You don't need live chat on your website | Hacker News Reader

You don't need live chat on your website

timharek.no

517 points5amdotis226 comments

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.

I have used those chats, talked to humans, and had my issues resolved - but I can't say it was a great experience.

I had to keep the relevant tab open and actively watch it because there is no sane method to get the notification if it's in background. Can't get distracted for too long, gotta actively watch that stupid chat for when someone comes in or replies after "I need a few minutes to do something for you, please hold on".

Also, I was nervous that any accidental navigation actions (like clicking on some page link) I take in my browser would lead to loss of that chat session. Basically, I was trying to not breathe in the direction of that chat and hope that it would work. I mean, it shouldn't, but I've seen it happen.

Honestly, I'd rather see a bunch of links to various messaging platforms. Or a phone number I can send a text to. Humans or machines, short or long response times - at least I know the underlying technologies are reliable.

I have had the same feeling – "this is okay, but could be way better"; I think a big part is in the lack of context.

Why on earth does the chat person need ask me my account number yet again? I am logged in to the website, they should be able to see that I am Account # 820914 and currently viewing Order # 788321.

Ensuring that this sort of context communication as the lowest bar for an in-app chat would go a long way towards making me prefer it to a conversation where I have to gather and route relevant information.

I never let call centers get away with asking me for account numbers over and over again without commenting on it; Amdocs and other vendors have had great software for keeping track of customer interactions between multiple people you talk to at a call center for 10+ years now. Management will make the usual excuse ("we can't afford it") but you can turn that around and ask "how can you afford to pay people to ask the same questions over and over again?"

At a hospital or clinic, it is common to be repeatedly asked your name and birthdate, even by the same nurse. It's not because they don't remember your birthdate. It's a procedural security measure in a busy, complicated environment to minimize how often they mistakenly hand you a bottle of someone else's pills.

I imagine this might be similar.

It's not. Hospital personnel do indeed ask you the same questions repeatedly to make sure they're treating the right person, but online vendors rarely have such high consequences attached to getting this wrong.

I suspect the real answer is that when they finally hand you off to a live human being, that human is sitting in the boiler room of a third-tier contractor on a different continent than the main headquarters of the business, and they have no idea what you're currently looking at on your screen. It's technically possible to do this handoff with a complete picture of how the user got there, but that requires a degree of technical integration most companies don't seem to want to pay for.

To be fair, in my experience they almost always tell explain the reasoning for repeatedly asking this information "for security reasons I must confirm your information again". Maybe I was just lucky with good places and people, but I never had wondered why the heck they need the information they already have on file (or worse, that I have already told them some minutes ago), because from their brief explanations I understand that they have some form and they must type in my data in there for verification.

> I never let call centers get away with asking me for account numbers over and over again without commenting on it; Amdocs and other vendors have had great software for keeping track of customer interactions between multiple people you talk to at a call center for 10+ years now. Management will make the usual excuse ("we can't afford it") but you can turn that around and ask "how can you afford to pay people to ask the same questions over and over again?"

But presumably you are talking to customer-service agents, not representatives, and what are they supposed to do about it? I share your frustration, but this seems to be just a recipe for spreading that frustration, not for resolving it.

(Unless you meant something else, e.g., you are professionally involved in call-center design, in which case I applaud your being a voice of sense in that domain, and thank you for it!)

I am polite but firm most of the time with agents, but I do get chances to talk with people who have the authority to change things. Raising a stink and ‘let me talk to your supervisor’ really can lead to tickets getting forwarded to people who can fix the process or at least give agents training in how to avoid or manage ‘lights on nobody home’ situations.

Lately I have been facing a breakdown in business processes with my local electric utility that first disconnected my electricity because one of my tenants made a mistake. I think they finally understand that I have three services at two houses at one address, but I went through two periods since then of getting no electric bill for months (which I won’t let slide because the last time they stopped billing me I got disconnected.) Getting that fixed involved waiting three hours on hold which got me talking to regulators again. The crew building the new deck at the other house has also deferred work because they have been unable to get through to anyone there who can turn the service off temporarily so they can work near where the wire comes in.

