A few weeks ago we attended a "Customer Success" conference put on by one of our excellent customers, Gainsight.  There were lot of interesting talks, but my major takeaway was that successful companies invest in building longterm relationships with their existing customers.

At Olark, we have people spread out over three continents, in four countries and six time zones. We're most interested in finding the right people as we build our business and location is not as important as what each and every member brings to the team.

Thus, we find ourselves spread out pretty far and wide, from our offices in San Francisco and Ann Arbor to as far away as Sao Paulo, Toronto and the Isle of Tiree, 40 storm-drenched miles off the West coast of Scotland.

Humans figured out trade very early on. By 3000 BC, humans were setting out on missions of waterbound trade, and by 1000 BC, merchants were becoming a part of societies. There were ideas about how to treat customers. The butcher, the baker and the local perfumier had to meet the needs of the customer with custom products as well as nascent marketing techniques.

The beginning of the industrial age brought the vast new challenge of a customer base the proprietor would likely never meet in person.

There’s a good chance that right now someone is browsing your site and considering making a purchase.

And although I’m happy you’re here reading our blog :-), I’d like to offer some ideas that you can apply to your own site and start converting those browsers into buyers.

Connecting your live chat software to a simple CRM or helpdesk is essential to sales and service. It makes the information you receive from chats more actionable, and thus more valuable.

A wise philosopher once wondered, "If a conversation happens and no CRM is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

I've written before about the amazing things we've had happy customers do for us; from baking cookies to delivering homebrew beer to sending us chocolates and cheese and wine -- jeeze, thinking about it, we've got some pretty amazing customers....

Olark Co-founder and Master of Customer Experience Roland Osborne delievered this talk about improving your product by getting your whole team involved with support. Apparently designers wearearphones quite frequently.

Lincoln Murphy is Customer Success Evangelist at Gainsight and is driving thought-leadership in the areas of Customer Success Management, customer retention, churn mitigation, and expansion revenue. Since 2008, as Managing Director of Sixteen Ventures, Lincoln has helped 300+ SaaS companies rapidly improve customer acquisition and retention to create efficient engines of growth.

I wanted to find out how Lincoln looks at "Happiness Hacking": testing customer-service solutions and improving the product in direct response to customer feedback.

Psst. I have a secret: Customer service is mostly sales! I will teach you to sell better by doing customer support.