Recent posts
Dos and don’ts for building a remote team: Lessons from a hiring manager
Most of us have had at least one bad hiring experience — a recruiter who got too aggressive (or, conversely, ghosted), an interviewer who showed up unprepared, or even an unpleasant post-hire moment when we realized the job wasn’t what we’d been led to believe. But as someone who’s been part of this process for more than a decade, I’m still shocked by some of my friends’ and colleagues’ hiring horror stories. Who are these people, I wonder, who are so blasé about hiring? Do they not understand the stakes?
From 0 to 10: How we built an unconventional Silicon Valley startup
This month, Olark turns 10! It’s hard to believe that a business we started as a post-college side project has grown into a 30+ person company. We’ve served tens of thousands of customers, generated tens of millions in revenue, and experienced our fair share of failures amidst a full decade of sustainable innovation and growth.
From 0 to 10: Starting a business by solving our own problems
This post is the second in our “From 0 to 10” anniversary series. You can read the series introduction here.
Beyond CSAT: Choosing (and using) the right metrics for your customer service team
About two years ago, a member of Olark’s customer service team decided to run an experiment. Sarah Betts spent three months responding to chats under three different names and avatars — first as “Samuel”, featuring a male profile photo, then as “Sam”, featuring a bit of androgynous clipart, and finally as herself, Sarah, with the same photo she’d used as a live chat agent for the past several years.
How a 5-stage design thinking framework helps our small team solve customer problems
Remember the Great Comcast Scandal of 2014? I’ll sum it up to spare you an unpleasant trip through the news archives: customer calls Comcast to cancel, and ends up on the phone for 30+ minutes with a representative who essentially refuses to accommodate their request.
