Goodbye, contact form

Contact forms are nearly ubiquitous with marketing sites. Commonly, the only objective goal of a business’s site is to force a user to the contact form so the business can collect the lead with email and/or phone. But, let’s be honest. It is 2025 and people are not filling random website contact forms like previous decades.

The reason for this is straight-forward, people do not like being contacted and they are meta-contextually aware that a contact form is just a lead capture engine that will be used to sell them services later. A smarter adaption to this common user-experience is to get rid of contact forms entirely, in favor of a chat bot. A chat bot serves the exact same purpose, but with more functionality for users.

Users who are simply wanting to be contacted or have services explained can chat with a bot regarding their question, and in the event that they do not receive a satisfying answer they can optionally be contacted soon by a human. To illustrate how a chat bot can be a more effective lead capture source while providing more functionality for users, I have removed the contact form entirely from this site!

Instead of drawing the users attention through my site to the bottom where the contact form lived, I am now grabbing their attention above-the-fold right where the rest of the content is through a floating chat bot button. They will receive introductory information from that chat bot, hinting at some of the capabilities. The bot encourages the user to interact with the content they’re actually seeing on the page, not zoom through it and get to a form. The user has to initially provide their name and email/phone to use the chat bot, capturing their details instantly for a potential lead source. This lead source can then be categorized and saved based on the user’s conversation.

With a full conversation from bots, the lead source has richer details such as user intent, knowledge of services, interest level, and possibly even specific details about how they view the business services. All of this can be used to better classify the user and gain actionable intel regarding converting them into a customer. The chat bot has the ability to send a message like a classic contact form and will sometimes suggest leaving a message for a human. It accomplishes this through tool/function calling, which is the practice of defining functions for LLMs to “call” to use.

Preventing abuse with a chat bot often looks the same as preventing abuse with a contact form. User inputs should always be sanitized, captchas and honey pots can prevent bot submissions, and content moderation APIs and tools can help identify and prevent spam submissions. I take a couple of extra preventative measures to prevent LLM-hijacking or prompt injection, which is where the end user tries to “take over” the ability of the LLM in the stack of the chat bot by rewriting it’s instructions or messages. Using classifier models for moderation and structuring the prompt with clear identifiers are some basic ways this can be largely mitigated.

I am excited for these new possibilities with the interaction of marketing sites and would love to see this implemented on more sites. I believe it would increase the amount of user interaction with the site as well as conversions and am interested in working with companies do real-life case studies of this UX approach.