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One of the bad ideas cur­rently infect­ing com­pa­nies in the tech­nol­ogy field is the LivePerson “chat with a sup­port per­son now” thing. This is a bad idea for mul­ti­ple reasons:

1. It’s a gigan­tic float­ing piece of garbage dis­tract­ing me from what­ever it is I’m try­ing to learn about your com­pany or it’s products.
2. The rep­re­sen­ta­tives on the other side are idiots who wouldn’t know what cus­tomer ser­vice is were it [insert your preferred-gendered joke here].

Case in point: Limelight Networks. The web­site lists about 15 “Services” they offer, and none of them are imme­di­ately obvi­ous and I don’t want to spend the next hour pars­ing their mar­ketease try­ing to find the spe­cific niche prod­uct I’m look­ing for. So I (like a fool) click the stu­pid chat thing obscur­ing their page. This started at 8:30am and went on until 9:30am.

Jon: Yes what com­pany or site are you from so I can bet­ter help you?
You: [redacted]
Jon: Thank you for wait­ing. I’ll be with you in just a moment.
Jon: I’m sorry for the delay. I’ll be right with you.
Jon: I’ll be right with you.
You: Why don’t you have a sales­per­son con­tact me and just ask me if our web­site is, in fact, a blank page?
Jon: I’m sorry for the delay. I’ll be right with you.
Jon: Thank you for wait­ing. I’ll be with you in just a moment.
Jon: I’ll be right with you.
Jon: I’ll be right with you.
Jon: Thank you for wait­ing. I’ll be with you in just a moment.
You: So what’s the point of this chat, exactly? For me to wait on iHold for an hour while canned mes­sages about your immi­nent reply scroll past?
You: Until I get bored and find another vendor?

After another cou­ple min­utes I just closed the win­dow, and now I’m at Akamai’s site, look­ing at their “solu­tions finder” — which is what I was look­ing for on Limelight’s web­site to begin with.