You don't need live chat on your website

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.

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?

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

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

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