I'm not arguing against chat in itself, merely implementations of it that interrupt the flow of what you are doing. For example, chat popups that ask you to in

I'm not arguing against chat in itself, merely implementations of it that interrupt the flow of what you are doing. For example, chat popups that ask you to interact before you've had a chance to even read the title of the page. Every customer who hasn't purchased yet is part of a funnel, and you absolutely CAN test with an A/B test (or equivalent) whether you're losing people when you annoy them by popping something up on the screen. And perhaps I'm an outlier. If the A/B test says you get more sales when you annoy the customer, who am I to argue (or it annoys me and not them). But it does mean you will have them as a customer and not me, and that's fine. I don't think I'm wrong to use this as one of many indicators of how annoying a SaaS is going to be to deal with over the long term.