Posts tagged blog

Olark is a very neat new service from as US company called Habla, Inc. that lets you integrate a live chat box on your website directly with one of a number of common Instant Messaging clients.

Very easy to setup and relatively cheap (free for the most basic service), it provides an excellent way of getting direct interaction with site visitors, which can be incredibly important for anyone attempting to engage customers immediately in a sales process.

To date, services that I know of like this require you to actually be logged in to the website or some other server somewhere for them to actually work. This is all well and good, but who wants to keep a live web page open just in case they get any direct enquiries whilst they’re doing other things? Certainly not me!

I’d rather just have my usual IM client popup with a new message/chat request alert as soon as someone wants to get in touch from the website, just as it would if a friend or a known client wanted to talk to me, and that’s exactly what this offers.

So far, though they support a number of IM solutions, they do not currently support MSN (well, Windows Live Messenger), which is my chat client of choice (probably along with 99% of everyone else) BUT after chatting to a member of their support team I am told it’s something being worked on and could even be in place by the end of the month (Oct – 2009)!

For now though I’m quite happy to switch to something like pidgin for a few weeks.

As you’ll see to the bottom right of the screen, I have integrated their service on this blog already, meaning that I can now chat directly to potential clients who visit my website and have questions or comments about the services I have to offer. Fantastic!

If it says I’m online, why not try it out for yourself and send me a message