You don't need live chat on your website

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.

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?

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