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You don't need live chat on your website

• revskill 4y ago
  So the issue here is the automatic popup. If the issue is not about content (not everything is simple to find out), live chat is helpful. But it's only helpful if the support team is ready to help via email.
  • eastbound 4y ago
    The kind of people it’s intended for, don’t know how to open a chat. Some people are afraid of clicking unknown icons. Some (different) people are afraid of starting a conversation. On the Nespresso website, the chat button covers the Buy button partially. So I ask them “Please confirm my order”. Chats are almost always a horrible implementation.
• mjfl 4y ago
  Eh. It's good for B2B. If you're ordering technical stuff and need something specific adjusted, can be helpful to chat to someone that can connect you to a specialist quickly.
• rob 4y ago
  I use the live chat on 1-800 Contacts exclusively to have the agent price match to another website. The entire process takes 10 minutes or less. It would take way longer to email them all of the details and wait for a response, have them confirm my address, etc.
• aendruk 4y ago
  > Can I help you with anything? No. > An agent will be with you shortly! > Hi, what can I help you with? > Agent ended the session.
  • princevegeta89 4y ago
    You forgot to add some messages added by bots and the chatbox itself with links to FAQs and crap. It's not so straightforward to get to humans these days
  • justsomehnguy 4y ago
    > Can I help you with anything? < I want to know about <something> > An agent will be with you shortly! > Please provide: > your name > your email > your phone No, thanks.
• beachy 4y ago
  Nice rant but, like those popups that ask for your email when you show signs of leaving the site , the proof is in the pudding - do these live chats increase conversions?
  • csharpminor 4y ago
    Agree. At one of my startups we hooked a $350k ARR enterprise customer over webchat. We also received some of the best early UX feedback through webchat. Developers are somewhat different from the general population in that we like to read documentation rather than going to a person for help. But for almost everyone else having someone to answer a question immediately is the preferred experience.
    • yummypaint 4y ago
      How did you establish that the customer would not have contacted you if not for webchat? If i go to a company's website already intending to contact them i might type in a chat box before i email or call them, but they would have gotten my business regardless.
      • satvikpendem 4y ago
        How did you establish that the customer would have contacted you if not for webchat? In the parent's scenario, it seems likely that the buyer for that enterprise was simply browsing through the site, or perhaps looking at various options, when they found the parent's site, saw that there was a chat and saw the near immediate response, asked a few questions and eventually set up a meeting. To do that over email would have likely taken days. Source: I've had something like this happen too.
      • csharpminor 4y ago
        To answer your question, they told us directly in our first sales meeting (we didn't close the deal over live chat lol). The director we were speaking to said something along the lines of "and to think we probably wouldn't be here if I hadn't written you in chat."
• apengwin 4y ago
  Zawinski's second law states that all software with messaging/chat eventually becomes a dating app.
  • durnygbur 4y ago
    no, linkedin hasn't
    • Aeolos 4y ago
      Are you sure about that? I know if at least one case where it has...
      • durnygbur 4y ago
        Where it has... profiles approaching me, with photos of females who wouldn't even respond to my "hi" in real life? You're are not going to earn commission on me sweetie.
• Oras 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3dxMGzt5mU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3dxMGzt5mU
• samsaga2 4y ago
  It could be nice to use a gpt-3 chat trained with the info from the web to have something like an ai search system.
  • drpixie 4y ago
    Noooooo (but it will happen) - so we can have convincing but wrong content about company products! Readers are commenting that chat increases "conversions" (I guess that means sales). I'd be interested to see what convincing but wrong chatbots do do conversions and to ongoing customer numbers.
• _nivlac_ 4y ago
  Eh, in my experience, I generally disagree. Why wait for an email response when you can get an answer then and there? Also, outside of online retail shopping, I've found live chat very useful. Sure, get rid of the intrusive popups and chatbots which don't help. But keep the live chat. It's valuable to the customer.
  • tjpnz 4y ago
    How can I tell whether it's a human I'll be talking to or a bot? I've had enough of my time wasted that I'm no longer prepared to bother.
    • brookst 4y ago
      Fortunately we’re getting more bots so you’re much less likely to waste your time with a human these days.
  • aendruk 4y ago
    In my experience the realtime chat agents appear pressured to clear issues immediately at the expense of correctness. Sending an async message gives the respondent time to research things or ask for help instead of making up answers on the fly.
• system2 4y ago
  I have a feeling the author does not have enough experience with e-commerce. Adaptation of livechat increased conversion rates and sales and it is visible in the reports. Return rates also go down with livechat. Especially women's products (hair, makeup, shoes) are benefiting from instant answers and change the conversion rates dramatically. Having a human talk to you thru your screen is a game changer in e-commerce. I personally use amazon customer support chat myself very often.
  • Sujan 4y ago
    Came here to point out that the right question is if it works for the company that offers it, not how a minority of users experiences it. You answered that. Thanks.
  • zulln 4y ago
    > I personally use amazon customer support chat myself very often. For what?
    • conductr 4y ago
      It's the best way to do something you can't on the website. As example, I've had to return products that have said they were not returnable or beyond the return date, chat is the easiest way to talk to someone and get it resolved.
      • system2 4y ago
        Exactly this. Usually they even say just take the money back and keep the product (when livechat is used).
  • brushfoot 4y ago
    Yep, the author is thinking like a developer, not a consumer. > If I need assistance, I will most likely do one of the following: > > Find a support e-mail. > Go to a physical store. > Ask a friend. > See if I find an unintrusive live chat that I chose to enable. This is a developer mindset: take the time to solve the puzzle. I get it, but the majority of people don't think that way. Most people don't want to solve the puzzle. They want to buy the product and get on with their day. Live chat lets them do that, and by the numbers, it works.
