Train Your Team on the New Platform
Converge Team
Part of the Olark migration guide
How to train your support team when switching from Olark, including onboarding timelines and best practices.
Training Your Team After Switching from Olark
Olark's interface centers on a chat console with a visitor list sidebar and a simple dashboard showing chat volume, response times, and agent activity. The platform uses concepts like Shortcuts, Groups, Automation Rules, and the Aiden AI chatbot. Here's how to map these to a new messaging platform and get your team productive quickly.
Key Concept Mapping
Olark concepts translate to a unified inbox platform like this: Chat Console (where agents respond to chats) → Unified Inbox (same concept, but includes all channels), Visitor List (real-time list of website visitors) → Customer List (contacts across all channels), Shortcuts (!shortcut_name canned responses) → Quick Replies, Groups (agent routing groups) → Teams with Auto-Routing, Automation Rules (targeted messages based on visitor behavior) → Auto-Reply rules, Aiden AI (autonomous chatbot, Pro only) → AI Reply Suggestions (agent-assisted, not autonomous), Tags (!tag command during chats) → Customer Tags (applied from the UI), Notes (!note command) → Customer Notes (rich text, not command-based).
Day 1: Core Navigation (30 min)
Olark's layout is a single chat console with a visitor sidebar. In a unified inbox platform, the key difference is that messages from all channels — website chat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, email — appear in one conversation list. Walk your team through: the inbox view where all conversations appear, how to filter by status (open/resolved/closed), how customer profiles show contact details and conversation history across channels, and how full-text search works across both contacts and messages.
Day 1: Recreating Workflows (30 min)
Recreate your most-used Olark Shortcuts as Quick Replies — instead of the !shortcut_name command, agents select from a searchable list or use keyboard shortcuts. Set up customer tags to replace your !tag system — on a modern platform, tags are applied through the UI rather than typed as commands. If you used Olark's Groups feature to route chats to specific teams, configure auto-routing rules with round-robin or load-balanced distribution. Rebuild your Automation Rules (welcome messages, page-based triggers) as auto-reply rules.
Day 2: Features That Work Differently (30 min)
Olark's Aiden AI is an autonomous chatbot that handles entire conversations without agent involvement (Pro plan only). On most unified inbox platforms, AI works as reply suggestions — the AI drafts a response based on conversation context and your knowledge base, but agents review and send it. This gives agents more control and avoids the risk of AI providing incorrect answers autonomously. Olark's Visitor Insights PowerUp (social/company data from FullContact at $59/month) has no direct equivalent — unified platforms typically show customer data you've collected rather than third-party enrichment. Olark's Cobrowsing PowerUp ($99/month) has no direct equivalent on messaging-focused platforms.
The Biggest Adjustment: Commands → UI
Olark agents are accustomed to doing things via typed commands: !tag sales, !note Follow up on pricing, !send helpscout, !shortcut greeting. On a modern platform, all these actions happen through the UI — clicking buttons, selecting from dropdowns, and typing in dedicated input fields. This shift feels different for the first day but is generally faster once agents adjust to clicking instead of typing commands. The biggest time-saver: customer notes are persistent, visible to all agents, and don't require a command to create or view.
Week 1: Guided Practice
Have agents handle real conversations with a lead available for questions. The transition from Olark is typically smooth for most agents since Olark's chat-focused workflow is simpler than multi-channel platforms — agents are mostly learning new capabilities (multi-channel messaging, AI suggestions, SLA tracking) rather than relearning old ones. Use internal team chat for quick questions during the transition period.
Most teams report the adjustment from Olark takes 1–3 days. The command-based interaction pattern (!tag, !note, !send) is the main habit to break — everything else maps closely to familiar chat workflows.
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This page covers train your team on the new platform specifically. For the complete step-by-step migration process:
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