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Comment by can16358p | Hacker News Reader

Yup. That Intercom overlay is always more of an annoyance than a feature. Intercom is immediately -1 for me as a potential customer.

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you're probably not the intended audience then. we have a help chat on our page as well. I didn't like it either but we've turned a few tire kickers into buyers pretty quick with it. Helps that we are small and one of my cofounders is ready to jump on it as opposed to a minimum wage employee.

Surely there are config options to make it not so freakin' intrusive for the reader?

just checked and we use hubspot. you actively have to click the chat icon to get the message to pop up

One of the first ublock origin rules i setup is to block intercom chat overlays.

What? That's insane. It's literally an almost immediate portal to talking to an actual human on the other side. All companies may not care about response times but a lot of startups make it a goal to relentlessly cut down on response time to where it's mere minutes.

except that it inconveniences the 99.5% (real number from previous company) of users who dont interact with it, and those that do often get stonewalled into the “it looks like nobody is there right now, please leave your email and we’ll get back to you” flow.

we all understand the premise but this form factor has in practice failed to deliver. instead if people want instant response they tend to join the public slack or discord. you know, the apps actually built for community chat.

It works well for switched on companies. I've spoken to very small SAAS company CEOs before via it, which is effective. Maybe something to discard over time.

It's the equivalent of walking in the store and having a sales person show up and ask what you are looking for.

Some people like it, some people hate it. I'm in the latter camp.

Hating an utter annoyance that expands over whatever I'm trying to do in a cheap and cheesy way that literally everyone I know hates too is "insane"?

Well okay then.

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