The leak
The visitor who almost asked.
A contact form only catches the people already convinced. Everyone before that point leaves without a trace.
A visitor with a question at 9pm is either going to get an answer or go read a competitor’s page. Most never fill out a form to ask, and the business never learns they were there.
We wanted it on our own site before we offered it to anybody. The constraint was that it had to work on sites we don’t control: WordPress, static builds, anything. A plugin covers one platform and breaks on somebody else’s update schedule.
So it became a single script tag with a client id. The knowledge, the tone and the keys stay on our side, and the file in the browser only draws the box and asks the questions. Clients own their site, their content and their leads. The engine is the one thing we keep, and we say so.