> Why on earth does the chat person need ask me my account number yet again?

Because their integration isn't very good.

Ones I've used, as long as you've configured a way to resolve the user, it pops right up in the service side of the chat system.

> Ones I've used, as long as you've configured a way to resolve the user, it pops right up in the service side of the chat system.

Be scared of those. They typically use client side JavaScript to read a cookie to know which username is active.

There is usually no verification of that info, so obviously it could be faked by a malicious client.

The docs say that, but it's way too easy to just trust the info rather than setup a properly secure solution.

I could see that being really bad... A 'social engineer' could talk support people into helping them hijack an account.

I would love to watch the inevitable presentation we'll be seeing at some security convention within the next few years.

This is a good point. You can definitely verify a user off of context (signed tokens, etc.), but you're probably right that a lot of folks don't do a great job of that!

> Or a phone number I can send a text to.

Or a phone number that you can actually call and which is picked up by a human within a reasonable time frame and who is actually empowered to solve your problem.

And to my surprise that actually still exists.

Just recently I had a stellar experience with the support of my hosting provider.

30 seconds wait, a person who knew what I'm talking about. Solving the problem instantly by mailing the relevant form, while we still chatted. All resolved in less than 5 minutes.

For what it's worth: that was hostpoint.ch. I'm not invested in any way. Just a very happy customer after 2 really good support experiences (one by email)

> Or a phone number that you can actually call

Of course, but I skipped this because I had tried to stay in scope of a text chatting.

Personally, I'd love to see more businesses accepting texts (SMS/Signal/Matrix 3PIDs/WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever works for them - just clearly indicating that they do). I'm an US resident but not a native English speaker - and while I've chatted online a lot, I have relatively limited experience talking to other people. So I have some difficulty talking to people, especially if my and their accents make conversation... less smooth than we both would prefer. Or at least I feel some non-negligible amounts of uneasiness before having to make an actual call. It's not too bad and I'm trying to improve as much as I can, but for some important conversations I'd rather use more reliable methods if those are available.

And to extend on this example, due to family matters I'm currently overseas in Mexico - and I only know very basic Spanish that is nowhere sufficient for any intelligible conversation beyond ordering food or asking for directions. Thankfully, almost every business seem to have a WhatsApp number so with a help of translation software I was able to do quite a bunch of non-trivial requests.

And while my case is maybe not that important (except for me), there are always folks with genuine speech and/or hearing disabilities who could be unable to use voice communication channels at all.

Oh, and texts allow asynchronous communications. I love that I can text my dentist office and schedule an appointment. I don't expect them to reply immediately (they won't if I text off-hours), but I know that they would receive my message and respond when they have a moment. Which is all I need, and my phone will notify me when they reply back.

Thanks!

I really appreciate your reply. It makes it quite clear that there really are cases where voice is not the best option.

Sometimes we are a bit blind to the need of others since we're too much focused on our own preferences and needs

In that sense your comment helps to see things from another perspective and teaches a bit humility in the process.

I'd say sometimes those services are successful but sometimes they aren't. It's not unusual for those things to claim "I am a human" but the human is nowhere to be found. For me it is a general pet peeve that everybody wants to open up UI elements that cover up whatever it is I want to interactive.

There's a bad idea which keeps coming back which are attempts to replace asynchronous communications (web forums, emails, ...) with more synchronous communications such as chat sessions, discord, etc. I can't wait until somebody tries making you go to a waiting area in "the metaverse" and spend an hour looking like a dork waiting for help. Lately I have been appreciating how you can a question to a site like

https://www.dpreview.com/forums

probably get a bogus answer in an hour but have multiple great answers in two weeks.

I agree. I also had to use a chat that put you on hold until an operator became free, while the site itself had a auto-logout if you didn’t click a box after X minutes waiting.

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.

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.

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.

fading the music and overlaying the status would be better rather than the abrupt cut.

Best of all is the system where they ring you back when they are ready

> 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.