• bluSCALE4 4y ago
  Personally, I feel chat is too immediate and am easily irritated since whatever I need has me upset. I prefer an email and a fast response or a phone number to call.
• webignition 4y ago
  In my experience, the usefulness of live chat features varies wildly. If the live chat service connects me to a human who is able to resolve my query in a timely manner, I'll take that any day. Phoning a large company can result in waiting in a call queue for a long time. My attention is on the phone call instead of anything else. A live chat window can be relatively ignored and checked once in a while. Emailing a large company can result in waiting for a reply taking 3-5 business years. Live chat gets me a response relatively quickly. A live chat service that does not provide an easy means of interacting with a human and which instead easily allows getting stuck in a bot loop is a great example of poor customer service and, for me, a great way of quickly finding out who to not do business with. That said, a poor live chat service for a business that I absolutely have to contact (most recently when terminating internet service after moving house) is an exercise in frustration and annoyance that is hard to replicate in any other manner.
  • usrbinbash 4y ago
    Exactly. Good chat implementations are great; meaningful automated information, fast handover to human operators while also providing them with the relevant information, and all that in the comfort of my browser window is a great experience. Being stuck in a loop against what's essentially a buggy ELIZA-Clone however, or a system that somehow is incapable of authenticating me even though I've logged into my account on their website, is not.
    • jimbob45 4y ago
      Are they better than a well-stocked FAQ with a search function?
      • eitland 4y ago
        > "well-stocked FAQ" Do you have examples? When I think of FAQs, IIRC almost all the time it seems like they wrote it before release and never upgraded it with actual questions.
        • 4y ago
• Vanit 4y ago
  Agreed that sometimes they can be too nagging, but I always really appreciate being able to resolve issues in a live-but-async manner. It also seems that chat agents are usually more empowered than phone agents when it comes to resolving issues, and it's an added bonus that it's all in writing so everyone agrees what happened.
  • nanidin 4y ago
    I spent 20 minutes in live chat with T-Mobile on my mobile device. Eventually a device reboot was required. I then spent 10 minutes establishing context, then 20 minutes in live chat with T-Mobile. Another restart was required. Repeat. Ad nauseum, or at least until I determined it was no longer worth my time to pursue the promotion I was supposedly eligible for.
• glasss 4y ago
  I have never been pleased to see the chat bubble pop up on any site I've used. I do hope the people that use it enjoy it thoroughly, just to offset my disdain.
• chucky123 4y ago
  The problem isn't live chat. The problem is incorrectly implemented live chat. I run a small saas and I can't count the number of times someone messaged an inquiry and I immediately got in touch with them. They were astounded by the quick response time, which is simply not possible with contact forms.
  • onion2k 4y ago
    They were astounded by the quick response time, which is simply not possible with contact forms. I'm intrigued. Why isn't it possible with a contact form? The mechanism for routing a message to you could be literally identical whether it's a chat box or a form. You could get the exact same notification on your system. It'd take you the same amount of time to respond. The only difference I can see is that what you reply with would go to the chat window in their browser instead of their inbox. Perceptually they may see that as faster I guess but it isn't really. However... I run a small saas and I can't count the number of times someone messaged an inquiry and I immediately got in touch with them. What you presumably don't see, or at least ignore, is the number of times people didn't get an immediate response from you and were annoyed by it, or were annoyed by the chat option being there in the first place, or who didn't even see the chat option, or whose browser failed to load it, or... well... lots of things. Your claim that users like it is simple survivorship bias - you're only focusing on the positive outcomes.
    • mschuster91 4y ago
      > I'm intrigued. Why isn't it possible with a contact form? - E-mail always has a round-trip latency attached, even the best systems will have at least a minute, and you have to do insane amounts of work to keep up with "deliverability" as automated anti-spam systems can and will detect high frequency of incoming emails and downgrade your score, not to mention you have to deal with bullshit like contacting providers that downgraded or outright black-holed you. - Uploading or sending attachments is a hit-and-miss, there still are providers limiting attachment size to 1MB (looking at you web.de) or with overzealous "security software". - People will readily ignore the "do not reply below this line" and reply inline, which software like JIRA SD won't recognize or garble up. - On mobile, people will have to switch between apps, which more often than not even on flagship devices leads to Android killing off the apps between switching for "memory efficiency" and 10+ seconds of load time after each switch. On-site chat has none of these problems.
• aussieshibe 4y ago
  It seems to me that someone could just as reasonably (that is to say, not at all reasonably) argue: > I don't like hunting for information when I'm shopping online, and would rather get a personal recommendation from a staff member. If you need to fill your website with loads of text, you probably need to do something about your live support staff. Our individual personal preferences prove next to nothing about what a business "should" do. Maybe it's true that these popups drive more people away than they convert on average (although I doubt it), but to claim that with any credibility you need to give some evidence.
• durnygbur 4y ago
  Chats are cancer and useless. Search (not ads, not suggestions!) and category-aware filtering is what I want. For customer support ticketing system, email, phone.
• gwbas1c 4y ago
  The problem isn't live chat, it's nagging. A lot of the chat bubbles that I see flash in the corner, and make the title of the page flash as well; with lots of annoying bleeps and bloops. I also find that sales is very trend driven. Currently they're trendy, but I hope that sales websites learn that you can't just stick things in people's faces all the time.
  • princevegeta89 4y ago
    Fuck those chat bubbles that automatically open when I visit websites. "Hi, Thank you for visiting. Please look around and let us know if you have any questions" I'm gonna really reach out to you if I run into questions but don't automatically expand the chatbox and ruin my experience here. I vividly remember car dealership websites being the worst of them all. They all use the same software more or less and it is just designed to generate leads through coercing visitors and customers.
