What is Drift?
About Drift
Editor’s Bottom Line of Drift
Drift offers a truly unique platform that expands your organization’s capabilities way beyond simple live chat support. As an entire marketing or sales platform, Drift’s focus on conversations and direct interactions between prospects or customers and agents or representative’s enables your business shrink the overall sales process, and grow leads into closed deals. The personalized approach of a conversational based platform enables representatives to directly connect with leads and prospects, providing them with direct support for their issues, or answers for their inquiries.
What helps Drift’s platform stand out is a number of unique features, one of which are the Drift profiles. Each agent, or representative, from your business is given their own Drift profile, which contains information including the rep’s name, picture, location, current time, position, and a little biography. These profiles enable users to reach out directly to what is obviously a live person, not just a generic chatbot. Users can also interact with the same Agent through profiles to ensure they receive the same level of service.
Drift’s Operator Bot can also step in, enabling users to provide context about their inquiry prior to speaking to a representative. LeadBot can also be used to qualify leads directly on your website, without users having to fill out any forms — simply have a short conversation with the bot. But if you want to reach out to someone not on your website, Drift enables your organization to send targeted and automated emails, which can directly convert into a live conversation with a representative.
Overall, Drift’s platform provides businesses with the tools to revolutionize the way they foster new leads, close new deals, and support existing customers. With Drift, representatives can speak to more customers in less time, and provide a new layer of personalized service. This lightning quick response time combined with personalized support enables organizations to boost their sales, shorten the sales cycle, and overall provide the best service possible.
Drift Features
- Drift widget: Drift’s chat widget provides a great experience for customers on both mobile and desktop. Additionally, from a user point of view, messaging with your customers is also an intuitive experience, and quite useful.
- Teams: The Drift Teams feature is very useful for live chat and chat routing, but it requires upgrading, which should be expected. However, if you have multiple teams using the platform (e.g. sales & support), which most companies do, the teams feature requires upgrading to the Enterprise plan, which is their most expensive pricing tier.
- Chat routing: Create rules for routing leads and conversations to the correct person, group or team. There’s also a round-robin feature that’s good for leads being passed to your sales team.
- Mobile application: Drift has apps for iOS and Android devices.
- Drift Automation & Qualification Bot: Drift’s goal is to replace SDRs with this bot. That’s already happening with many bots, including this one, but no chatbot has fully achieved that goal at this point in time. The technology just isn’t there yet. However, this feature, as well as other AI-powered chatbots, is currently worth investing in. That’s because they work 24/7/365, can handle multiple conversations at once and can produce better results than humans.
The catch with Drift’s Automation and Qualification Bot is that their Annotation Team needs to train and optimize the bots for you, which also requires you to be on their most expensive plan.
- Reporting and Tracking User Data: Drift has three report types accessible from the conversation view: Team Performance, which has metrics about your team’s interaction with visitors such as their response times; Conversation Volume, which includes general data related to conversations; and Routing Rules, which is a report about where your conversations are being routed.
Additionally, Drift’s ‘Contacts’ feature lets you filter contacts based on attributes and events. For example, you can create user segments for targeting via email or chat. - Personalized Playbooks: This is a Drift feature that uses Cookies and IP data to deliver personalized greetings to your website visitors. It’s available when you upgrade to the Premium plan.