The ability to chat live with visitors is an incredibly useful marketing tool for site owners. Whether a site owner operates an e-commerce or consumer or business service site, live chat is increasingly becoming the norm for engaging with visitors in real time. Olark, a Y Combinator-funded startup (re)launching today at Demo Day (it was previously branded hab.la), has made the ability to embed chat into a site incredibly simple.
For free, site owners can embed the widget into their site with just a few lines of javascript. One useful feature that Olark offers is the ability to add one-to-one chat to any website without editing any code. Olark’s short link service lets website owners create a link to any site they would like to chat with a visitor about. When a customer/user clicks on the link, the Olark widget will float over to the visited webpage. The site owner can use an existing IM client, such as GChat or AIM, and each customer will show up in the buddy list. So site owners can interact with visitors from their preferred chat program. Visitors show up on a website owner’s buddy list as soon as they hit the site (with an anonymous ID like Web User 1), with the name of the page they’re on. Basically, you can watch everyone’s progress through the site even when they don’t talk to you.
While Olark has a free offering, you can add different functionality to the chat widget starting at $5 per month. One paid feature is the ability to hide the widget on the site when the site owner isn’t available to chat. You can also implement chat in certain pages while restricting chat on others. While most customers will use the free version of the widget, paid clients have been doubling every month and the startup is in line to hit profitability next month. Olark is already being used already on 4000 sites, including SurveyGizmo.com and HonestIdeas.co.uk.
Of course, there are many competitors to this product out there on the market, including chat offerings by Meebo, Digsby and AOL all with the same functionality. But Olark’s co-founder, Ben Congleton says the beauty of Olark’s widget and short link service is in its extreme simplicity, allowing even a non-tech savvy site owner to be able to implement live chat on a site easily. Plus, Olark lets owners customize the widgets to resemble the look and feel of the site in which its embedded. Olark, which was originally a side project of its founders before the startup entered Y Combinator’s program, was rebranded from hab.la during the program. Congleton says that the decision was based on a few considerations, including confusion around the spelling and pronunciation of “Habla” as well as the advantage of having a .com domain versus the .la domain from Hab.la.
Something to look into.
Nice one, looks great. If the company is serious about customer service they need a service like this.
Nice to hear that this olark can be used in i-phones..It will be really useful to all business service sites..It is profitable too..
It’s something very useful for my site. However, Custom Branding is only available to their most expensive plan ($149).
I want custom branding but I would not need 10+ operators & 150+ simultaneous users.
I hope they would revise their plan offering.
Send us an email, we will work something out for you.
You’re stripping off their chrome and doing whatever you want with the product. I’m guessing that increases average support costs and reduces name recognition and market penetration. The users would be less consequential. Seems like a fair deal to me.
Yes, I have to agree, the pricing seems to be very poorly structured, although Andrew was very helpful in answering my questions and suggested that it would be possible to work something out if, for instance, I wanted 3 operators but didn’t need SSL.
On the whole, I think they might have miscalculated how the average customers is going to react to their pricing matrix. Unlike most other companies, you seem to get less per dollar the more you spend on Olark i.e. the $15 plan only doubles the capacities you get from the $5 plan.
Also, thanks to Danny Roa for pointing out the astonishing fact that you only get custom branding on the $149 plan, the one for 10+ operators.
Whoever is responsible for their pricing strategy doesn’t realize that the vast majority of online businesses and, in particular, the businesses who might be open to a brand new product, are going to be small, generally just one man bands.
What they are doing is alienating their biggest customer group, when they should, instead, be selling them the self-branding or the SSL without making them feel that they are being forced to buy unnecessary operator and visitor capacity i.e. self-branding, SSL and other features should be clearly available as add-ons to any account level, and without having to contact Olark and negotiate a special arrangement.
I thought the Y Combinator scheme was meant to give their start-ups advice on the really essential stuff such as pricing, it would be interesting to know how this car crash happened.
“Car crash” is a mischaracterization, perhaps more of a teething issue.
Cool thing is they have a revenue model, tuning the pricing is a process.
cool
Cool live chat 2.0 site, cannot believe it is profitable though. Live person is not performing well, and there are many free professional live chat software on the market already like http://www.zazachat.com (linux) http://www.etalkup.com (msn, aol im)
Looks just like Google Talk in Gmail. Very cool for companies that want to provide a “LivePerson” type experience.
the problem whit those chat windows is that i always forget to go to that website to login to chat. So if there was something that can be in my skype or windows live it would be great that is always open any way.
Olark uses the standard Jabber protocol which means you can use any client that supports the Jabber protocol. Here’s a large list of clients that support the protocol, and hense work with Olark:
http://xmpp.org...e/clients.shtml
That’s exactly what Olark does – you can use your existing IM service (AIM, GTalk, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, etc.) to chat with your website visitors.
hmm i only could find
Setting up your Olark account in iChat (Mac)
Setting up your Olark account in Adium (Mac)
Setting up your Olark account in Pidgin or gAIM (Windows, Mac, Linux)
Setting up your Olark account with Meebo (Windows, Mac, Linux)
And those are all messengers that i tried and hated .
ahhh they are still working on that feature
Does it work with gmail for enterprises? I.e. gmail.powered.email.system@companyname.com ?
