How to Interact with Your Respondents in Realtime

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How to Interact with Your Respondents in Realtime

28 Jun

Sean O'Dacre No Comments

If you’ve never heard of Olark before, it’s a live chat application that lets you connect with visitors on your website. The FluidSurveys engineers have developed a plugin that connects with Olark and lets you communicate in real-time with people who are taking your survey! How cool is that?!

You can finally engage your respondents and have meaningful, intelligent conversations* to let them know how much you appreciate their participation, or to help them if they get stuck, or to get feedback that you weren’t even expecting! Just imagine the possibilities… this changes everything with online surveys!

… or you could just say “hi”. Up to you.

How to:

Setting up this functionality is a breeze. Start off by logging into your FluidSurveys account and selecting the survey you want to add this feature to, and then click on the “Publish” icon:

Next, click on the Settings tab:

Now click on Other Options:

Next, click to Enable the plugin:

A small window will pop-up that lets you either connect with your existing Olark account, or create a new account. To make this demo more exciting, we’ll go through the extra steps of creating an Olark account. Simply type in your email address and then create a new username and password for Olark. Just to be safe, don’t make them the same as your FluidSurveys account.

Now click “Setup my Olark Account”:

Now You Need a Chat Client

If you click where it says “Click here to login to your Olark account”, a new browser tab will be opened and you will be sent to your new Olark account at olark.com. From there, you can read the latest information about which chat clients are compatible with Olark, and how to set them up.

If you’re a PC user…

For PC users, the quickest and easiest way to get started would be to download the Pidgin chat client from Olark that comes pre-configured for FluidSurveys. Simply click on the “Link my Olark Account” button that’s shown in the previous screenshot, and then Preview your survey. The Olark chat screen will pop-up in the bottom-right corner of your survey and give you a link to download Pidgin. Piece o’ cake!