[eveningsteps]

Very bitter and to the point. I regularly wonder, do the people who want features like these installed — feedback form, "support chat" windows of various degrees of fakeness, subscription offer popups jumping in your face, and other absolutely baffling obstacles — really use their own web sites? Have they ever had to?

[pjerem]

As someone who used to work for one of those companies selling a « support chat » platform, no, they don’t.

The marketing and sales departments never targeted the editorial/dev team of a website/company but directly the sales department or an upper management department of the potential new customer.

Chances are that the developers of those websites have to suffer those bullshit integrations as much as you do. And they also are asked to integrate them.

[ratww]

Those things are often added using Google Tag Manager, so developers (and anyone else seeing non-production pages) normally don't see them.

Funny story: at my previous job the widgets were disabled "forever" from the site (via a cookie) once you logged with your company email. Marketing and marketing devs had emails in another domain to test their widgets.

[Breza]

I tried using one of those homepage chat features for a prospective vendor exactly once. I asked "Does your platform support <xyz system>?" Turns out the person on the other end of the chat had nothing to do with the company and all they could do was collect my email address/phone number and file a ticket for the company to answer. Um... no thanks.

[eitland]

As long as there is an actual live person who can help me behind that chat I actually appreciate it.

I used the chat solution of my broadband provider just a couple of weeks ago and it was a really good experience.

Also, as a former support technician I far prefer text from both sides of the table.

[krono]

A website is a tool, a means to an end. The purpose of chat popups or feedback forms is to further a business goal, not to increase the website's usability.

[thatjoeoverthr]

Is the business goal to get you to click the back button?

[TeMPOraL]

No, the business goal is to lie, trick, cheat and steal, to fuck a potential customer over so they part with their money.

That the customer may not be satisfied afterwards doesn't matter - there are plenty of mitigation strategies, such as lock-in effects, playing off sunk cost fallacy, or drowning negative feedback on third-party sites with bought ratings, reviews and social media likes.

Seeing a site like this should light an immediate warning site in your head, telling you that you don't want to be on the business end of their business goals.

[diordiderot]

You clearly don't understand capitalism.

The business just provided the most value™ to the customer at that moment in time

[TchoBeer]

Their customers being ad companies

[RodgerTheGreat]

It sure is a good thing that externalities don't exist.

[krono]

I myself am blocking these annoyances with an adblocker so I'm in the same boat as you.

That being said, the value that these patterns are gaining the businesses that employ them, must outweigh the value lost from people who are so annoyed that they take their business elsewhere.

It is how it is, unfortunately.

[arp242]

I had a support chat on my business website for a long time; the "business goal" I wanted to further was to make it very easy for people to talk to me, ask questions, etc. I helped out a lot of people with very short turnaround times.

I removed it mostly because it takes a lot of effort to maintain a good level of responsiveness on these kind of things unless you have a dedicated support team.

Some of these support chat popups are a bit too in-your-face, but it sure beats hunting down some email address somewhere.

[Breza]

I like companies that have a "Support" button that leads to a page that offers live chat. Having a chat box on the home page feels gimmicky to me.

[dkdbejwi383]

I visited a retailer's website recently and wanted to use what I thought was a text-chat popover thing to ask a question about stock availability. Once I clicked it, it asked for permission to access my microphone -- err, what? -- when I denied it, I got a chiding message telling me to enable microphone access so I could speak my question, so that some salesperson could listen to it and send me a reply email within the next business day answering my question.

Ridiculous.

[Aeolun]

Hmm, when I was working on one of these customer facing websites the support popup was quite literally directly connected to me (very small company) until we integrated it with the real support system (still just me and one or two other people).

[Minor49er]

Very often, they do not, especially if the site creators are not a part of their own target demographic