Everything about it was seamless. An oddly great buying experience. The actual software itself does what I need it to do. New features that are actually useful dropping all the time. Staffers who try their level best to add value to my day. It's all great.
Price. It's high! Can't help that though. They do NOT take a hands off approach, so staff costs money. Developers cost money. It's a full featured, well supported program.
We can spread out our sales costs by automating a portion of our sales funnel that would otherwise be human driven. When our staff are unavoidably out of the office, our Driftbots take over!
Offer some interesting new capabilities but can't do the basic right. The main problem is the way they do business
The main issue is not the software, but the way drift does business. I am taking the time to write this review because there should be consequences to a firm reputation when they are misleading people. 1. Drift refused any free trial and only accepted to provide a tech demo where we were told everything would be fine 2. After sign up, we got ZERO access to the implementation team, which service was included in the price, and support did not answer emails, refused to do anything but chat, could not provide any clear tech guidance. Really poor. 3. We were overcharged and had to send emails all over the organization to get that point resolved after weeks. I got other things to do. 4. During the implementation, it turned out that the critical feature we had been told was included (routing).... was only available if we agreed to pay 3x more than the cost we had been quoted. And Drift is expensive in the first place when compared to pretty much any other chat solution. 5. So after losing a month+ in the process, Drift accepted to cancel the subscription BUT still charged us and refused to refund the initial month 6. We are talking about small money here (1k or something), and Drift can keep the change if their team feels they need to. But that is just an awful approach to customer service and the worse experience with a vendor after 15 years in IT. We have lost a couple of months because of them, and we are now going with another solution, which is 7x cheaper plus delivers most of the features. Even if not the fanciest ones. I would seriously warn people to consider other options; there are plenty on the market.
none, we uninstalled it
The actual software is very sophisticated and when implemented correctly could have a lot of value.
I began a contract with Drift back in May. What the system does is really incredible - IF they spend time to help you implement it. From the beginning, I had to be proactive in asking for their team's support over and over again (they'd rather send you to tutorials and make you do the hard work of figuring things out on your own time). This unfortunately is not conducive for me as a fellow small business owner in Boston who has limited time. You would think at such an expensive price point, they would have better implementation and care for their customers to ensure they make the most out of their investment. Between my busy schedule and their limited availability for training time - it took 3 months to get a playbook written and ready to go live. I was charged full price for the 3 months I didn't even use drift - and they didn't even have the courtesy to call me to check in on why implementation was slow and offer solutions for me. It then came down to me asking if they would apply my credits toward future months when I'd be operable (not a refund but application of credit to the future and a long term commitment thereafter) and they refused saying they don't offer refunds for inactivity. In the end, it's important to know this company chose to make $700 in the short run and lose a customer altogether instead of working with that customer to find a solution for the long-haul. Finally - just go to Drift's website and look at the brands they claim to work with. Over half of them no longer use drift and use other providers. This company clearly suffers in the department of customer happiness and retention. I highly advise you give your business to another company that deserves it.
They need better business practices and to care more about cultivating long term relationships with their clients that are MUTUALLY beneficial.
We implemented the pro-edition of Drift and our CSM had us up and running in about half the time we had planned based on her clear understanding of the tool and quick uptake on how our business works.
The out of the box Salesforce integration requires a level of nuance and strategy at the playbook level that has created a small subset of our data from Drift that is unclean, meaning we're getting engagement to a degree that generates a record in Salesforce, but neither our marketing nor sales teams can really act on that. There may be some refinements we can go through in our sync settings and how our playbooks are structured, but this requires some big strategic choices about conversational marketing we weren't prepared for; ultimately we wished all the Drift leads in our Salesforce system were at least "as good" as a simple first name/last name/email like most of our forms collect.
We've seen a large number of our e-commerce traffic balk on our Shopify checkout pages, and we've been unsure what was happening to those users when they abandoned. When we deployed bots, we could see in the playbook analytics that most of our self-serve users would opt to speak to someone versus proceed to checkout when given the option. This has allowed us to manage our user journeys by price point, making our lower-priced options more frictionless, but adding in a layer of customer support and human-sales-support for the larger value items at the final step before finishing a transaction. This has allowed us to use our live-sales talent much more efficiently in order to seal the deal on big packages while letting the automations and bot playbooks manage consumers that are more comfortable self-serving at the lower price points. This one learning has been huge in our move to more e-commerce and with regards to our CRO efforts in Shopify.
I like Drift's ability to build out playbooks based on different data like acquisition channel, page, etc.
To be most effective, you must purchase a seat for your entire sales team. This can be extremely costly.
It is providing a chat conversion option on our company website - some of our users prefer this engagement route.
To start with, Drift's chat widget is customizable, looks great, and is very easy to install on most sites (simple line of code in the header, Wordpress plug-in, etc.). The chat experience is good and it integrates directly with Slack so that you can chat from within Slack or within the application. They are constantly adding new features, and improving the experience for both us and our customers. I love the targeted campaigns, where you can send specific users on your site little unobtrusive messages (or full-screen takeovers), based on very specific data (device type, location, URL visited, etc.). This allows for great user engagement, without much in the way of additional resources. It has also replaced Freshdesk for our customer support as their paid plans support email communications. Pricing is very fair for the feature set, as they do not charge a "per user" price like many operating in this space.
As a relatively new product, I've come across a few little bugs, but their customer support is phenomenal and is always quick to address any issues. The free plan is quite limited unless you are operating a very small business, but they've got to make money somehow!
Drift has replaced a few pieces of software/services for us, by rolling a great feature set into one package. We have replaced Smooch (online chat linked to Slack), Freshdesk (e-mail customer support), and Mailchimp (e-mail campaigns) with Drift. I believe that we have increased our ability to connect with our customers and potential customers, while not increasing the amount of labour required for customer service/support online.
Support: The support comes with a price, but its worth it. Anytime you missout on something, you can contact them. They will definitely help solve the problem. Features: A recent feature for adding widgets withdifferent language. As we are a global company we wanted to have bots with different languages for different countries. This features have sorted the issue for us. Simple yet clear reporting. The Dashboard gives a gist of how your bots are performing on any given day, which agent had more meetings booked and other stats. Drift Video feature makes most of our jobs quite easier. With Videos, we record answer videos and send it to customers at times.
Price. Price. Price. It costs close to $500/month, which is too high compared to its competitors.
We use it for lead capturing and website guidance for our customers. With bot, now we have a new channel for leads. We are getting new leads every single day and few leads are turning into sales/business.
The widget's appearance on the website is clean and polished. Furthermore, the features it provides to automatically reach out (AI Sales Assistant) are great to actually recover a customer about to leave the website due to frustration or confusion. The meetings feature is handy if a customer wants to know more about a product or schedule a demo.
I feel like the Playbooks feature doesn't have enough simple options suitable for the free tier. In my opinion, there should be custom, simple trigger-based Playbooks. They could be limited by Drift, if needed.
My website has more clicks and views than conversions. Additionally, I've noted that over the course of a few weeks, many customer emails have gone unanswered for more than 2 weeks, buried under too many emails. With Drift, I feel like customers can have multiple support options; We already have a helpdesk, but honestly, the Drift live chat is the fastest option, and the fact that it lets us categorize leads is a plus. I feel like I would lose way too many customers without this solution, so, in short, I'm looking to solve: - Low customer support response times (sometimes more than one month), which is unacceptable; - Low conversions because the customer can't find what they want, or they want a custom quote and no one reached them over email; Additionally, an (Almost) instant and feature-packed support experience is priceless, and that's why Drift helps in solving these issues.