the run-up to the holiday shopping season, we're offering some insight on what things are like when live chat gets really, really busy.