I have almost never encountered this while on hold (the closest I have come is the despicable "we are experiencing unusually long hold times", all the time), and it would be so good. What I particularly hate about the repeated announcements of the type you describe is that they are often much louder than the background music, so, not only do they train me not to pay attention, they force me to turn the volume way down, or hold the phone far from my ear, making it still harder to hear when a human comes on the line.

Revolut's in-app chat was like that. You may have to wait over 4 hours, so obviously you're not looking at the screen when a person picks it up. Then when you take a look you find they've replied and then left, and you have to wait for another person on a different shift to pick up your reply.

The trouble is, this was also their only support channel. No phone or web or email.

This went on for nearly 1 week when I was trying to talk to them to unblock my blocked-for-no-reason account a few years ago, and their response times got progressively slower.

In the end a quick message on social media got the account unblocked in 20 minutes. How?!

Bad internal structure, is how.

The other annoying thing is when the human asks the same questions I already answered to the bot.

The chat boxes that actually are chat don't bother me. Provided they don't try to pop-up unrequested or otherwise make themselves annoying, I actually like them. They can be really handy for asking a quick pre-sale question or getting support.

The ones that are just a shitty interface to a FAQ suck, though. I don't even like it when they're as you describe, because its eventually turning into an actual chat with a real person is kinda-hidden functionality.

Exactly. When I know I can get a real live helpful person, it is awesome. When it is a bod that will just try to find information in the FAQ that I've already read, it is not very useful. When it is a live person who only knows how to give me the phone number and say, "please call during business hours" it is very annoying.

Yeah that filters out probably the 90% of trivial requests.

It ought to be possible to closely integrate a chat bot with a human so that people don't even notice the transition... It is always fair for a human to say "let me talk to my supervisor" and it is the same for a bot.

When I need live chat support, it's because I've already exhausted the help center and can't find my answer elsewhere. I really do need to speak with a human.

Fortunately, many chatbots in my experience will indeed switch over to human support if I write "I want to speak with a human". I'm glad they take that into account.

I'm glad you had that experience. In my experiences with both website based and call center based chat bots, the primary goal is to make it as difficult as possible to reach a real person, if I have a detailed question. I'll get a few menu options and maybe a link to an FAQ. I find it unbearable.

You, along with most people on this site, are not the average consumer for these type of chat apps though. People aren't exhausting the help center, reading FAQ's, searching other sites, they're probably barely even reading anything on a help center at all.

I approach it from the other direction nowadays. I'll hit up live chat instead of checking the help center. If they're going to annoy me with that on every page, I'm going to use it. And if it wastes their time on something trivial, that's on them.

Does that actually benefit you though? Is it more efficient for you to wade through a chatbot or wait for a human to respond rather than read the documentation?

This is the ideal scenario when building these out. Automate a lot of the low-hanging fruit that most people are going to be looking for, then seamlessly convert to a support chat with a human as needed

> 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.

>so long as it's connected me to a human rather than a menu of chatbot options

Key point here. Chatbots are a universal "please despise my company" tool.

If you don't have a live human available - don't show me the chat button.

If it is clear I'm talking to a chat bot, then I have the option. But if you make me jump through hoops to get a human and then give me a bot, I'm going to be pretty annoyed at you.

Overall I had very mixed experience with chats for support, because it is impossible to get past the bot. Or if, it takes age for a human to show up, then they disconnect if i don't respond immediately.

But my bank, which is horrible is many ways, has implemented it exactly right and the chat has been my main way of interacting with them for a year or so. It starts out with a chatbot listing common FAQ topic but also says that at any point I can just type "Asesor" (Advisor) to be connected to a human, which usually takes little less than a minute. They can then trigger authentication from within the chat so they can actually do basic things related to the products (but not things like e.g. doing transfers).

I’ve found they are particularly effective when the chat option only pops up on the “contact us” page, and it goes direct to a human (with a max of one question to route the request).

Amazon gets points for having the worst implementation I’ve seen. Although it doesn’t pop up and spam you, if you click through on the website or app, it connects you to an incompetent chat bot.