    • kristopolous 4y ago
      I wonder how many people just try to be chatty. "Hello! I'm so glad to hear from you! How is the weather where you are? How is the employer? Are you happy there?" Etc
    • ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      Yep, especially on the first page you ever visit, and it covers 60% of the contents. Also, you usually have to close the "subcribe to our newsletter" popup first, to even see the chat window, covering the content you're interested in. Then you scroll half a screen down, and a new popup with a survey, asking you how much you like their page. Basically, they actively try to discourage you from seeing the content you actually want to see on the page.
      • denton-scratch 4y ago
        Well, I guess this is what happens when a business operation is placed under the control of marketing. It's a very old-fashioned attitude; back in the early noughties, many companies thought of the web as essentially an advertising billboard, so the website was placed under the marketing team. That's counterproductive, if the website is actually a core business operation.
• probabletrain 4y ago
  I've found adding a live chat to my online creation tool invaluable for getting a sense of what people find confusing or unintuitive. I change or update ux flows based on often-asked questions, and know if the change worked based on whether I still get those questions.
• dmje 4y ago
  Chat is one thing. Obtrusive chat is another. Bot chat is a sort of pinnacle of shitness that eclipses all others. When companies do chat and it actually helps the user, all good. When it's done entirely to help the company by reducing salaries for real staff / trying to prevent users getting in touch / promoting some feature or product the user didn't want in the first place... - then it's generally all bad.
  • yummypaint 4y ago
    Spectrum (the ISP) had terrible incompetent bots attempting to pose as humans last time i was forced to deal with them. They were even trained to claim they were human, but couldn't answer questions any person trivially knows the answer to. It's a true insult to the intelligence and time of their (unwilling) customers. The purpose is to waste peoples's time and grind them down in hopes they give up before even entering the phone tree.
• gnicholas 4y ago
  I had a live chat widget on my startup's site for a while. What I found was that maybe 10% more people reached out, but the bigger difference was that about half of the contact that would have come through our email form (and not required an immediate response) was now coming through chat. This meant that we needed to respond immediately, which was a downside. The most annoying thing though was when people would try to prove that I was actually a chatbot. Any tips for how to definitively prove you're not a bot (shy of getting on a zoom call, which is what one user suggested!)?
  • naet 4y ago
    I think you don't need to definitely prove you're human or pass some kind of adhoc turing test. You just need to convince them that whatever need they have can be taken care of via the chat widget. If the need is to speak to a human, help them schedule a phone call with a sales rep / support rep / relevant party.
    • gnicholas 4y ago
      Oh, these people never have anything they want to accomplish, other than to waste the time of a person (or cycles of a computer)!
  • nuker 4y ago
    > This meant that we needed to respond immediately, which was a downside. Isn’t the whole point of having chat on your site?
    • gnicholas 4y ago
      The hope was that more of the interactions would be ones that uniquely benefit from live chat. We found instead that it was just shifting our existing conversations from email to chat, typically with no benefit.
  • gorbypark 4y ago
    I would just advertise it explicitly as an actual human. “Click here to chat with a real, live human!”, etc.
• subradios 4y ago
  The problem isn't live chat, or nagging - it is a corporate policy structure for something complex (sites like eBay, Facebook, and Amazon are effectively running small municipal governments at least) combined with an incentive structure to get the person to tie up as little support time as possible, because that costs money. Added in is the modern trend to try to make immensely complicated things like "global commerce" look like it takes two button clicks. Abstractions are good, but something, somewhere, should tell me how my inputs to this system affect what happens.
• causi 4y ago
  Some are great some suck. Amazon live chat has always been helpful. Anything tech-related has been totally useless.
• ranting-moth 4y ago
  I think live chat is brilliant when I need it. But I partially agree with the article. Don't shove it it my face, that gives me the sleazy salesman feeling. And I mean live chat. Me chatting with a bot is not a live chat.
• gchokov 4y ago
  What's going on recently with all the posts about "you don't need that" or "you don't want to be". Of course, I need a chat on my site - my whole business has been relying on this.
• tibanne 4y ago
  I like the live chat option when it's just there and doesn't bother me. I don't like writing emails to support.
  • atraac 4y ago
    Only as long as the chat immediately connects you to a human and you dont have to click/write through 10 bullshit messages about nothing with some half-assed bot.
    • monkeydust 4y ago
      Yes this. If your thinking of incorporating live chat then make sure it's backed by humans or at least a way to get to human easily (if your AI bot fails to address the initial question). When you don't have a human available such as outside normal business hours just hide the chat feature, people can use your contact form. IMHO this is the only acceptable method for having a chat feature on a site.
• dncornholio 4y ago
  Live chat upped the conversion % like nothing ever did. It's massively useful, no matter how good your site is.
• xnorswap 4y ago
  I recently had an excellent experience with live chat. My logitech mouse1 button started doing that thing where it momentarily unclicks while dragging. If you're a heavy mouse user you've probably experienced it and how frustrating it is. In this case, the mouse wasn't cheap and it was only 6 months or so old when this happened. The automatic Amazon process told me to go to Logitech about it, so I did. The obviously automated chat bot was actually helpful (as long as you understood it was automatic), although it had a bug where it asked for a TOTP code but if you entered it into the chat box instead of pressing a "totp" button to enter it, it would say it doesn't understand and restart the whole long process. Okay, so that's a frustratingly bad chat bot, but once I had realised what had happened I typed AGENT to get an agent and the live customer service agent was incredibly helpful. They understood my frustration with dealing with the automatic process and that it had gone wrong. They understood my complaint with the product. They were helpful in informing me that yes, the mouse was covered by warranty and that they could replace it if I could get a "notice to refuse service" from Amazon. This gave then me what I needed to go back to the amazon process to get them to accept it as a return by saying I had spoken to Logitech and that Amazon needed to replace or refuse service. Between the two chat boxes, the logitech one, despite being a more buggy experience, was far more helpful once I got to a person. On the other hand, the amazon experience was miserable. They asked me if I wanted a QR code or a printed return label. I said, "Can I do both?" and they answered "Yes". They then waited. A minute or so later I realised they were waiting for a prompt and said, "Okay, send me both please" and they said, "You have to pick one, QR code or printed label". I don't know with Amazon if I was speaking to a human or not. This is very frustrating compared to the Logitech experience where I went from what was obviously an automatic process to obviously a human. Overall, this was probably quicker and easier than had I tried to pick up a phone. Crucially though it still hinged on having a human in the loop who was very helpful.
