Olark is a live chat system that you can easily install on your website and provide live chat facilities for your visitors.

Olark is a powerful Live Chat system that is easy to install and easy to set up. Olark provide a very good range of training videos and, as you would expect, there is live chat available if you need to ask specific questions.

Whether or not live chat is appropriate for your website is a decision that only you can make but Olark can certainly be setup and configured to be relatively unobtrusive and I believe it would work very well, even for “professional” sites like lawyers, accountants, medical services and so on.

There is integration available for several CRMs including Salesforce, e-commerce platforms like Shopify and a useful link to Google Analytics to help you to measure the impact of providing a live chat facility for your website visitors.

Your chat box can be customised to suit your preferences and it can also be branded to reflect your business image.

When a customer engages in a chat with you it will remember their details and if they return for a second or subsequent time you will be ware and can retrieve the details of earlier chats with that customer.

There is a free version of Olark available so that you can try it out – it’s free forever provided you can stay within the limits of 1 operator and 20 chats per month. Even if you can’t then the paid options are very reasonably priced at from $12/operator/per month depending on whether you are willing to pay for 2 years in advance – you can go month by month if you prefer but the monthly rate is higher.

I’ve seen websites where, following the introduction of a live chat facility, interaction with customers has improved and conversions have increased as well. I would suggest that you give it a try but bear in mind there is an overhead beyond that of paying for Olark, if you need to, and that is the need to make someone available to answer the chats.

There’s very little to lose by giving Olark a try – and a lot to gain if it suits your business model.