Keep in mind this is an article extolling the virtues of outsourcing critical components of your business by... a company that you outsource critical customer interaction components to.
By what metric is it dumb? We've found that our chat widget dramatically increased contacts, conversions, and is often used for support.
Personally I am not a fan of annoying chat widgets, but they do seem to work well.
Then they started to blink the tab title.
It's one thing that you do irritating stuff to get my attention when I'm actively on the website, but when I'm doing other things? This is right up there with popunder ads, blocking right click, and autoplaying sounds.
Instant close.