Today's case study comes from Michael Borohovski, co-founder and CTO at Tinfoil Security.

I fell in love with Olark shortly after my co-founder, Ainsley Braun, and I started Tinfoil Security in 2011, mostly because I'm extroverted and gregarious by nature. I'm the type of guy who is absolutely willing to hop on a site, see an Olark chat, and start a conversation. Remarkably, this is exactly how we met one of our future advisors, now also a good friend.We’ve been using Olark for four years now, and while not every chat has led to serendipitous meetings, enough conversations have led to unexpected outcomes that I find it an invaluable resource for meeting people and learning more about our customers.

Recently I wrote about The Olark Retreat - why we get the whole company together at least once a year and how we structure that time together.

It turns out our customers also host some unique retreats!

We recently completed our fourth-annual, week-long, all-hands, extra-hyphenated Olark retreat. Since then, I've been fielding lots of questions about our retreat from curious friends: Why do you do it? What do you there? Should my company do a retreat?!

The answer to that last question is unquestionably yes, although it might look very different from ours. To understand why, let's start at the beginning.

Online retailers listen up - you have 104 days until Cyber Monday.

Now, that might seem like a lot of time, but you know - and I know that you know - holiday shopping season will be here in the blink of an eye. If you're not preparing now, you'll be scrambling come November.

Today's guest post from Giles Adam Thomas, CEO at Whole Design Studios, provides a step-by-step tutorial on how his team achieved a 176.33% conversion rate increase by studying chat transcripts and making simple website copy changes.

Photo by Lauren Peng on Unsplash

Many people believe conversion optimization is the same thing as A/B testing. This is incorrect.

Increasing leads, sales, and more importantly profits from your website and your business requires a focus on increasing your conversion rate.

A little while ago we announced reaching 10,000 paying customers. It was, without a doubt, a huge milestone and we wanted to celebrate. Not only did we want to celebrate, but we wanted to celebrate with our customers who helped to make it all happen.

Today's post comes to us from Hannah at TRULY who wrote in to tell us how a particularly busy holiday shopping season caused their team to rethink their live chat experience and improve their customer experience.

Recently some of our support team made a road trip from San Francisco to Portland, OR for UserConf 2015. Channeling my inner Jack Kerouac, I kept a short journal on the trip. Ride along with us...

As a developer at Olark, I really appreciate the creativity and ingenuity of the customers that integrate with our API. I find it rewarding to see people not only using the products we create, but also the APIs we provide to interact with our system. These interfaces provide a peek into the big machine that Olark is, to allow deeper integration of a customer’s specific needs to better communicate with their own users. Once in a while a special integration comes up that is so elegant that I can’t wait to share it with my co-workers and other Olark customers trying to solve a similar problem.

Olark customer Jane Clayton & Company was recently featured in the winter issue of Retail Technology UK. You can read the full article on pages 52 and 53 of the magazine by going here, but since that article will only be available through May 2015, we've captured some of Jane Clayton's story here on the Olark blog.