Olark is a fantastic way to convert more visitors. My company has found live chat crucial as we grow the business and learn more about what our customers want to know.

But having a live chat box isn't the end of the story. Here are some tips that have really helped Red-Robot to build live chat into our business from start to finish.

MoonClerk is an online payment system that allows non-programmers to use Stripe to accept recurring payments and one-time payments. Founder Dodd Caldwell and Gabe Cuevas have come up with some great ways to talk to customers with Olark.

You are ready to chat. You have Pidgin up and running and connected to your Olark chat box, and in the meantime you are attending to the work on your desk.

But oddly, no chats come in and later on, you see emails in your offline messages inbox. Huh?

It could be that you are getting set to idle/away by Pidgin against your will.

After a number of surveys to understand what our customers really want to know about Olark, the data has been collated and indexed, and compiled in this top 10 list below.

One of the challenges for sites using live chat is convincing your visitors you’re all human, nothing outsourced.

Camp Cody gets around this with one of the most friendly Attention Grabbers we’ve seen to date.

If you're an advanced 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.

All sorts of visitors see your site each day. Some might check out your service, visit a few pages… and hopefully even sign up and become a customer. All of your favorite analytics software can show you these visitors with numbers and graphs, but what about the actual people behind those numbers?

The days of 'I just want to talk to someone' are rapidly disappearing and being replaced with 'the last thing I want to do is have to talk to someone'. This is especially relevant in the part of the process that the internet dominates, which is self-service research, education, comparison and selection.

However, chat only works when the response is timely. As a startup, with only a handful of people, we faced the concern of 'How do I ensure a timely response to users on our site?'

A wise man once said, "what goes around comes around."

I've found that the same sentiment holds true for creating happiness and amazement for your customers. Everything we do to stun and amaze our customers comes back to us tenfold.

Congrats! You’ve signed up for live chat to talk with your customers.

This quick guide assumes you’ve already added Olark or another live chat to your webpage and have set up your IM chat client to connect. We figure you’ve tested on yourself or with your team, have passed the tapping of the mic, “HALLO, Is this thing on?” phase, and are all the way to the “Hey, it’s live and ready for customers and site visitors to start talking to me and what do I do next?” phase.

Okay, so you are signed up and ready to jump into All Hands Support Month along with the rest of your company. Ready to help provide stellar customer service and meet your customers directly.

Exciting. But it can be scary too. Say you're the CEO or the VP or marketing or a development engineer who's gonna chip in and do some chat shifts now that you have free operators for a month. You may be thinking,"What if I don't know the answer to some of the questions our customers will throw at me? Won't I look dumb or something?"