I wanted to highlight some small tweaks and additions we brought to you in October. Hopefully they make your life a little better as you use Olark!
The following is an excerpt from The Cyber Monday Survival Manual.
When Cyber Monday has come and gone, you're going to want to know how well your team did.
One way to tell is to manually count the number of times someone rings the "official" Cyber Monday Sales Cowbell. (If you got our Survival Kits you know what I mean).
Another more accurate and efficient way would be to have Google Analytics keep track of the numbers for you.
We've talked about hiring the right people for your team, but what does it take to ensure your new hires are successful within your organization?
Last year, sales on Cyber Monday topped two billion dollars. That was an 8.5 percent increase from 2013 as Cyber Monday was, again, the busiest day of the year for online shopping. We saw it on our network too. Chats for Olark customers went up 40 percent on the Monday after Thanksgiving, and those numbers stayed high for the week following Cyber Monday.
November and December - the holiday shopping season - will account for 20 to 40 percent of annual sales for small and mid-size businesses.
How are you getting ready?
Today's case study comes from Michael Borohovski, co-founder and CTO at Tinfoil Security.
I fell in love with Olark shortly after my co-founder, Ainsley Braun, and I started Tinfoil Security in 2011, mostly because I'm extroverted and gregarious by nature. I'm the type of guy who is absolutely willing to hop on a site, see an Olark chat, and start a conversation. Remarkably, this is exactly how we met one of our future advisors, now also a good friend.We’ve been using Olark for four years now, and while not every chat has led to serendipitous meetings, enough conversations have led to unexpected outcomes that I find it an invaluable resource for meeting people and learning more about our customers.
Recently I wrote about The Olark Retreat - why we get the whole company together at least once a year and how we structure that time together.
It turns out our customers also host some unique retreats!
We recently completed our fourth-annual, week-long, all-hands, extra-hyphenated Olark retreat. Since then, I've been fielding lots of questions about our retreat from curious friends: Why do you do it? What do you there? Should my company do a retreat?!
The answer to that last question is unquestionably yes, although it might look very different from ours. To understand why, let's start at the beginning.
Today's post comes to us from Hannah at TRULY who wrote in to tell us how a particularly busy holiday shopping season caused their team to rethink their live chat experience and improve their customer experience.
Recently some of our support team made a road trip from San Francisco to Portland, OR for UserConf 2015. Channeling my inner Jack Kerouac, I kept a short journal on the trip. Ride along with us...
As a developer at Olark, I really appreciate the creativity and ingenuity of the customers that integrate with our API. I find it rewarding to see people not only using the products we create, but also the APIs we provide to interact with our system. These interfaces provide a peek into the big machine that Olark is, to allow deeper integration of a customer’s specific needs to better communicate with their own users. Once in a while a special integration comes up that is so elegant that I can’t wait to share it with my co-workers and other Olark customers trying to solve a similar problem.