Olark vs. Smith.ai

If you want to have the option to chat on your company website and keep track of those chats, the customer's satisfaction, your employees' capabilities and the repetition of certain inquiries, Olark can truly help your business. We have 4 employees at any given time dedicated to our chat function during business hours. After hours if offers the option to send our customer service team an email with your question on your behalf. Everyone wins.

Incentivized

Their chat monitoring is useful to anyone who wants to provide fast communication to prospects. I see so many companies with horrible response times for their chats. They are very professional and helped me create scripts that help them convert more leads. It is basically a virtual sales team. Their phone service saves companies time on wasted calls and fills in when they can't answer the phone. They say that over 50% of leads are never followed up because of a poor phone strategy. Smith.ai Live Website Chat fixes this

• Its ease of use and simple design is a huge plus.
• Their customer support is top notch. They have always been super responsive and helpful.
• Past chats are stored and easy to search.
• It's easy to customize to fit the look and feel of your website.

Incentivized

• Smith.ai Live Website Chat agents are immediately available to address questions and collect information from new clients.
• The agents are warm and personable.
• In addition to collecting a new lead's contact information and case details, the chat agents also collect referral sources.

Incentivized

• There is not a way to add a queue. We have guests that get a little impatient when we are very busy. This would allow for the guest to know that we are working on getting to them and not ignoring them.
• We have experienced outages this past year, and the communication in regards to what is happening is not the best.

Incentivized

• I have not seen any area for improvement. These people have a great service backed by an even better level of support.

I think it's a great feature to be more in touch with a customer base - it saves time, money, and is often extremely effective in terms of answering customer questions and addressing concerns. Although the subject of product renew is not necessarily in my hands, I strongly advocate for the program's future use

Incentivized

It is simply easy and customizable to be exactly what you need it to be

Incentivized

Smith.ai Live Website Chat allows you to provide a script for when they answer prospective clients. The script is customizable as your needs change. However, the script only goes so far, as they do not know your business personally. Once they do go through that script, they send you an email with the caller's contact information so you can reach out personally if they seem interested. They do so with efficiency.

Incentivized

I've used the Olark knowledge base and searched online for help on questions I had. The help section is easy to use. I have found most of the answers I need within minutes. Plus their help section has a chat feature in a box on the same level as the answers so when I did need more help it was right there for me. (didn't need to search for it on another part of the page) This box has a link to open a support ticket, twitter link for quick answers, and a systems notice

Incentivized

Smith.ai pays for itself if we can help one site visitor move down our lead funnel to being a client. We have averaged over 50+ new leads each month since implementing the chat and with a close rate for becoming new clients that is double what our advertising PPC new client closing rate has been.

We did use Zendesk chat for a short time but switched to Olark when a colleague suggested Olark was simpler. We were looking for a chat solution that was easy to understand and use visually, plus easy to switch between multiple people when taking turns monitoring chat. And we liked how it fit on the screen of the website - easy to see but not intrusive

Incentivized

I have priced services with Ngage and Apex Chat. Smith.ai is more cost-efficient than these competitors. Most services charge a very high per qualified lead basis. Sometimes $35 or higher per lead. Considering that not all qualified leads convert, client acquisition costs can still be very high. Smith.ai only charges approximately $8 live chat sessions with low monthly flat rates. A completely automated chatbot is even less per month, and in some instances free.

Incentivized

• Positive impact on employee payroll. We would have to hire at least 1 or 2 more employees if we no longer offered Live Chat support.
• I don't believe that Olark had any negative impacts on the business. We simply outgrew the platform.

Incentivized

• Positive - Smith.ai has easily saved me $25k+ in receptionist costs. They probably helped me land another $50k in new business I would otherwise not have brought in the door because they immediately grabbed the client on our website so they didn't get away or have to wait 2 days for a call back. Great ROI (100 to 1 ROI is probably not an exaggeration for my law firm).