[mschuster91]

> I'm intrigued. Why isn't it possible with a contact form?

- E-mail always has a round-trip latency attached, even the best systems will have at least a minute, and you have to do insane amounts of work to keep up with "deliverability" as automated anti-spam systems can and will detect high frequency of incoming emails and downgrade your score, not to mention you have to deal with bullshit like contacting providers that downgraded or outright black-holed you.

- Uploading or sending attachments is a hit-and-miss, there still are providers limiting attachment size to 1MB (looking at you web.de) or with overzealous "security software".

- People will readily ignore the "do not reply below this line" and reply inline, which software like JIRA SD won't recognize or garble up.

- On mobile, people will have to switch between apps, which more often than not even on flagship devices leads to Android killing off the apps between switching for "memory efficiency" and 10+ seconds of load time after each switch.

On-site chat has none of these problems.

[onion2k]

Email certainly has its flaws, but none of that has any material impact on how quickly chucky123 can reply to a contact form rather than a chat window. A contact form on a website just sends a POST request to a server, and then that server notifies chucky123. The process could be identical to using chat in that respect (it often isn't, but we're talking about a specific instance rather than the general case.)

If chucky123 replies to the notification immediately via chat or via email the user should get pretty much the same experience. Suggesting this is a benefit of chat doesn't make much sense on a technical level. It isn't. It's just a benefit of replying to contact requests quickly.

[denton-scratch]

> "do not reply below this line"

If you're going to use email for customer interactions, then respect the conventions of email. I will reply below whatever line I choose. If your software doesn't support that, then answer the phone.

[chucky123]

On point. Plus the fact that chat has conventions that closely related to how we talk naturally vs etiquette based emails means that you can drop a whole bunch of charade and just talk to your users naturally.