Only 0.4% of our users chat with us on Intercom— is this low?

Hey Steve, I'm using Crisp and my ratio is even smaller. Less than 10 conversations with ~2500 visitors…
I was about to remove it TBH. I was wondering if the users still really use this kind of chat. I don't know about you, but I don't click on these anymore, most of the time you just start a chat with a dumb bot…
I even tried to start some convos with active users, but I'm pretty sure they thought that was a bot popping :)

God I hate these chat things, as an end user. Let it die

I would send them one welcome message and one timed email to get them back in the app, and give them an open ended way to give feedback by responding to that email or message.

Like, I took a quick look, and I think I might use the product. Curious how it scales though (i.e. doesn't Google charge some API fees once you get some quantity of map views, or are you paying the bill for that?)

I was actually collecting data about this while validating the idea of my project https://github.com/moufette-tools/moufette.

I made a list of SaaS/web apps using Intercom/Crisp, I either messaged the founder and if I couldn't reach them I just messaged them directly via the chat widget.

so far the answers I got say that people only use the widget if they have a specific question to ask, in most cases, something didn't work or them and they need help.
So seems like visitors will not use the chat widget without a very strong motive. For example they will not use it to give you feedback, request feature or report a bug

I'm also experiencing very little response to the chat tool I'm using on my website targetaudience.app. I wonder, do you have automated messages triggered on some pages or events? I don't have automated messages right now and I thought that was the cause that the tool isn't used.

It does seem fairly low, but I guess it depends on what your website is. For example, if you're making a SaaS app I would imagine the percentage to be higher, just because people might have more questions when they're on the landing page or in your app. But if it's a blog/informational website, then likely fewer people would chat with you.

Generally though, the "% of users who start a conversation" is a meaningless metric because it doesn't correlate with how good your website / customer support is. It could just mean that you have done a really great job already answering their questions with your FAQ / blog / other self-serve help material!

If you do want to chat with more users, though, one tactic you could try is implementing a welcome message. Those tend to make more people click through and start a conversation with you. If your target audience is not as tech-savvy, they may not even notice the Intercom button, so messages help to make it more salient.

On the other hand, if you find that you're not getting enough value out of Intercom to justify the cost, I'm actually building a new customer support tool called Letterbase - you can take a look at https://letterbase.io if you're curious! It's still in the early stages, so it may not be the right fit for you, but it'll certainly be cheaper than what you're paying right now :)