[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.