Would You Like to Chat? The Many Reasons Add Intelligence Improves Web Chat — forbes.com

Web users are increasingly familiar with an annoying phenomenon afflicting all manner of sites: you’re just browsing around, minding your own business and up pops a chat window asking if there’s anything “it” can do to help (Generally these helpful pop ups aren’t manned by a live agent, but are just a programmatic chat bot). Most times, it’s irritating and the answer is, “No thanks, just passing through.” It’s unfortunate, especially since the site owner is genuinely trying to be helpful, but the overuse and misapplication of an inherently intrusive technology like web chat ends up having the same effect as an animated pop-up ad: it’s an immediate turn off. Indeed, most users are so inured to these things as to ignore them entirely. Most chat invitations are also unhelpful because they’re out of context with what the user is trying to do.

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