  • lutrinus 4y ago
    So, you went to the Amazon live chat. They sent you to Logitech. You chatted with their bot and had to "restart the whole long process" because of a bug. Then you got connected to a human who asked you for a confirmation from Amazon. You went back to Amazon and asked them for a return, again. You had a "miserable" experience with the process, there, but in the end got your return label. Yeah, really sounds like an excellent experience.
• snapetom 4y ago
  A live chat that isn't a live chat but instead is just a fancy interface to a FAQ or search is the worse. I always immediately bail and get a very negative impression of that company. Any company that spends money/time on such a useless feature deserves to whither away.
• apexalpha 4y ago
  I actually value live chats. I like them a lot if they connect me to a human. They're faster than e-mails, which can take a few days to get a response to. And they're more convenient than phone calls where I have to stop other stuff while I wait to be connected. I can also be more precise communicating things like bank accounts and order IDs, especially if I'm chatting in something else than my native language. Plus I can easily record and store the answers since it's just text. So +1 for live chat from me! Bonus points if the company just uses WhatsApp rather than some box on the website.
  • qwertox 4y ago
    Same for me, but only if they are opened through a button on the contact page. I find those auto-opening chat widgets on the main page really annoying.
  • gorbypark 4y ago
    As a newcomer to Spain, I was looking for an ISP that could help me out with language barriers. I chose the one with the live chat option that connected me to a human within 30 seconds, even before I was a customer. It's been really helpful because I don't speak much Spanish yet and can use Google Translate if I need to. It’s been great so far. I have had to contact some other services via a phone call and it can be a nightmare trying to do anything in a language you can barely speak. It’s not so bad now that I can speak a bit of Spanish, but I still will choose a company based on if they have a live chat feature that connects to a human.
• dewey 4y ago
  I'd group them in two big segments. 1) Sales chat 2) Support chat Both of them I prefer over emailing, calling or writing into some contact box and receive an answer days later. Live chat windows are in almost 100% of the cases I've interacted with them quicker, as they tell you if someone is online and how many minutes you are expected to wait. Sometimes 1) can be spammy when they make sounds or open automatically but I still prefer to ask a quick product question before signing up for something via the chat than emailing someone.
• yevpats 4y ago
  yeah it is annoying especially if it opens up automatically which I think in most live chats like Intercom it is by default and there is no easy way to turn this off. But I guess it depends on what site it is exactly. Interesting thing I noticed for dev tools is chats is useless because users start to paste huge amount of code or configuration into the chat which makes it super hard for both sides so basically just use discord or slack for dev support :)
• butler14 4y ago
  Shout out to supermetrics.com who have great live chat, and almost always resolve my issue within 5mins And relatedly amazon who actually have a useful chatbot (i don't have much positive to say about amazon these days but 1 click purchase and chatbot implementation is still very strong)
  • luckylion 4y ago
    Is Amazon pretending their chatbot is an actual person? That would explain my experience with them. It's either that or somebody who barely speaks English but is only given a 1995-technology translation of my messages and can only respond with 15 pre-written text-blocks.
    • butler14 4y ago
      i am actually not sure if amazon have live-human-chat behind the chatbot, as, in fairness, the chatbot usually sorts out our issue (often very quickly) i presume they do, though, and i wouldn't be surprised if it's not so great!
• deleted 4y ago
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• dyates 4y ago
  Live chat windows that pop-up automatically and hassle you once you've spent X seconds looking at a website are annoying, much like email subscription modals. But when I've been actually looking for support and made the choice to click on the chat button, I've generally had a great experience, so long as it's connected me to a human rather than a menu of chatbot options. It's asynchronous enough that I can keep doing something else while I wait/chat, saves me from having to spell things out or repeat alphanumeric codes over the phone, and is way quicker than email.
  • thih9 4y ago
    > as it's connected me to a human rather than a menu of chatbot options Another annoying option is getting an auto reply about no-one being available; or being asked for personal data, sometimes before even starting the chat.
  • Sakos 4y ago
    I've seen a live chat implementation that starts as a chat bot, but switches you to a person after a few clicks and you can't find what you need. I felt that was a perfect compromise.
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      Yeah that filters out probably the 90% of trivial requests.
    • soco 4y ago
      A very annoying "feature" of some of those is making you wait for the human (okay that's acceptable) BUT timing out the session if you don't reply them within a minute or such.
      • thombat 4y ago
        That's the cousin of telephone hold music that interjects with a recording periodically, such as "We apologise for the delay; your call is important to us". All this does is repeatedly grab the caller's attention AND progressively reduce the strength of the grab, so that finally when a real live & hopefully useful human joins the call they may not be noticed. Just give me some crappy Muzak: instrumental without voice, or a gentle periodic beep to confirm the line hadn't dropped. If there is a voice then let it be only to tell me the remodeling queue length, e.g. "You are now eight callers from being served", and only do it upon change of status, not repeating every 30 secs.
