New Olark Agent Training Guide

Share this guide with your team to start chatting with your website's visitors in minutes.

The guide is broken into four parts.

• Using the New Olark Agent Console
• Your personal Olark settings
• Your organization’s Olark settings
• Pre-chat checklist

We recommend reading through this guide fully at least once. You can also bookmark it for quick reference when you’re chatting with visitors in the future.

Using the New Olark Console

Open the Chat Console in a new browser tab, so you can follow along as we explain the chat console section by section.

Changing Your Status

When you log in to the Chat Console, you will be set to "Do Not Disturb".

Click on the button in the top left that says “Do Not Disturb” to set yourself to available/online. The button text will change to Available. The background color of the button will be green when you are available, and red when you are set to do not disturb.

Pro Tip: If you get a bunch of difficult chats at once, set yourself to Do Not Disturb, so that you can focus on finishing the chats you have open.

Personal Settings‍

In the upper right hand corner, you will see your account avatar. If you click on your avatar, you will be presented with two options: User settings and Log out

User settings

‍Alert sound: which you’ll hear every time a visitor sends you a message, or when you receive a notification. Check out our guide on how to enable desktop notifications.

The option to set your alert sound to loop until the window is focused is located here.

Theme is where you can select if you would like your Olark chat console to have a light or dark theme.

Translation is where you can select to have your messages automatically translated. please note that you must have the Olark translation powerup enabled on your account in order for this to function

Why was I forced away from chat? If you receive a new conversation and we don't see any chat activity from you within five minutes, we send a notification asking if you're still there. If you don't respond to the visitor or that notification, your status will automatically be set to Do Not Disturb so that other visitors will not start conversations that go unanswered. You can set your status to available again at any time. Check out our being forced away article for more information.  

Force away is a universal Olark setting and cannot be adjusted

Using the left panel of the chat console

• My Inbox: Visitors who you have current chats open with.
• Team Inbox: Current chats with all logged in team members will show here.
• Recent Contacts: Conversations that have taken place recently will show here for easy reference
• Website Contacts: Visitors to your website that are not currently chatting will show here. This may not include ALL visitors to your website as it is limited based on the number of agents you have on your account.

When you have a view selected in the left panel, the contents of that view will be displayed in the panel on the right.

• Team: The other agents from your account that are logged into Olark will be shown here, along with their current status.
• Dashboard: Clicking here will open a new tab in your browser with your Olark dashboard
• What's New Clicking here will open a new tab in your browser with the Olark changelog to view any recent updates or changes.

Proactive chatting: Check out the other ways you can proactively chat with visitors.

Conversation Panel

This is what it looks like when you receive (or initiate) your first chat. With "My Inbox" selected, the chat will show in the panel to the right. When you click the chat you want to view (and respond to), the conversation appears in the far right panel.

Displayed at the top of every new conversation are details about the visitor, what URL they are currently looking at, and details about any automated messages they received.

Type your reply in the text area at the bottom and hit the Enter button in the console to send the message. Hitting Enter on your keyboard will input a line break.

You can manually end a chat with a visitor by either clicking the archive icon next to the chat under the my inbox view, or by using the agent !end command. Both the agent and the visitor will receive a notification saying that the chat has ended.

Commands and Shortcuts will allow you to become a productivity superhero.

Agent Commands

Commands are short phrases preceded by an exclamation point to execute agent actions, such as !transfer, !transcript and !end. Be sure to check out the full list of available commands.

• Want to transfer a chat to another chat agent or group? Type in !transfer and hit return.
• Want to pull up the transcript URL for the current chat? Type in “!transcript” and hit the enter button.
• Want to let the visitor know the chat is over? Type in “!end” and hit the enter button.

You can also click the Actions button in your reply input box to bring up a list of common commands.

Agent Shortcuts

Want a faster way to type out your most common phrases? Shortcuts allow you to create commands that expand to user-created greetings, messages, or links. Shortcuts are preceded by the semicolon (;) key. Your account administrator can create team-wide Shortcuts, while agents can create their own personalized Shortcuts. Check out how to set up Shortcuts for more information.

Visitor Information

Olark’s technical magic allows you to see visitor details such as:

• Current Page being viewed
• Prechat survey answers

This information, when available will be displayed as a notification at the top of the chat when it is started by your visitor.

You can also see a visitor’s Name,and Email, if you have set up one of the following conditions;

• Your organization has the pre-chat survey enabled.
• The visitor had previously left that information when sending an offline message.
• If your company’s developers used our API to display visitor insights in the chat console.

Your Olark Dashboard

Open the Olark dashboard in a new browser tab, so you can follow along as we explain section by section.

Transcripts

Olark saves all of the chats each agent has had in the Transcripts section for later review.

The icons we show to the left of the transcripts indicate what type of interaction took place for each entry. A single speech bubble icon next to a transcript indicates only one party sent a message (either the agent or the visitor). The two speech bubble icon indicates a conversation took place. Finally, an envelope icon indicates an offline message sent by the visitor.

Each chat transcript has a unique URL, which you can see after clicking through to an individual transcript. You can use the URL to share links to transcripts with your other agents.

Reports

If your organization has Chat Ratings enabled, then your visitors will be able to rate their experience with you at the end of the chat. The Reports section is where you can view their feedback.

Account administrators will be able to see the Reports of all agents. Agent accounts will only see their own Chat Ratings. This differs from viewing Transcripts, where any agent can read any transcript for review purposes. You can learn more in our Chat Ratings guide.

Agent Profile

You can access your profile by clicking your display name in the top right and then clicking Profile.

Your display name is the name that your visitors will see. Visitors will never see your username.

You can also upload a profile picture for yourself. It should be 100x100 pixels in size. It will be displayed alongside the first message you send to every visitor.

Your Organization’s Olark Settings

There are two levels of user roles – adminstrators and agents.

Administrators can view and change all settings. Agents are limited to the following actions.

• Chatting to visitors.
• Viewing chat transcripts for all chat agents.
• Viewing their own chat ratings.
• Editing their personal shortcuts.

However, there are many settings that your account administrator has control over which agents can’t change but should still be aware of.

It is a good practice to ensure your organization's administrators have considered each of these settings.

• Which CRM integration are we using (if any)?
• Which chat routing option (i.e. All Agents or Round Robin) are we using?
• Do we have a chat limit set, and if so what is it?
• Do we have Chat Ratings set up to get feedback from visitors?
• Do we have any Automation Rules set up?
• Do we have an Offline Message set up?
• Do we have any Groups set up, and do I belong to any of them?

Pre-Chat Checklist

• Set your display name and profile picture in your Profile.
• Choose an alert sound in your settings in your chat console Chat Console.
• Set up desktop notifications.
• Create some personal shortcuts.
• Familiarize yourself with important commands like !transfer, !transcript, !end and !send.

If you have any questions, please reach out by sending us a chat message or an email. We are always happy to help!