[gnicholas]

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!)?

[nuker]

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

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

[gnicholas]

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.

[naet]

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.

[gnicholas]

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

[gorbypark]

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