• mafiaboi 4y ago
  You can leverage the current users by opening up the chat to any user or the member of the website/app. They can bring their messages to any other website as well. In this way, your visitor community could help you manage customer relations and also talk about your product live.
  • wink 4y ago
    You're describing every customer forum with answers like "I reinstalled Windows and that fixed the problem!!!"
• osrec 4y ago
  I personally love live chats, both as a user and a developer. Yes, the pop-ups can be annoying, but still the overall experience has been really good for me. I especially like how chats are asynchronous, yet feel immediate. And you can think about what you want to say, much like an email, without feeling like you might need to wait 3 days for a response.
• lucumo 4y ago
  One thing that annoys the living crap out of me is when live chat is the only way to get support and they have office hours! So now I can't send an email at 1 AM when I have some time to myself, but have to take time out of my day to chat with customer support. I might as well use the bloody phone by then.
  • charlieyu1 4y ago
    Even phone is annoying, am I expect to wait 30 minutes to 2 hours to wait and talk with someone to resolve an issue, when it could be an email?
  • alldayeveryday 4y ago
    Some live chat systems will create a ticket from your off hours chat, and then followup with an email once their support team comes back online. I've even seen when this email allows to click a link to go into a new chat session (assuming on hours).
• ho_schi 4y ago
  * Live Chat * Cookie Banners * Newsletter-Offers * Java-Script moving things around What do they have in common? No benefit for the user. Remove the entire EU-Regulation upon Cookie-Banners. I would be thankful. A service is allowed implicitly to store Cookies or any other mean of "remembering" when a login is used interactively by the user. If the user doesn't login itself you aren't allowed to store any data about the users. And if they want do something for the environment, battery-runtime, reliability and user experience. Require that any public founded website must work without Java-Script.
  • 878654Tom 4y ago
    That Cookie-Banners are so annoying is because companies want to anger customers against them. I have seen many websites that have easy cookie-banners or none at all as they only use functional cookies. The legislation is fine, it literally is, if you want to track someone you must tell them.
    • ho_schi 4y ago
      Anger is an interesting term. They make it so huge that you want to get them out of the way and click "Accept"? I don't like the regulation for another reason. Cookie-Banners are a business model: https://usercentrics.com/ https://usercentrics.com/ Draws a dark shadow on the regulation. Smells like lobbying. They gather and store user data from other websites. The opposite of what should be done.
  • xigoi 4y ago
    > What do they have in common? No benefit for the user. The benefit of cookie banners is that you know to stay away from the website if possible.
• projektfu 4y ago
  When I first learned about these I was interviewing with a company that was an early entrant/innovator. Their box was sales oriented but came up when you showed sales interest and told you if a salesperson was available. I thought it was a really clever idea, especially for those interactions where someone is browsing at 9:30pm and wouldn't call but would feel fine texting with a salesperson who was just up watching TV. Fast forward to the future and it's become dystopian like everything else on the web. It's an excuse to remove phone numbers and email addresses, it replaces support with bots, it's not truly async because you can't easily do other things while waiting for a response or they close the connection and you start over with another person and no history.
• cebert 4y ago
  If you block LivePerson, you can eliminate a lot of these annoying chat agents. The appear to be one of the more prominent providers of this service (https://www.liveperson.com https://www.liveperson.com).
• qwertyzxcvmnbvw 4y ago
  It can be fine, but man is Intercom ever an irritating little widget. Always in the way, too small to see context, history of chats is uninformative, emails are messy. Any suggestions on a better implementation?
• mtkd 4y ago
  They come at a cost, one of the popular ones is 300K+ minified JS and they are common on retail sites with very high mobile traffic -- severely impacting Lighthouse score Also they often overlay and can block a cookie consent acceptance button etc. There is no reason for them to fire on every page, isolating them to a support page is surely enough
• Yuyudo_Comiketo 4y ago
  > And almost every time I see this “nagging” I want to leave the website Well, just do leave, what's the problem?
• sudo_navendu 4y ago
  This is a good argument. A lot of problems that live chat aims to solve can be solved by documenting and making sure that the documentation is discoverable. I’m definitely talking to my team about this.
• jack335 4y ago
  I think that depends heavily. Yes if the live chat window is annoying you that you should buy something or sign up for a newsletter that is super annoying. But if you really need help and there is a human within one second on the other hand this is amazing. Also vice versa. If I'm online on Crisp or Intercom it is super easy to understand what my customer tries to do and help them within a second. Not everything is negative about live chats, as always :D
• Lightbody 4y ago
  My startup uses live chat and our human median response time is sub 60 seconds. Our customers love it.
• esher 4y ago
  Intercom client here. We use the tool for our client support (only). The website is therefore just the point of contact for something else. We do not 'engage' our clients. We do not want to 'drive sales' from leads. It's open for unregistered users as well but rarely used by them. Humans answer. We learn a lot by speaking to our clients about how they perceive our service.
• gureddio 4y ago
• mabbo 4y ago
  Especially true if the person/bot you're chatting with can't actually do anything they claim. My car needed it's winter tires put on (in Canada, you need different tires when it gets too cold because rubber compounds are weird). I went to the website to find the phone number but hey there's a new pop up offering live chat! I chatted. It was obviously pretty quickly it was a bot, as it mistook my last name for my first name and despite repeatedly asking it to correct that it wouldn't. Eventually it had taken down my information and said someone would call to confirm. No one called. day later I called them to ask what's up. The person on the phone said that no one who can actually book appointments ever receives any details from the bot. Some executive decided it would be great to have a bot to book appointments, and so the software team just added a fake one.
• agopaul 4y ago
  Live chat widgets are a great tool at the beginning, as they help get in touch with more people looking at your website. That said, especially in Saas, I think it hardly makes sense to keep it on after reaching a certain point. I can see how it could make sense in eCommerce though.
