Contact Forms Should Be a Last Resort During Working Hours

I’ve built contact forms for years. They are mostly black holes. A visitor reads an article, clicks "Contact," sees a generic box, and leaves.

I saw this happening on my own site. Traffic was decent, but the "hello" rate was low. People were reading technical articles and then vanishing.

So I replaced the contact page with a system that actually captures intent.

The 5-Second Window

If someone wants to talk, they want to talk now. They won't wait 24 hours for an email reply.

I added live chat, but I had a strict requirement: I will not sit in front of a browser tab waiting for messages.

I wired the chat backend (Supabase) to Twilio. When a visitor messages, I get a text on my phone. I can be anywhere. If I can reply, I click the link. The front end looks like WhatsApp to build trust, but the back end is built for my convenience.

I also hard-coded the boundaries. I use pg_cron in the database to kill the chat server at 19:30 and wake it up at 08:30. The system respects office hours automatically; I don't touch a switch.

Fallbacks and Context

Most chat plugins fail when you go offline. They show a "We're away" badge that acts as a dead end.

I built the UI to switch modes. If the database says I'm offline, the chat widget unmounts from the page. It’s replaced by a specific enquiry CTA.

If you are reading an article about mobile app development, the form that loads asks about iOS vs Android. If you’re reading about web apps, it asks about your tech stack.

I use SurveyJS to inject these definitions based on the blog post ID. When a lead comes in, I know what they were reading. We skip the first three emails of "So, what do you need?"

Why I Built It This Way

Plugins are silos. The chat doesn't talk to the forms, and the forms don't know the user's context.

I built this because standard tools lose leads. By connecting Enquiries, Surveys, and Chat into one pipeline, the system captures data that generic sites miss. It handles the rate limiting and scheduling so I can focus on the actual work.

If you see the chat button, I’m around. If you don't, the form is smart enough to take a message that matters.