Third parties provide direct links to Amazon’s competent chat bot that can actually handle basic requests.

Seriously, WTF are they thinking?!?

I agree. A live chat support option, appropriately staffed, is often the most expedient way to get help.

I work configuring contact center software. Chat agents are often more experienced, "tech savvy", and less overloaded than phone agents too. And Chat is harder to ignore than Email, which Agents can just give a token reply to punt it back to the pending queue.

Absolutely agree. Don't give me a sales pop up when I look at your landing page, but if you have an Intercom chat on your support page, I'm all ears. Had to contact Stripe support a few weeks ago and they got to me pretty quick and were really good about it. I think the company I work for spams you on the landing page unfortunately...

It’s way over the place, sometimes it’s great, sometimes you have to wait in a queue for half an hour, sometimes it’s just a cheap bot shield in front of the customer service representatives.

The one time I used the live chat (to attempt to cancel my Economist subscription) they immediately left the chat

It's time for this to be a protocol, and built into the browser.

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.

> A live chat window can be relatively ignored and checked once in a while.

Some live chat implementations have taken the liberty of requiring an input from your end every X minutes, otherwise the chat terminates. Support agents have literally told me "please wait a while while I look into this" followed by "are we still connected?" just a few minutes later.

I hate this so much. I get the idea, but it's infuriating if I have to repeat the whole process just because I was distracted for 5 minutes.

I know what you mean.

However, you can't expect a company to tie up a support person for 48 hours on their screen and you get back to them 2 days later, that is ridiculous.

Where is that line drawn that is not too short and not too long? I don't know, but there has to be a line.

I do think it is my responsibility to continually check my screen to see if there's been an answer to my last message. There are two sides and both must be responsible actors. I think 5 minutes is plenty of time, for example. As the saying goes, "You snooze, you lose."

And it has happened to me and everyone else, of course. BUT, and here is the cool thing - when I get back on the chat, I just say that I was chatting and got distracted...but then the tech support person can go review the notes and quickly get up to speed on the conversation.

I love chat.

> Where is that line drawn that is not too short and not too long?

48 hours seems reasonable. Because that support person isn't tied up, they're answering other chats until you reply.

Otherwise, at least several times the time it took the agent to meaningfully respond.

I find that if you just reply after their message, the chat status goes to "waiting on agent", so you don't get disconnected while they look.

Before signing up to a new service, I tend to contact their support first to assess how difficult it is to contact them.

If I have to wait for an hour to get support, or navigate through some maze to reach them, or find it difficult to attempt to terminate my contract, I'll go with someone else.

When I really need help or something is wrong, that's not when I want to find out that it is almost impossible to reach them.

Note to self: Use ChatGPT to immediately respond to any support request that aren't from existing users so that potential customers have to perform the Turing test.

Plot twist: the chat bot is also running the Turing test. If the potential customer passes, they can sign up. Otherwise, “Contact us for pricing” and I don’t mean it as an anti-bot feature…

Why would you exclude so many modern MBAs from using chat? :)

> Emailing a large company can result in waiting for a reply taking 3-5 business years. Live chat gets me a response relatively quickly.

I've had the same experience, and I don't understand why. In both cases, someone needs to read what you write and reply to it with a message. Why can't the just treat email just like live chat?

I dislike live chat because it forces me to wait for their responses (I'm looking at you, Amazon, minutes to type 10 words?) and dedicate time to it instead of putting all the information into an email and sending it and communicating asynchronously.

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.

Are they better than a well-stocked FAQ with a search function?

A lot of the people on HN might be very willing and able to search a FAQ to try and answer their own questions.

But you would not believe how many average people refuse to spend even 10 seconds trying to answer own question and insist on reaching out to a human even when the answer is very obviously readily available. Sometimes this makes sense; there's some scams out there and at least speaking to a native English-speaking person is reassuring when it comes to who you trust your money with. But sometimes some people are just miserable and want to annoy others.

> "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.

