Want to chat with your customers directly from Slack? The Olark Live Chat Slack App makes that possible! You can also share conversations with teammates in Slack, ask for help when things get busy, and celebrate together when one of your team members gets a 5-star customer rating. 

And how to reach Olark during the last week of the year

Happy holidays everyone! Wherever you are, the entire Olark family wishes you all the best as we close out 2017 and get ready to flip calendars over to 2018.

Chat Shortcuts that are visual - because, let's be honest: everyone loves gifs

We previously gave you some live chat canned responses examples. These Shortcuts from Olark users provide a nice framework for transactional chat shortcuts. They help your live chat agents respond faster, which keeps average response time down and customer happiness up.

Do an unusual number of visitors bounce from your pricing or registration page? Have you noticed that people have a lot of questions about a particular section of your help center? Is there a page on your site that’s getting too busy with multiple calls to action—watch a video, sign up for a newsletter, and chat?

Did you know...you could address all of those issues with automated chat rules?

For most small businesses, getting data isn't the problem.

Pageviews, sessions, opens, likes, shares, conversions, chat volume - data, and the tools to gather it, are all around us. The challenge is making data and analytics actionable.

We’re thrilled to announce that it’s now possible to create detailed JIRA tickets straight from the Olark chat console! Just enable the integration and use the !jira command to send customer bug reports and feature requests straight to the waiting arms of your engineering team.

Last week, while in line at the grocery store, I checked my email on my iPhone and up popped a clearance sale announcement from my favorite running company. I’m a size medium, so I had no time to lose—millions of averaged-waisted shoppers were vying for my shorts! I made my thumbs do the cha-cha and had three pairs charged to my PayPal account in seconds flat.

When you’re talking to a customer on live chat, quick responses are critical—a few seconds' delay might be all it takes for someone to go from feeling personally cared for, to wondering if you’re there at all.

Starting today (Friday, August 11, 2017) the Olark Customer Support team is headed to Traverse City, MI for Olark's annual company retreat.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about customer support. My background is in public relations, as I've talked about before.

Yet, as is wont to happen in any startup, my role has expanded since I joined Olark. As I've morphed from 'specialist' to 'marketing generalist,' I feel like I've read a million "how to market your startup" articles. What kind of articles you ask? Try starting with the 'Growth Marketing' section of the Appcues blog. They do a nice job capturing actionable insight.

While they often have amazing hints on growth hacking and optimizing different funnels, many articles fail to mention a strategy that may come as a surprise: customer support.

Yes, it actually involves humans, but don't be afraid: it will help you improve your product to ensure existing customers stick around longer, and maybe even buy more; and it makes it easier to attract and sell to new customers. 

How so? Let's take a look.