• qwerty456127 4y ago
  Live chat often is the fastest and easiest way to contact a human without having to register.
• nonameiguess 4y ago
  I get that a lot of responses are out there "hey, think from a prospect's perspective" or whatever, rather than as a developer. But, as a developer, most of what I'm looking for is information about products I'm already using. It's a matter of where these chat popups are placed. If you place them on the support/contact page, fine. But if you put them on every page on the entire site, then I click through from a search engine straight to a blog post, knowledge base, or FAQ that has exactly what I want, try to read it, and am immediately blocked by a modal I have to close first. That is annoying as hell. "How can our company help your company?" You already do! You don't need to convert your existing customers. It's even worse when it's my own company. No, you can't sell a support contract to yourself. Yes, I can go solely through internal knowledge bases, or only ever seek information through our existing support rep. But why would I do that when the exact information I need is already on the public Internet? Just let me actually see it without nagging me to buy something I either already bought or can't buy. The vast majority of information I seek out is for products I already use, not products I might use if you can get me to talk to a salesperson. I get it from the perspective of the business. Hey, if a conversion rate goes up after we do this, then we should have done it. Full stop. But it's a locally optimal solution that ruins the web globally. They've done the same thing to e-mail. My work e-mail is nonstop flooded with small businesses that think they can solve a problem for my business. I'm just a developer! I can't sign a support agreement with you. I don't care if your project management software is better than whatever we're already using. I don't care if you can help us hire people. I'm not a project manager and I'm not HR. To you, it seems costless to just send out bulk emails to every employee of a company, knowing at least some of them will actually be interested, and any non-zero conversion rate for a zero-cost cold call strategy is worth it. But you've poisoned the commons! E-mail is now an annoyance rather than useful. I spend more time deleting spam than reading anything. I spend more time closing popups than consuming the content from you that would be useful to me that I was already trying to consume. This is Moloch in action. Is it worth it for the world to turn every form of information transmission into more annoyance than utility so that some tiny percentage of small businesses can survive a few years longer than they might have otherwise? I see how it is worth it to the owner of the business. Is it worth it to the rest of us who make up the overwhelming majority of humanity?
• hnarn 4y ago
  Live chat for support is bad, and live chat from a bot to sell something is even worse, and for the same reason: none of them are actually live. Even in the case where you get to talk to a human, it usually starts with a queue (not real time) and ends with a ticket if your issue wasn’t resolved immediately. All of this, as they say, “could have been an email”, then both parts don’t have to stand by like a couple of radio operators. It’s an illusion of urgency and effectiveness. I’ve worked in support and I’ve also (like almost anyone) used support to get problems solved, and the urgency of a phone call or a live chat is, most of the time, not only uncalled for in almost every case but actually worse than the alternative: For the support example specifically, I believe the best way to resolve most issues is to: 1) get as much necessary information as possible in the first question, whether that’s automatically collected, or submitted through a form etc 2) have it quickly end up in the hand of a technically competent person who can work, in peace, to resolve the issue. Chat or phone calls may seem good because it feels intuitively like it speeds up communication, but it doesn’t. It only creates urgency and frustration on both ends that does nothing to speed up resolution, and often falls back to non-realtime anyway. As for selling stuff, bots have never been a good idea. If you have good UX and clear information there’s no need for a half baked script to guess what the user wants to navigate to, because they can just navigate there themselves.
  • alldayeveryday 4y ago
    > live chat for support is bad Just this week, I had to reach REI because a package showing as delivered was not actually delivered. The carrier researched the problem and told me that I needed to contact the seller. I clicked Live Chat from REI support page, picked from few menu options, got connected to an agent, and within a few mins had sent me out a new order plus refunded me for one item they no longer had in stock. During the chat I had the option to either elect for a new order, or to have full refund. Being on standby "like a radio operator" allowed quick exchange and resolution. I much preferred this to a phone call or elongated email exchange. My POV is that different people have different tastes/preferences concerning the channels they want to use to receive support. I think it is good when companies offer multiple options.
• josefresco 4y ago
  Competent live chat for a paid service is amazing. I pick it every time over support ticket, email, & telephone.
• rgavuliak 4y ago
  I've encountered a couple of those on career pages which I feel is extremely unnecessary.
• mirzap 4y ago
  This is heavily biased. You want someone to adapt business case to your preference. I personally hate those bubbles as well. I also hate pages overblown with ads, newsletter dialogs, browser asking for permissions etc. But I'm not most people. Most (regular) people like it and use it. Most people don't mind the ads as well. They don't mind those annoying browser notifications asking permission to receive updates. It is how it's supposed to be for them. So, like it or not, if you run B2C business - you really need those little annoying chat bubbles.
  • Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    > Most people don't mind the ads as well. In my experience, non-technical users dislike ads as well, they just don't know there's something you can do about it.
• zorrolovsky 4y ago
  I dislike live chats but many users and businesses see value in such functionality... who am I (or the author) to demand they stop? There's a mantra in UX that says: "you are not your users". The way I interpret that mantra is that you shouldn't assume that your opinions, preferences, motivations and behaviors are the same as other users'. In other words, a single experience or use case will never cover 100% of the needs of all users. Sorry to state the obvious, but different people have different needs, and they see value in different things. To demand that "XYZ" stops because one person doesn't like it is so wrong and myopic... it's actually a pet peeve of mine. It's fine to share your experience "When I open my email, I do XYZ" but for the love of god, never make the sweeping assumption that your experience covers everybody else's' needs or opinions.
• codazoda 4y ago
  I used a chat app on a technical blog and loved chatting with users (who often didn’t believe I was real). I didn’t nag, however.
