Basically the widget sits in the corner of your site (like most do) and allows anyone who visits your site to chat with you via a standard IM client (iChat, Adium, Gtalk, etc…). It will hopefully help keep current customers happy, and maybe convert a few people who would otherwise have clicked away.

At this point you may be asking “Well what makes them better?” and I could easily say that what makes them better is;

• Olark took less than 5 minutes to install
• Olark allows me to customize my chat widget to match the colors of my site
• Olark saves transcripts of my sessions for further review
• Olark encrypts my chat sessions
• Olark is very affordable

But I won’t. Because that is not what makes them better. You see, what makes them better in my opinion is their awesome customer support.

It began with a follow-up question. Now to be clear, I had visited Olark.com, clicked in their very own Olark widget, running on their very own site, got no response, so I left. I figured that would be the end of it, but then a guy named Matt shoots me the following email.

Hi – I saw you just signed up for olark.com, let me know if there is anything I can do to help

-Matt

Awesome! A dialogue has begun.

So our correspondence went on for several days. And it could have been awkward, it could have gone bad, but no, Olark’s group have a very deft touch at helping out their customers. At one point I guess I was even speaking with one of the co-founders, and the exchange ended up going so well that he wrote.

Awesome, we definitely buy into the “smaller is better” mantra.  Most of our customers are small businesses like us in fact   If you ever stop by the SF bay area drop us a line.

cheers,
Roland

How sweet is that? I seem to have made some friends!

So to sum this up, you could use Olark for all the reasons I listed above. But the reason that you should use Olark is because they are actually human beings and treat you like a person and not a paycheck.

-kudos boys

jared