More choices. More power to you. 

We've talked before about why it's important to connect Olark Live Chat and a CRM or help desk solution. It makes the qualitative data contained in transcripts actionable and more valuable, improving retention and increasing the likelihood of future sales.

As an independent live chat platform, our value is multiplied by the number of platforms we enable our users to connect with. By offering you more platform options to connect with, we increase the power you have to provide a high quality customer experience.

One of our goals here at Olark is to help all of your systems work together to provide the best possible customer experience. With that, we’re excited to announce the revamped Olark Live Chat and Groove help desk integration.

Here at Olark, we’re committed to building integrations with complementary analytics, CRM, and help desk platforms that will boost our users' business.

Google Analytics (GA) is one of our most popular integrations, and is arguably the most popular web analytics service in the world. Data from BuiltWith shows that nearly 76% of the 100,000 top websites in the world use GA. And here at Olark, we found that more than 40% of our paying customers use the Olark and Google Analytics integration.

However, for a long time GA was a major customer support bottleneck for us. We knew enough to handle most basic GA questions, but none of us were GA experts or used GA on a regular basis, and so as a team we would struggle with deeper or more specific customer questions.

The following is an excerpt from our whitepaper on Olark Live Chat and Google Analytics, written by David Kucher of Confluent Forms. To download the entire whitepaper, which includes step-by-step instructions for creating segments, visit the whitepaper download page.

Olark Live Chat offers its employees 12 weeks of paid parental leave, which includes paternity, maternity or adoption. Policies like this, and our vacation bonus, helped us earn a 2016 When Work Works Award, and require a lot of behind-the-scenes work before they see the light of day.

Today's guest post is by Jacob Baadsgaard, founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising.

Content marketing is a key component for any business that wants to generate more leads. It's the "Swiss Army Knife" of online marketing:

• Need better SEO rankings? Great content helps with that.
• Need better PPC performance? People love to click on and share great content.
• Want to nurture or grow your audience? Content marketing is great for that, too.

But…what if there was a way to help your content perform better? To get more conversions from all of that content you spend so many hours producing?

Photo by Roman Mager on Unsplash

Hi there! I'm Ben Schultz, Data Guru at Olark. In this article, I'm sharing some data and results that other Olark users have experienced by adding our live chat software to their website. Check it out!

We're surrounded by data here at Olark. On regular basis I'm combing our customer records in Looker, checking out event data in Segment, and keeping an eye on our search traffic via Google Analytics.

Our friend, Matthew Harris is the founder of sendwithus. He recently wrote an article for Venturebeat about social engineering - using a human interaction, like live chat, to trick people into providing security information.

In this follow-up article, Matt explains how the extra data his team populates in the olark UI helps identify customers and mitigate the risk of an intrusion via chat.

I can't believe we're about to close the books on 2015. Where did the time go?