NearlyFreeSpeech has an incredible FAQ: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq

From the other side of the fence - you can base your FAQs on actual questions (to the point of highlighting and bolding the most common) only to keep getting a significant amount of requests with that exact same question multiple times a day.

Absolutely.

But in most cases I think it is both: FAQ isn't updated/relevant && people don't check it.

I can confirm that - at least in my experience - FAQ's are pre-made (and never or rarely updated), when a new service/site/whatever starts, it is logically nonsense that there is even one FAQ.

In theory everything should be clear from the info/documentation/manual, and when it is not so (as it often happens) and something is actually frequently asked, not only an entry in the FAQ list should be added (together with its FGA[0]) but the sheer fact that it is frequently asked should mean that the topic is not clear enough in the info/docs/etc and these should also actually be corrected/updated.

As a "disciplined" user (who actually did read both the FAQ's and the documentation) when you (manage to) contact (via mail/chat or phone) the assistance with a question/doubt there are usually three possibilities:

1) the assistant knows less than you on the topic and cannot answer properly

2) the assistant is competent and manages to answer your question, though with some difficulty (you made an original question)

3) the assistant is competent and answers your question easily because it has already been answered by him/her tens or hundreds of times (your question was not so original but never made it to the published FAQ's)

#3 is the clear sign of a failure in the way FAQ's are managed.

[0] http://jdebp.info/FGA/fga-not-faq.html

> Acronym for "frequently asked questions"; a list of answers to frequently asked questions that can be presented to a community (be it a forum, Usenet newsgroup, or software user base) so that the same questions need not be asked over and over again. In the entire history of their use, not one has ever been used for its intended purpose.

From the BonqQuest glossary https://www.jerkcity.com/glossary.html

What the chat should have is something like a chat interface that exposes the FAQ via question and answering, through natural language processing, basically like ChatGPT but it doesn't need to be that advanced.

If the bot can't find the answer, connect to a human. That way, the company's support burden is decreased while still being able to talk to a human if needed.

This could be an email, but of course the business doesn't want this as it would create a record of interaction. Whenever I had to use live chat it was a tactic to wear you down.

A decent amount of the time I've been asked at the end of a live-chat if I would like a transcript emailed to me.

I just now chatted with Amazon, and not only do they not send (or ask to send) a transcript, they even clear the chat once the agent has left so you can't even save it yourself.

I can't imagine any other reason but "we don't want the customer to be able to have a record".

in my case it was very much just a dark pattern used by a local ISP (they also removed all possible email contacts)

These are almost always saved by the business/chat app.

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.

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.

I just type "No thank you, I have no questions yet!" in those boxes. Then shortly after you will something like "<Support person Foo has entered the chat.> <Support person Foo has left the chat.>".

If everyone would do this then eventually the company would be forced to remove the initial chat bubble since their support is wasting 90% of their time looking at bullshit "No thank you!" answers.

> If everyone would do this then eventually the company would be forced to remove the initial chat bubble since their support is wasting 90% of their time looking at bullshit "No thank you!" answers.

or they'd get worse since someone would somehow figure out a way to prove it's "customer engagement" and therefore valuable.

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.

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.

It's pretty sad that even little startups these days are ending up doing it. They usually have two or three people "available" through chat but the chatbox punches you in the face even when you're just a visitor trying to check out what the fuck their startup does.

If they could, they'd trigger something on your phone or computer that causes a knife to stab you in the face the first time you open their site. But alas, their power is limited to rendering the site unusable and unreadable.

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

Whenever it nags, I click on it and ask how to remove the chat.

Then I say it doesn’t work, because, clearly it doesn’t. At one point they give me a real person to talk to.

That’s what in-product char is for, right, resolving UX issues?

I’ve been looking for months for a time-tracking tool on MacOS and I never subscribe to any because I throw the ball when opening the pricing page and the chat opens. I’m so annoyed I insult them, I really need a time tracking tool for my team.

I can recommend to you the open source tool ActivityWatch.

I think this is the default for services like Intercom and you can't stop it [0]. It's super annoying.

