San Francisco, December 9, 2014 - Olark today introduced Chat Ratings, a feature that allows companies to garner more detailed customer feedback and better understand if they are making customers happy through live chat. Chat Ratings let customers quickly and easily rate the helpfulness of their live chat experience, and let operators and managers immediately review that input to measure the quality of service being provided.

Grasshopper was founded by Siamak Taghaddos and David Hauser in 2003 with a vision of helping entrepreneurs and small businesses run their organizations completely via mobile phones.

Making sure that they are aligned with the needs of their customers has helped them create a number of initiatives intended to increase happiness and build relationships with customers. Taylor Aldredge, Grasshopper's Ambassador of Buzz, details some of these programs and shares what they learned.

Huge thank you to Miha for allowing us to share this article, which originally appeared on his website breakthebit.org. 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.

At Olark, we have people spread out over three continents, in four countries and six time zones. We're most interested in finding the right people as we build our business and location is not as important as what each and every member brings to the team.

Thus, we find ourselves spread out pretty far and wide, from our offices in San Francisco and Ann Arbor to as far away as Sao Paulo, Toronto and the Isle of Tiree, 40 storm-drenched miles off the West coast of Scotland.

Connecting your live chat software to a simple CRM or helpdesk is essential to sales and service. It makes the information you receive from chats more actionable, and thus more valuable.

I've written before about the amazing things we've had happy customers do for us; from baking cookies to delivering homebrew beer to sending us chocolates and cheese and wine -- jeeze, thinking about it, we've got some pretty amazing customers....

Olark Co-founder and Master of Customer Experience Roland Osborne delievered this talk about improving your product by getting your whole team involved with support. Apparently designers wearearphones quite frequently.

Wade Foster is CEO of Zapier, the integration service that allows you to connect many web-based products and services easily.

At Zapier everyone does support as part of support driven development. As the CEO, I still spend at least 10% of my time each week doing support.

Freshbooks has developed a rather legendary reputation for their obsessive attention to customer experience.

They are the winner of multiple Stevie Awards for Best Front-Line Customer Service Team and have generated countless customer tweets remarking on their astonishing support. Mark MacLeod, Chief Corporate Development Officer shared:

In the early days of Olark, we took a very traditional approach to customer support. We did what most companies do and hired someone smart to handle it. Andrew did such an amazing job of handling issues that we hardly heard from our customers.

In the Fall of 2009, Andrew decided to go back to college and finish his degree. So we had to change things up a bit.