App Awareness Month – Olark

This post is part of App Awareness, our month-long series where we spotlight a different Google Apps Marketplace application every day in April. The applications we chose to highlight demonstrate excellent integration with Google Apps, and we either use and love the product or know a lot of other people who do. Have a favorite Marketplace app of your own? Tweet it to @bettercloud.

Olark – Real-time Chat for Your Site

Olark allows businesses to interact with site visitors (likely customers) in real-time! The handy application appears as a pop-up window on your company’s website and allows site visitors to chat in questions and comments. Olark is easily installed on your site with simple JavaScript, which you can copy and paste into your site’s code.

Olark users can also customize the chat box to fit in with a website’s aesthetic and depending on your offline preferences, the chat box will disappear completely, appear as a webform, or display an offline message to site visitors.

Analytics make Olark even more powerful! You can see where visitors are coming from (unless their privacy settings are set otherwise) and reporting shows you when the best times are to sign into Olark and chat with customers (determined by ROI). You can even view individual chat operator performance to determine which help methods result in the most returns!

Lastly, Olark gives you the option of adding multiple team members, or operators, to the system (depending on which pricing plan you choose). If one team member is busy, another can take over chat duty – chats are distributed by first respondent or ‘round-robin’ and you can even transfer an ongoing chat to another operator.

Google Apps Integration

We know what you’re thinking. Olark sounds great, but how does it work? Olark lets you carry out chats via Google Chat in your Gmail inbox through a simple integration.

And if your company hasn’t enabled Google Chat, you can also answer Olark chats via iChat, Adium, Meebo, Pidgin and more! Olark even works with mobile chat clients as well.

Why We Like It

Olark is easy to install and use and its integration with Google Chat is very unique. Plus we’re all for an app that delivers better customer service! We’ve used it at previous companies and really appreciated the direct feedback from customers. We’re currently testing out the product for our sites now and have found Olark very helpful and easy to use!

To install Olark, visit the Google Apps Marketplace.

Stay tuned for more of our favorite Apps in the Google Apps Marketplace!

Can you guess Monday’s app?
Hint: This app provides asset sharing security for Google Apps.

About App Awareness Month

At BetterCloud, we’ve seen first hand the impact Google Apps can have on a business: extreme cost cutting, streamlined management processes, enhanced collaboration and mobility and much more.

During our time as an independent software provider focused 100% on the Google Apps platform, we’ve interacted with thousands of organizations using Google Apps and we’ve discovered one common trend: knowledge and awareness of third-party applications that extend and enhance Google Apps is extremely limited.

This April, we’re devoting the BetterCloud blog to educating Google Apps users on the wide array of applications available for Google Apps today. These products not only enhance native Google Apps functionalities, but bring a diverse range of services from CRM, to expense management, process and systems management and more to your Google Apps environment. More importantly, adding these applications to Google Apps allows you to retire expensive legacy software licenses and creates a more cohesive organization.

Disclaimer: The companies appearing in this month-long series have not been contacted nor consulted regarding their inclusion. Our choices are based solely on reader suggestions and our experiences with the applications.