0: https://www.intercom.com/help/en/articles/5053699-how-do-i-s...

Could we simply block it with an adblocker?

Firefox has and addon called "Hello, Goodbye" that does: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hello-goodbye...

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.

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.

That’s why I have such contempt for my fellow voters.

How in the hell?

A few weeks ago, I had Amazon accidentally send me someone else's package, who lives about five blocks away from me. Not even the same street name. But it reported my own package as having been delivered, which clearly was not the case.

I wrestled with that stupid chatbot for probably two hours. There was no option in its menu for this specific problem. It would only allow to report not receiving something, and the only option given to me was to wait a few more days, or report the wrong item had been delivered, in which case I needed to send it back. I tried calling the support phone number instead, but it was just the same chatbot but over voice, with the same options.

But this wasn't my problem. I had the right package. It just wasn't mine. It wasn't addressed to me. If I returned it, how would they know if it was me who sent it back?

I don't even remember how I finally found a phone number to call that connected me to a human, but I'm pretty sure I had to outside of Amazon to find it. As soon as I got connected to a human and explained what happened, they were more or less instantly able to help me, but it was incredibly frustrating not having the bot itself give me an option to talk to a human. I could only complete it's automated workflows.

Amusingly, the CSR told me to just keep this other guy's package and they'd send him another, even though I could have easily walked down the street and given it to him. Fine, I guess. It was a pressure washer attachment that actually does fit my pressure washer.

> I had the right package. It just wasn't mine. It wasn't addressed to me.

I think this assessment was the root of your problem. This wasn't what happened. What happened was two separate things and the mistake was tying them together.

You didn't get your package they claimed to have delivered. Full stop. Deal with that problem.

Second, you received a package addressed to someone else. Deal with that separately.

>It would only allow to report not receiving something, and the only option given to me was to wait a few more day

If you need the package soon, that’s not great.

The problem is that as a customer, it's hard to distinguish between the chats that are actual, human-will-respond-in-near-real-time chats, which are just a piss-poor FAQ bot that leads nowhere, which ones are a FAQ bot leading to a human, and which ones will ask me for an e-mail address (and if they do, which ones will spam me instead of contacting me in case a followup is needed).

Actual chat that's passively available on request and makes clear what it is is great. Anything that pops up, makes noise, or otherwise begs for engagement, or isn't "click here for human", is an anti-feature.

I think there's a difference between live _support_ chat and live _sales_ chat. If I'm seeking support I'll take live chat any day of the week.

I actually just complained about this yesterday- I do _not_ want to have your shitty version of clippy[0][1] flying around the screen, pulsing, and asking if I need help while I'm browsing your page. Stick it on the support/contact page and that's plenty good for me.

[0]: https://media.welsh.cc/Mod27D

[1]: https://media.welsh.cc/e1tniz

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.

The availability of chat isn't what's wrong. It's the implementation. It should just be a static button in the header/footer or where ever. When I need it, I can find it, just like every other link.

> I personally use amazon customer support chat myself very often.

For what?

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.

Exactly this. Usually they even say just take the money back and keep the product (when livechat is used).

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.

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.

> 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.

Email certainly has its flaws, but none of that has any material impact on how quickly chucky123 can reply to a contact form rather than a chat window. A contact form on a website just sends a POST request to a server, and then that server notifies chucky123. The process could be identical to using chat in that respect (it often isn't, but we're talking about a specific instance rather than the general case.)

If chucky123 replies to the notification immediately via chat or via email the user should get pretty much the same experience. Suggesting this is a benefit of chat doesn't make much sense on a technical level. It isn't. It's just a benefit of replying to contact requests quickly.

> "do not reply below this line"

If you're going to use email for customer interactions, then respect the conventions of email. I will reply below whatever line I choose. If your software doesn't support that, then answer the phone.

On point. Plus the fact that chat has conventions that closely related to how we talk naturally vs etiquette based emails means that you can drop a whole bunch of charade and just talk to your users naturally.

