Olark Chat integration with Marketo/Salesforce

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

We here at Babajob have planned on and will be using :

Marketo - Marketing Automation Tool.

Salesfroce - CRM

We have Olark Chat as an on-website application for certain webpages involving employers/recruiters.

We need to integrate Olark with either Marketo or Salesforce for strategizing using the chat statistics. I see that Salesforce and Olark have a pre defined integration laid out but none exists for Marketo and Olark integration.

What do you people suggest ? Should we integrate Olark with Salesforce and then push the required data from Olark into Marketo using Salesforce or rather, straight away integrate Olark with Marketo ?

If its better to directly integrate Olark with Marketo, could you help us out with a proper guidance as to how can we achieve this ?

Thank You !!

Prabash Rath

Babajob.com, Bangalore, India.

[SanfordWhiteman]

You should describe exactly what "the chat statistics" and "the required data" are for your implementation.  You aren't really being specific. 

Will your leads already be known to Marketo (associated) before they open a chat?  Or are you referring to anonymous sessions opening a chat, during which process they'll identify themselves (i.e. by filling out an OIark form to start the chat)?  Please provide as much detail as possible.

[Anonymous]

Hi Sanford,

No, our leads will not be known to Marketo before the chat is opened.

Following is what will be the most likely scenario for us :

An anonymous user visits our site and chats (Anonymous sessions) with one of our sales persons.

Here, he/she may or may not reveal personal details like emailID, Name etc.

What we want are :

(a) If the emailID is obtained, then we can use it to engage and nurture that user further.

(b) If the emailID or other related details are not obtained, then some chat statistics like Chat Duration, Chat Transcripts etc. is what we would like to have with us once that particular anonymous chat session is over to plan our retargeting plans.

For example - If the chat lasted for say, 5 minutes and keywords like "Payment","Interested" etc. are fetched ; then we will plan retargeting that user accordingly based on the statistics received.

How do you suggest we achieve this or a similar scenario : By integrating Olark with Marketo directly or Marketo interacting with Olark via Salesforce integration ?

Thank You !

[SanfordWhiteman]

(a) and (b) are very different, as I'm sure you understand.

Marketo's web analytics component, Munchkin -- and really Marketo in general -- is geared toward named leads, not so much for extended retargeting of anonymous leads.  For example, anonymous leads cannot have lead fields populated.  Though anonymous web activity will be recorded, the expectation (as I see it) is that you'll action that once-anonymous data after the email address is identified.

For (a), you can use Olark JavaScript API and the Marketo Forms 2.0 API after a chat to create the corresponding Marketo lead by posting a form.  It only has to contain the email address but could potentially include any custom fields like LastChatDuration or whatever you create in Marketo.

For (b), you're really talking about a job for a web retargeting engine.  You could save those events like keywords and duration to the anonymous lead's activity log using the Munchkin API, but you're not going to be able to re-retrieve that information from Marketo.   But neither do you need to retrieve it, as the actions took place in the same browser session, so you could store it to LocalStorage instead and build your own retargeting logic based on those "interesting moments." Or, of course, use a retargeting service that is designed to react to session history.

[Anonymous]

Hi Sanford,

Thanks a lot for your insight.

Regards,

Prabash.