You are not alone. I hate them with passion, just as those sticky sidebars.

When I need support then I'll go looking for it. For that case, please have a visible link somewhere in the header or footer. There is absolutely no need to stick your 200x400px "SUPPORT!!!"-link into my face permanently. Many of them even perform idiotic gymnastics during scrolling or accidental mouseovers, in order to maximize the distraction.

However, there's one thing even worse than that: Automatic chat popups (Hello Rackspace!).

If you're at the receiving end of such a popup and get some really nasty text from a stranger, then that's probably me.

You can hide the widget by default and then show it with javascript when the user clicks a link/image/etc.

Isn't the look of Olark customizable? I guess it depends upon how much work you want to put into it.

I started looking but didn't find much. And wasn't sure what was possible in the free tier.

I'm not a big fan really of any of the support tabs and am sorry they have gained so much traction (thanks UserVoice, I guess?). But thankfully they are not present on the more legit sites.

Above the free tier you can start Olark hidden, and show it only when a "live chat" link is clicked. Shopify (one of our customers) does just this.

This. I didn't know what Olark was until I clicked on the link here, then I saw that all-too-familiar box that I try to avoid out of the corner of my eye. It's great that people are getting real feedback and having conversations with their customers, but in my experience, it doesn't distinguish itself from "Hi! Click here to talk to a REAL LIVE person!" chat windows that you see on so many ecommerce sites that either direct you to a new page entirely, bounce up and down continuously or create a modal after a few seconds of surfing to remind me that it is there.