Chat bubble blindness —- a new thing?

[jeffgreenfield]

Found this on Hacker News ... (https://www.atlistmaps.com/in-good-company/chat-bubble-blindness)

Company saw exponential increase in online chat request by REMOVING the chat bubble and adding a link to Live Chat in their navigation.

anyone else try this / experience this yet?

 

[Alex Snyder]

great idea! I'm going to try it.

 

[jeffgreenfield]

@Alex Snyder - do come back and let us know the results!

(Personally ... I cannot stand those bubbles -- they def get in the way for me!)

 

[Marc Lavoie]

Chat bubbles have to be just like any call-to-action to make them useful and fun to use: contextual.

They get annoying when they pop as soon as you get onto a website, this is non-sense.

Contextual timing & content will help your customer and in turn, your business. These tools are for them, not for you. The sooner you understand this, the better. It's a lot more work, but also very effective.

Quick tip if you're considering this: Set a chat bubble on a single page that's driving a lot of traffic (top 10 pages in your site) but that also has the higher exit %.

This way you can see what's wrong with your page, and keep it manageable on your end.

 

[jeffgreenfield]

I love the part about the "higher exit %" .... they're going to leave anyway ... might as well find a way to keep some of them around!

Great advice Marc!

 

[Dan Sayer]

Is that just for desktop? Wonder if the same applies to mobile.

 

[todd.smith]

This is an exciting topic. I read the article, and I am not sure I would say with any sense of conclusiveness that this could work at scale or across industries. I think every business website has a particular customer persona that might be more applicable to a chat pop icon versus a passive link on a page. It also has to do with the amount of information provided on the page, how easy it is to navigate, and a whole host of small things that determine the effectiveness chat in general on the website. Automotive websites in general suck, so chat becomes a catch-all that fills a gap where the website underperforms.

I have always been one to put chat at the intersection of action versus just placing it on every page popping up and annoying the shopper trying to navigate the site. As it was pointed out in an earlier comment with mobile, your real estate is even more critical, and a giant chat bubble covering up content or worse navigation can and most often is a detriment of the website's performance success.

This is why I believe we will see changes coming to this exciting area of the business soon.