Connect Olark With Help Scout to Get Chat Transcripts to Your Inbox

Olark Live Chat is an easy-to-use live chat platform for your website. Simply copy-and-paste the embed code they provide, and within minutes you can be talking to customers who are browsing your site. With plenty of customization options, you can tailor Olark to match your site's aesthetics and use it to start sales conversations or help customers in need.

Perhaps its most powerful feature are the transcripts of customer conversations Olark provides. With the Olark and Help Scout integration, chat operators can attach a complete customer conversation to a customer record in Help Scout. Operators can manually send conversations one at a time, or they can select 'auto send' all conversations. Support team members can then flag these conversations for future reference and follow-up.

In each transcript, Olark captures customer information such as IP address, visitor location and browser/OS. This is contained as a separate note within the Help Scout Inbox. 

Here's an example of how it appears in Help Scout:

Activation instructions

Pro-tip: Log in to your Olark account in one tab, and your Help Scout account in another as you'll need to switch between the two to complete these steps.

1

Head to Manage > Apps > Olark in Help Scout. Click Install App.

2

Copy the Webhook Url shown to your clipboard. Note: The URL shown here is for illustrative purposes only. You'll need your account's unique URL from the Apps page in Help Scout for the next steps.

3

Head to Olark and click Settings > Channels in the top menu.

Scroll down to find the Help Scout line, and click Connect Help Scout to Olark.

4

Paste in the URL you copied in step 2 to the Help Scout webhook URL field. Check the box to Send chat transcripts automatically and Send offline messages if you wish. Click Save.

5

Important: Check your settings for emailing transcripts in Olark and make sure that you do NOT have it set to email transcripts to your Help Scout Inbox address or custom connected email address — this would cause you to receive duplicates in your Inbox.

6

Head back over to Help Scout, where you should still be on the app page for Olark, and choose the Inbox you want the chat transcripts to go to, then select the default status for those conversations. Click Save.