• chrsw 4y ago
  "Our web experience is so poor even aggressive nagging about a useless chatbot isn't going to make using this site feel substantially worse. Welcome."
• jFriedensreich 4y ago
  I cant overstate how important sane defaults are for tools. most average integrator will leave options enabled that tools have to show all their features and get exposure. this is extremely relevant for playing toxic welcome sounds and showing nag messages as well as marketing triggers to offer something. Unfortunately tools like intercom have these features to be able to sell to marketing departments and they also want to get exposure to their customers users otherwise they would hide these features behind giant warning messages that these features will upset users if used inappropriately. on the other hand if a discrete chat button is easy to find without sounds and without nag and obstructing other UI this is a godsend to quickly resolve issues without having to deal with entering email adresses, navigating support forms and finding the help on the buttom of some menu or faq.
• thelock85 4y ago
  > unintrusive live chat that I chose to enable. After living in South America for a stint, I have an entirely new appreciation for WhatsApp for desktop and sites that include one-click integration.
• deleted 4y ago
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• IsaacSchlueter 4y ago
  Take the data point for what it's worth (ie, not much). I have never found these chat popovers useful, I have always found them obstructive, and I have always been seething with resentment when forced to use one for an interaction with a company. It's just slightly less painful than being forced to use ye olde telephone, and I will only use live chat if that is the only other option. Most likely, I will simply give up and use a competitor instead. In any chat I am forced to use, I guarantee I will do my absolute best to radicalize the chat employee against your company and try to convince them to get a different job, or quietly and safely sabotage their employer if they cannot leave. I will make the interaction take as long as possible while doing this, in an effort to drive up costs as much as possible. I am not alone.
• logic_probe 4y ago
  CHat sometimes works. I like _real_ live chat, not those boxes that pop up where you're most likely talking to a bot and can't get a real person. If I'm on a company website for tech support, or have problems with an order, I've seen real live chats, where there's a person on the other side, be useful. It's better than, say, abandoning a complicated order, calling in, and seeing if the agent can find you cart, etc.
• dpcan 4y ago
  Hmm, I disagree, and I also have a few clients that swear by its success. Many times it’s not that you didn’t show enough info on your site, it’s that you purposely withheld info on the site to force a live chat requiring a name and email or you can provide good service in the chat and ask for it. What the consumer wishes were true and what it requires to make a sale are unfortunately at odds in many businesses. It’s still not a perfect world.
• citizenpaul 4y ago
  I don't think I've ever disagreed more with an opinion on here. I think chat support on sites is one of the best things to happen to customer support. It's become my preferred way to contact companies for problems. Some Benefits I've noticed to chat support. 1. You have auto documented your case. 2. You can get service asynchronously. 3. Wait times are IME almost non existent on most chats. 4. Better sites have some really good auto support functions in the chat. I've gotten refunds from nothing more than a few mouse clicks. 5. Chat support doesn't have the "not my department I'll transfer you" nightmare. The main downside is chat support is not consistent across sites some do it really well some do it just OK. All are passable though since most of these chat functions were developed recently its mostly just the company implementation that is bad. Either way I have a better experience than the phone or in person support most times. I suppose the other problem is if the chat support is bad they just ask you to call on the phone anyway but that has been rare for me. Customer support is and always will be a low paid job where you are interacting with people that basically don't care and are putting in minimal effort. They have no authority or power to do anything but follow a script anyways 99% of the time so there is no point in wasting time talking. The chat allows you to get straight to what they are allowed to do. Anything that makes it quicker to a resolution without waiting is a win for me. I do agree that I despise when a site uses the chat as an advertising vector. That is easy to solve same as sites with various types of popup and interstitial ads. I just don't patronize the business.
• ChrisArchitect 4y ago
  Anecdotally there is a sizable portion of customers that want to ask a question without reading much or doing anything or worse having to call or fill out a form, so the prompt and connecting to a person on chat is very effective and quickly gets them to next steps / answers. It comes down to implementation and the gripe about nagging is fair, but the utility of the thing is still valid and like another commenter mentioned it's a great thing that's happened to customer service.
• gspencley 4y ago
  > It reminds me of going to a clothing store and before I’m able to get inside an employee asks me if I need help finding anything. I hate that as much as live chats on websites and it makes me want to leave the store. The worst is when retail employees are paid on commission, then you will get harassed endlessly by different employees asking you if you need assistance when all you're trying to do is look at a damned rubber spatula (I'm looking at you Williams Sonoma!) I go out of my way to avoid shopping at those types of places. I want to get in and get out with as little disruption as possible.
  • conductr 4y ago
    I've learned to just ignore them. Like a beggar asking for change, I just don't make eye contact and keep on with my business. It's awkward in a store but I'm okay with that and it doesn't take long for them to realize I don't need help. The normalization of always-worn-earbuds has been a great enabler of ignoring people in public.
• f1codz 4y ago
  I agree that it popping it on its own is irritating. But having a live chat feature I have found to be very useful. Recently I have had to do a lot of purchasing for my House renovation project remotely (from a different country). It was useful feature, to enquire about specifications, book replacements etc. So much so that on the websites that didn't have this feature, I really missed it.
