Has anyone A/B tested the presence of the Olark widget on their site?

We're getting ready to roll out Olark on our site, but I'm kind of wondering if it will just increase the support workload without actually improving conversion rate much. When I was first checking out Olark, I'd pretty much decided to buy it, but because the widget was there (on olark.com), I spent some time chatting with one of the founders and asking questions. We'll probably start off with something like 20% of visitors getting the Olark widget.

That's interesting, I'll get that test going on historious and see if the results are worth writing about.

sounds like a good experiment - conversion improvement certainly depends on the site as well. Mind sharing your results afterwards?

For us, we also get a lot of solid suggestions and feedback from chatting with customers, so the benefits are not always solely in the conversion improvement :)

How many of those wouldn't have bought if there weren't a chat option? Who knows? Without that detail, however, this statistic is useless...

Author here. Correlation/Causation is certainly something I wonder about.

I can say anecdotally that the conversations were worth having. Most started neutral and ended with excitement.

Given that this is so easy to try, I recommend doing it. You'll also learn what things your customers wonder most about prior to buying.

Oh, I agree about having a chat option on your website, I just don't agree that that statistic is very significant, and it certainly doesn't mean that Olark increased your sales by 25%, I just wonder if people will take it that way...

I'm not sure about purchases but I can tell you that installing Olark on SyncPad's website saved us some bad reviews from people who didn't read the instructions.

What percentage of people chatted with Olark before buying Olark service? I wouldn't be surprised if it was lower than 25%. :)