Some people are born to greatness, some people achieve it through Herculean effort, and some strive their whole life and never obtain it.

In hiring great customer service teams, I've met of a few of the first case: the ones who you know fifteen seconds into the interview that they're getting a job offer and their own desk. And I've known a few that I would build a stone wall to keep them away from any interaction with the public.

But the million dollar question is; can greatness be taught? Is there a formula to get your team to that peak of greatness where you just know they are doing far more for your company's image and future beyond merely answering questions?

CustomMade + Olark: never pushy

Have you ever wished you could just make someone go exactly where you say? With Olark chat software, you can!

In the early days of Olark, the only choice you had for notifications in the in-browser chat was the default "pop" sound for incoming and outgoing chat messages.

A lovely sound to be sure, especially when you hear it all day long during hundreds of chats. But feedback we've received from the field was that for some, the "pop" is just not arresting enough, especially in a busy office with phones ringing and many things vying for your attention.

So, by popular demand, please put your hands together and give a warm welcome to our latest feature enhancement: New sounds for the Olark in-browser chat (chat.olark.com).

Hey there, guys! Aaron Wilson here, the ever-present but ever-invisible Olark Ruby Ninja Warrior. I'm coming out of the shadows to tell you a little bit about our fun journey with database backups.

If you're an advanced Olark API user, you might want to skip straight to our full API section. If you're a new Olark API user, then you've come to the right place.

Sure, there is visitor info like location and IP address, but do you ever wish you could know even more about your customer before you engage them in conversation?

Live chat can increase user engagement on your site, but sometimes just adding a 'click to chat' tab isn’t enough. It might require some work to get customers familiar with the chat function and to help them understand that a real human is standing by, ready to answer questions.

The following are a few ways to proactively start a conversation with visitors browsing your site and help them find what they’re looking for.

Every day, Olark sees more than 3 million visits across thousands of different websites and browsers. We constantly have to ask ourselves: are we causing any issues or slowdowns on our customers' websites?

Knowing the answers to these questions is critical to our success.

A casual misstep means we could be silently breaking thousands of websites, halting transactions, angering the world, causing the next recession...you know, the usual.

TL; DR: Browser encoding can change from one request to the next. When you set content-type, be sure to also specify a charset. Being in the US, that great, wide birthplace of the Internet, it's very easy to take encoding for granted. Anyone who's not a web developer can happily inhabit ASCII for their entire lives, and at most raise a few eyebrows when they see funny mis-encoding like "fiancée" in a few Latin Extended words here and there.

Scheduling on-call schedules has always been a bit of a pain, especially given the way we rotate shifts. PagerDuty’s interface really only satisfies one type of on-call schedule: scheduling people manually for multi-day or week-long blocks of 24/7 coverage.

Lots of our customers use their Olark box to help visitors and make sales. Which is quite awesome! But some have come up with creative, innovative and thoughtful ways to Olark and bring new uses to the features we offer.