• bighorseflap 4y ago
  A year ago I probably would have said that live chat is superfluous and annoying. After moving to Europe I have found them useful. The mix of language/cultural differences and legal/social uncertainties sometimes makes it hard to know what I need to apply or register for something. Information may not available on websites, sometimes because the answer depends on your personal circumstances, sometimes because the websites are just old or incomplete. I like sending e-mails. But e-mails are just not taken as seriously; I might wait a week for a response, only to get a curt "That is not possible", which doesn't clarify my situation or point me in the right direction. If I call, I might have to wait a minute, or I might have to wait an hour. I don't get the freedom to wait that long for a call during work hours, and customer service might not be open late at night. In a phone-call I am also limited by my ability to speak a different language on my feet; I often cannot fully express what I want without some considerable forethought. An in-person appointment would be good, but that might have to be booked weeks or (during Covid) months in advance. It may require travelling across the country. And I may not even know what I actually need or want from the appointment, so I don't know what supporting documentation etc. to bring. Live chat solves all these problems. It is asynchronous, so I can stop, think about, and re-read the conversations. Where the language barrier becomes a problem, I can look up definitions. And I get a fast response, which can be followed up with additional questions if my problem is not quite solved. This is much better than waiting days or weeks only to get a non-answer because I asked the wrong question. Intrusive live chat pop-ups are obnoxious, as are "robot menus", but I love the option to chat live with a human. It has helped me many times.
• butz 4y ago
  If your manager or boss insists on adding live chat to website, offer an alternative: facade (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/third-party-facades/ https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/thi...). Website will load faster, won't nag visitors, but chat will be readily available for visitor that actually needs this functionality. And don't forget to measure interactions (how many visitors used live chat and on which pages). That might help to convince stakeholders that live chat is useless, especially if you are using paid version of third party live chat.
• deleted 4y ago
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• johndhi 4y ago
  I work in this industry and it's interesting to see all of the different perspectives here: chat bots are ok if passive and not proactively engaging, chat bots should support authentication, chat bots are evil and shouldn't access cookies at all. People (and customers) do hold all of these different opinions and it's sometimes hard to please them all. As a business, should we try to cater to everyone, or just a certain group? In Europe it's different from America. Personally I do think there's a weird inflection point where once your chat bot gets so fully featured it becomes a website within a website which seems... Unnecessarily small.
  • Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    Have you done ux testing with real users of real websites? Is there really anyone who wants to use chatbots? I have never had a good experience with one. Always a waste of time. It has always been a negative-value product to me.
• throw__away7391 4y ago
  Yeah, this "marketing" chat is pretty annoying, especially when the person on the other end can't do anything more than follow a basic script. Customer support via chat on the other hand is amazing.
• dsaavy 4y ago
  We have a simple chat window that only shows on exit on specific pages of our website (consulting firm). It's been a really efficient way to potential clients to start conversations with us and for us to get them quick and helpful answers. Saves both parties a lot of time and helps both qualify/disqualify each other a lot faster.
• wharfjumper 4y ago
  We started offering live chat on our marketing website about 10 years ago at my previous business. It was staffed by the same humans that worked in sales and support. Customers and prospects loved it. Highly recommended.
• harel 4y ago
  Perhaps I do not need live chat to sell or market me something. But I am very grateful and appreciative to services that provide support as an existing customer in the form of a live chat. It saves me hold time on the phone, it's more immediate than email, and it usually very efficient.
• r4v3n 4y ago
  I can't be more agree with it
• bcx 4y ago
  I think there is some nuance here that is helpful to unpack. We'd almost all agree that: 1. Things that get in the way of solving customer needs are annoying. Most modals, popups, proactive notification that don't happen at the right time. This could include chat, email capture, cookie banners, chat bots, popovers. 2. For almost every business there are some sets of customer needs that require a conversation with a human. This could be building trust, conveying nuance of someone's situation, dealing with an exceptional case, helping someone make an ambiguous decision, etc.. 3. Doing customer communication well requires investment and commitment from the business. (In almost all businesses you are serving customers at scale, where 1 representative at the company is serving anywhere to 100s to 1000s of customers, this ratio is important and varies based on LTV / productivity support etc) I have some experience here. I cofounded Olark live chat (https://olark.com https://olark.com) in 2007. We've seen customers see significant boosts in building trust as demonstrated by chats leading to repeat shoppers and increased retention (this holds across SaaS and e-commerce) when support is done well. This trust also translates to front of the funnel lead growth and word-of-mouth as well (linking to case studies seems like too much for HN). Where customers suffer is when chat is seen as a cost savings device at companies not committed to service, or when marketing thinks you can just spam the heck out of customers and see results -- notably there are results -- but they tradeoff customer goodwill -- these are often the same folks who love popups - and interstitials -- or kind of face customer service with qualifying bots. Love seeing this conversation on HN btw.
• geocrasher 4y ago
  You might not, but I do. Live Chat is my primary means of talking to my customers, doing support for them, and doing sales. It works fabulously. Without it, the business would never have grown to what it is.
• wy35 4y ago
  Another opinion that is basically "well I don't like it so it must be bad for everyone!!!" From the company-side, live chat has generated tons of leads for us vs. just an email address. It's also easier to manage these leads inside live chat software vs. a messy inbox. From the customer-side, it's very annoying to do quick and frequent back-and-forth conversation via email. Replies take way longer and I want to see the entire conversation at once vs. in an email thread. Live chat fills the space of being as fast as phone calls but as convenient as email. There are times when I need instant support but can't call (e.g. if I'm in a noisy cafe and I need to resolve something while I have information pulled up on my laptop).
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  The only thing worse than this, for me, is when it detects your mouse heading for the back button/address bar and it starts trying to interrupt you.
• Rastonbury 4y ago
  That's just an opinion. It's almost like a chatgpt 3 response for "write short blog with hot take on trendy Web thing". Was expecting some data on how this backfired when implemented or something. I like chat when I need it, no digging through a dark pattern looking for support contacts. It also tells me that customer service is at least somewhat of a priority for this company. Otherwise I just ignore.
• BrotherBisquick 4y ago
  I once had to use the live-chat window on my bank's website (Ally, in this case) after I tried calling them and encountered wait times measured in decades. It went perfectly well but to this day I'm not sure if I was speaking to a robot or not.
• sfhh 4y ago
  Gdsggvfd