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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

I too always find the Intercom or similar bubbles incredibly annoying, intrusive and distracting, especially when a bot pops up saying something that I absolutely don't need to focus on.

I think the purpose of this bubble is to promote Intercom. It's for sales/marketing people who see it elsewhere first (but never use themselves) and think it's a great idea. Next thing you know, there's an order coming from the C-level to engage with Intercom and integrate it.

The effect of the integration is that some people will talk and it will seem like an improvement - compared to zero interactions previously, no doubt it is. As a consequence of this, nobody bothers to check if it's the best way to integrate the chat functionality.

(Although this is only one of the 1000 things that are wrong on the web today. All sorts of unnecessary things that you need to ignore, neutralize, refuse, dismiss etc. before you can get to the content.)

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There was an article yesterday about the lack of increased web page performance to match the constantly growing infrastructure - one item that came up was the fact that many sites have unnecessary features that no one asked for. This quote:

> We first added Intercom when we launched Atlist— it just seemed like the startup thing to do.

Seems like a perfect example of a feature that wasn't born out of demand or a perceived demand - it was just one of the bells and whistles available as freebies in frameworks so why not throw it in there.

Isn't it weird that we have entire companies like Intercom or Rasa whose value add is pushing automated, AI-driven "assistants" onto websites, and then the companies that buy into that entire value add and codebases hacked on by ML experts find that none of it even works better than how it was in 1998?

I could understand the thought process at first glance. NLP is revolutionizing things. Startups want the lastest technology if it's backed by Arxiv papers underneath enough layers. There is the image of people working dead-end jobs in call centers answering questions that nobody wants to spend time on but need to get answered anyways. So why not just make all of that go away, by inserting this ready-made digital replacement into your package.json?

I feel like the point is being missed though. Because even a call center employee working at Comcast is still a human. I think people are getting way too ahead of themselves in thinking code and "neural" networks (what a misleading term) can suddenly automate all of these things that could never be automated before, like dynamic conversations. And even before that the article proves that a single HTML form element is 62% more effective than a VC-backed GPT2-powered "solution" to a problem nobody had. Why require a dynamic conversation at all if e-mail works better?

Maybe there's some property about human interaction with founders or call center workers that's fundamentally impossible to replicate with technology, at the philosophical level, and we'd be better off investing into human resources instead of spending all of this engineering effort trying to work around that fact. Or maybe there theoretically isn't such a limitation, but I have serious doubts that 2020 is the year we'd finally be ready to declare that we've gotten past them.

While intercom's advertising may like to tout bots and AI chat, I can't imagine that is why most companies use it. They have a plethora of other features, sort of like proactive marketing automation that make it useful.

If it were just about the chat we would have dropped them for a cheaper solution long ago.

They continue to roll out new features and charge more and more for them though, so they will eventually run us off. Just not yet.

It's unfortunate because AI in its current form has properties that would be amazing for human labor augmentation, but I would argue that the kind of AI system you can get for less than $10 million/1-2 years development time is not really well suited to replace a human agent.

The ML sprinkled over MS Office, Facebook's image tagging interface, GMail are often very useful to me, but I can't see anyone finding the suggestions so reliable they would be comfortable letting the systems silently work without guiding the process and approving changes.

It's good to have someone keeping an eye on the customer interactions. If you have such a deluge of support requests that this is a problem, maybe the actual solution is a simpler process or better communication up front.

> 62% more effective

This is the thing that is odd to me about this article.

They increased the number of conversations, ok. But are conversations valuable? How about actual conversions (not conversations)?

If conversions remained the same, but conversations went up, it seems pointless.

I see this issue a lot with social media, everyone wants to have share buttons and so on, but few step back and think about if that even makes sense and if their customers even want to engage with them in that way.

There's a perceived need for a Facebook page or Twitter, but how much value does it really add to either party. Especially in commerce where conversion correlates with speed, is it really worth paying that performance cost? As an example, last week I removed a bunch of integrations for a client that were adding no value and adding roughly 1.5s to First Contentful Paint.

Though as a strategy, it sometimes pays off to hurt your competitors by focusing them on features that are useless or cost them money.

The most frustrating experience is when I'm already paying for an app and intercom constantly nags me and gets in the way of me using the actual app.

I recently tried to buy an electric skateboard ($1000+) and couldn’t get to the add to cart button because of the chat interface. A competitor had a similarly rated/speced board so I bought theirs.

Why not just remove it with inspect element?

Because fuck intrusive sales. Shouldn’t need developer tools to buy a product.

Bit much to have to hack around on a website to give that website your money.

Why reward bad UX?

That was actually my line of thinking. I was on mobile and it didn’t work. I jumped onto my laptop and still didn’t work. I felt I had put in enough effort at that point. If I didn’t have what I felt was a fairly perfect substitute in the competitors product maybe I would have tried harder.

Because you're shopping for a skateboard not a web app.

maybe they were on their phone?

That requires multiple clicks to 'fix' someone else's website. There should be a more automated (but still suboptimal) solution where you can add Intercom to your ad blocker though.

Serves you right for thinking you needed a $1000 electric skateboard. Indulgent techie!

I hate those Intercom bubbles and hope they go out of business, but probably won't for the reasons you listed.

I have used them as a business owner of an e-commerce shop and they were surprisingly useful for our customers. I was reluctant to add one to the site but it was absolutely worth it. I did always wish that there was a way to integrate the chat window in to the page layout, though - I think that would be much less obnoxious than the chat bubble pop-up. I started trying to build one like that but never finished.

Wow, I love them. They can be annoying but it's super helpful to click one button for support on sites I use.

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