Robert Adams

I cannot disagree with comment above. 

We built-in chat widget inside our standalone program which looks quite complex, I have to admit, to those who have experience with similar tools, not to mention newcomers. And every missed conversation most likely costs us either an existing or potential client. Our marketing department brings new clients, but your widget, Zendesk team,  makes client leave dissatisfied with the support. 

users are able to send messages when presented with the form is to accommodate a scenario where the user decides they do not want to proceed to speak to agent, and instead want to continue to try to self-serve by chatting with the bot

Daniel Aron  we do not use bots as they are usually helpless in most of our clients' cases. Why wouldn't you implement an option to disable the ability to send messages if bots are disabled? This situation with a customer sending messages but receiving no response because bot is disabled and agents have not received the request looks like a bug to me, and it seems this feature  were implemented without your clients needs and cases being thoughtfully reviewed. 

Probably, it's time to move it and the related tasks back from the completed state of your developing cycle into the In progress state and fix the issue you have not thought about.

Sorry for being rude, I can expect incomplete features being released by a start-up company or a cheep indi game developer, but not from grown-up company like ZenDesk.