Yes. If you have issues, shoot us an email, or DM to @olark if you prefer
I think they removed the AIM, MSN, Yahoo support. I don’t know if they are going to add it back.
just tried it. Cool
I just installed this on two websites inside of 5 minutes per site. I find it amazing that one can be receiving live chats on their iPhone that quickly. Very impressive system.
Just installed this on our Oracle WebCenter Interaction intranet in about 3 minutes.
Unfortunately not having access to IM within the firewall greatly limits this tool. I can still correspond to users via my cellphone though which is kinda neat.
Your firewall sounds pretty restrictive. Does it block GMail too?
The name change was definitely a smart choice. Olark is much more fluid, easier to say, and sounds like a product with serious brand potential. hab.la was too awkward and unclear about the pronunciation.
Hey Thanks, We think so too.
This looks really good, although I prefer Click to Call action instead of chatting, usually phone is a lot more effective and faster, hence more efficient at customer service or sales.
Disclaimer: Medularis, my company, provides Click to Call services. We do custom branding for all of our clients.
Very slick. This is something I can imagine offering our clients, who are all ‘non techies’ and are looking for the latest tools to market their business websites.
We’ve really liked using Olark (or Hab.la for the old schoolers). Flowing into our chat programs makes it easy (automatically logged in on boot), and they’ve been very receptive to fixes and tweaks. It’s a good team and a great service, and plays right into SurveyGizmo’s goals of great customer service, sales and support.
How is this different from the Meebo widget?
I just tried it on olark itself. It was kinda cool man. Some one named habla or hoobla came online. Answered my first question and even before I ask my second question, it said “No one for you to chat now” (No it didn’t say get lost). which was kind of arrogant. But their service seems to be really cool. But this can be a plus and minus if I use it on my website. Always looking at “No one there to chat” will not create a good feeling for my users.
No one for you to chat now–> maybe ‘ we will be available for chat later. Would you like to leave a message?’
For this, user should be able to leave a message.
Is it just me or are they expecting us to pay for something that Meebome (A really awesome pdt in my opinion) already offers for $5 a month?
meebome is a great product for consumers, but it’s definitely missing some features that businesses told us they want (transcripts, offline message-to-email). That $5/mo goes towards offering technical support too.
Most of our upcoming features should help to draw that business/consumer distinction a bit better.
I think Olark is very cool, it seems they have spent a lot of time analyzing the needs of a small-site …and the technical solution is elegant.
all though there is a bunch of competition, at the end of the day …customers want simplicity and the thing just works !
I think it looks really cool, have seen it in action and it is nice to know you can just chat to someone. Have decided to sign up for a trail to see how it goes.
It is a great idea! DubLi has a system called CINCH which is pretty similar – vendors can use it to directly contact their customers and it’s got a whole raft of features.
I’m going to download this and see if this is as good as CINCH, if it’s even got half the features, then consider me signed up!
Something sneaky going on here with Olark’s code that they ask you to paste into your site — it *requires* that your site provide Olark with a backlink on every page that you enable the widget.
The widget works by firing wc_init() when your page loads. That Olark script then looks for the code that you’re supposed to copy/paste into your HTML. At the end of that code is a plain HTML link that looks like this:
(a href=”http://olark.com/#1238-240-10-xxxx” id=”hbl_code”)Olark Livehelp(/a)
If you attempt to modify or remove this link, the widget will no longer open because it cannot locate your Site’s ID. Olark cleverly buried this Site ID inside of the link that they require you give to them. So I would hardly call this a “Free” widget when a backlink is required but not necessarily disclosed. Any attempt to change the link href or link text will also disable the widget.
My solution: add a rel=nofollow and display:none to the link…
(a style=”display:none;” rel=”nofollow” href=”http://olark.com/#1238-240-10-xxxx” id=”hbl_code”)Olark Livehelp(/a)
One additional improvement you can make on your own site is to remove the wc_init() call from the pasted in code and move it to a “Chat with us” link… that way the widget does not appear on the screen until the user requests a chat.
We use Olark for our website, and in my experience it delivers exactly what they say. Olark is a simple, yet effective, tool for businesses that are looking to convert more “visits” into sales. Plus their service thus far has been helpful AND friendly.
we have also developing smart gambling widgets.
you can take a look and share your wisdom.
can i use this chat widget on a non wordpress site.
like: http://www.1link.co.il
I use this for my website. We do DJ entertainment. I’ve been using Boldchat but i love the ability for my potential customers to see the chat window at all times.
I now get more chats!
oh I forgot to mention…It’s awesome getting the chats on your blackberry for Google Talk! Open 24hrs
another simple jabber chat service is available at http://www.plupper.com
Thanks Sten. Plupper was just what I was looking for. They offer a lot more than Olark in terms of functionality and their pricing is very fair, in fact its free, unlike Olark whos pricing is just ridiculous. Whoever came up with Olarks pricing needs to take a look at their competition. They limit most of the common features even when you start paying. Once you are paying over $30 you could get a more advanced system for the same price. I mean who would pay $150 to have the “olark” branding removed. Olark should be paying you to put such a prominent link on everyones site. Come on its just a f***ing widget!
Yes, I’m using Plupper too, and I really like it … it has lot more features than others. And it’s for free
))
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