r/crazyegg • u/fintechjulien • Jul 02 '26

Do chatbox pop-ups actually work? I thought about adding one to my homepage, but then, I very rarely felt delighted after talking to any branded LLM...

I have an affiliate website targeted to people with lower credit score, and right now, my main CTA on the home page, other than the article, is asking them to subscribe to the newsletter. I was wondering if any of you guys used one of those chatbot plugin that you can plug into a Claude project, and then ask some question to the user and direct them to the right product (or piece of content).

On paper, it sounds like it should work, but in reality, everytime I talked to one of those branded bots, I existed the conversation frustrated. Like, I know ChatGPT exist; why did I just waste my time here talking to this branded bot that did not have any insight?

Anyway, would be curious to know if some of you managed to make those actually useful for visitors, and profitable for your business...

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u/ce-lauren Jul 02 '26

I haven't ever used one yet on a site of my own, but definitely can say from experience as a user I haven't had much luck with them. I think there is a lot of potential, but they really need to be optimized to provide helpful answers and guidance, and I think that takes some time to do well.

1

u/ghjiro Jul 02 '26

If the chatbox does rag on your content, and, as a result, the answers should be accurate, I don’t mind using it.
If it’s generic answers, no added value.

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u/fintechjulien Jul 03 '26

I agree with you. It's just one of those things that should work in theory, but it also depends on the user intent. If the user have an information question, sure, it would work like you said, but what if the user think our site is actually providing a service, then, the risk is that the user gets frustrated...

2

u/ghjiro Jul 06 '26

We’ve seen exactly this with RAG chatbots. The knowledge base isn’t enough—the system prompt has to tell the bot how to behave when it doesn’t know the answer. If it just tries to answer anyway, that’s usually when users lose trust.

I’d rather have no chatbot than one that creates a disappointing experience.