I tried Olark once long, long ago and had multiple problems with it -- if there were more than 10 simultaneous visitors on my sites, which there usually were, the whole thing would get wonky and send me the wrong chat info or overlap conversations from different people... I don't remember the details, except that it didn't work. And that wasn't with trying to talk to more than 10 people at once, just having more than 10 on the site.
I switched to SnapEngage, which also has a proactive chat feature that lets you automatically initiate chats on certain URLs and such. It just worked and, I think, was cheaper too... been using it ever since.
I don't actually spend many hours online available to chat, so most of the time the little widget in the corner of the page says "Live Support Offline" and clicking it pops up a contact form instead of a chat. I get mails from that every day, where almost nobody used the contact form built into the websites. It's worth the $19/month just for that.
I'm assuming Olark has long fixed those issues I ran into, but I've no reason to want to switch back now.
Zach from Olark here, sorry to hear you were having issues some time ago! Honestly, I'm not sure what could have been causing issues for you back then, but rest assured we take message delivery extremely seriously - whenever you're using Olark if you ever have any issues please let us know so we can dive in to the logs and take a look!
Most of our users routinely have many, many more than 10 simultaneous visitors - I can assure you we work in that case. : )
I switched to SnapEngage, which also has a proactive chat feature that lets you automatically initiate chats on certain URLs and such. It just worked and, I think, was cheaper too... been using it ever since.
I don't actually spend many hours online available to chat, so most of the time the little widget in the corner of the page says "Live Support Offline" and clicking it pops up a contact form instead of a chat. I get mails from that every day, where almost nobody used the contact form built into the websites. It's worth the $19/month just for that.
I'm assuming Olark has long fixed those issues I ran into, but I've no reason to want to switch back now.