Another factor is not everyone is a hacker who reads their email after sending a form or understands how all this works in the first place. Most people have {e|g}mail because it’s that sign-in thing that their hacker relative set up for them.

Another big chunk of people doesn’t get that they can tap on a chat button, that’s why it flashes and pops up automatically or after a timeout of inactivity, which means a user is probably confused.

I wish there were levels of accessibility in the web tech. So you could specify not only whether a user can see or hear at all, but also select from few levels of computer knowledge, from beginner to confident to 30 years of software development, so everyone could get a reasonable experience.

Actually I wonder if this could be a growth area for Slack. E-commerce chat.

I had to chat with Verizon reps yesterday to set up my phone. They asked for my device ID or some other configuration numbers. I sarcastically put in 11023 <a lot of zeroes> 47781 (number is fake for this example).

And what appeared in the chat was 11023 47781. The chat app truncated anything between <>. Probably an attempt at XSS protection. But not the behavior I was expecting.

So if a company doesn’t have the capacity to do chat well, why not outsource it to a company that can? Make the integration easy, style the pop up to each company that uses it. Boom, new revenue stream.

If I'm browsing an SaaS and see a chat box that says someone is online. I'm much more likely to ask a question to the chat where I would otherwise just leave without trying to contact support in another way.

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.

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).

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?

> 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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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!)?

> This meant that we needed to respond immediately, which was a downside.

Isn’t the whole point of having chat on your site?

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.

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.

Oh, these people never have anything they want to accomplish, other than to waste the time of a person (or cycles of a computer)!

I would just advertise it explicitly as an actual human. “Click here to chat with a real, live human!”, etc.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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."

I'm not sure if your question is rhetorical, but I'd like to know this too. My observation is that what started as a decent idea was quickly hijacked by marketing departments and got corrupted so quickly that they've become an annoyance to me -- not unlike pop-ups, browser push notifications, and so forth. It's the "tinted car windows" of the web, immediately putting your site into a bad neighborhood.

Anecdotally, I've had far more success DM'ing companies on Twitter -- I don't think I've ever gotten a bot-like, automated response when taking that route, and I've had really specific questions answered quickly and thoroughly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fortunately we’re getting more bots so you’re much less likely to waste your time with a human these days.

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.

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.

If your manager or boss insists on adding live chat to website, offer an alternative: facade (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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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) 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.

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.

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.

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.

Live chat upped the conversion % like nothing ever did. It's massively useful, no matter how good your site is.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Indeed it was, because I still got everything sorted in around the same time than I'd be on hold if I were to phone for example my broadband provider.

The issue is that (probably) your broadband provider support/reply times are terrible (on the phone) so you appreciate the (convoluted/complex) experience via chat with Logitech and Amazon as "quite good compared to ...", since every company for this or that reason has lowered down to almost non-existant the level of assistance the few times that it is bearable and somehow it leads to a solution, it appears as (relatively) good.

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.

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

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.

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.

Zawinski's second law states that all software with messaging/chat eventually becomes a dating app.

no, linkedin hasn't

Are you sure about that?

I know if at least one case where it has...

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.

My startup uses live chat and our human median response time is sub 60 seconds. Our customers love it.

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)

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.

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!

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.

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.

You're describing every customer forum with answers like "I reinstalled Windows and that fixed the problem!!!"

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

"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."

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.

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 :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3dxMGzt5mU

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.

I like the live chat option when it's just there and doesn't bother me. I don't like writing emails to support.

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.

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.

> And almost every time I see this “nagging” I want to leave the website Well, just do leave, what's the problem?

Competent live chat for a paid service is amazing. I pick it every time over support ticket, email, & telephone.

Some are great some suck. Amazon live chat has always been helpful. Anything tech-related has been totally useless.

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.

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.

I've encountered a couple of those on career pages which I feel is extremely unnecessary.

Live chat often is the fastest and easiest way to contact a human without having to register.

I can't be more agree with it

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?

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

Gdsggvfd

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.

    * 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.

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.

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/

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.

> 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.

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