Drift Reviews: 4.4/5 — Solid Choice

It's a great tool for connecting people who are already on our website with someone on our sales team, and the notification system is pretty good. The info about the site visitor that it collects is usually pretty accurate.

The system, especially the mobile app, can be really glitchy and is definitely not user friendly. The web app is fine, but when we need to be responding to Drift messages after work hours, the mobile app can be really frustrating and doesn't update in real time.

It's an easy way to connect with site visitors quickly, as opposed to emailing them which tends to get lost in their inbox. Connecting with users right away can be really helpful for getting meetings and additional phone calls set up.

- The design of the chat widget is gorgeous. It works on any browser and every mobile phone, I've tried, like a charm. With other chat widgets, I had lots of issues that it hasn't been displayed always correctly. - Advanced bot and automation capabilities based on tags and other attributes - Live view of prospects on your website with direct contact via web chat functionality - Outbound marketing (sending sequences and tracking of emails) with their drift Gmail extension.

- Drift is quite expensive for what they offer. I'm one of the happy customers, which has gotten a startup license of the pro plan for a fraction of the normal price (500$ a month). Even with the pro plan, you have unnecessary restrictions like customization of the chat widget with CSS and using the smaller version. Most of the enterprise features as account-based marketing are great for any startup. Why isn't just the support by Drift and the quantity of usage restricted? Why do I have to see the restrictions within your account always and cannot just hide them if I cannot afford 1000$ a month for a year upfront? Are they in need of that kind of marketing? - The calendar cannot be completely translated into the language of your choice and you can't use a custom domain. - Help center is branded with drift, even if your plan support branding free chat widget. - I've received lots of emails from Drift about their Hypergrowth Conference (at least 10 in the last few months), which is quite annoying, no matter how personal and funny they have been written. - I receive quite some emails regarding extensions of the core product like Drift Signature and Drift Help Center, but I've never gotten an update what has changed in the core product. After a while looking into the bot creation section, I've been flabbergasted that the whole design of the visual builder has changed, without me receiving any message about the advantages the new design and process brings with it.

- Providing a beautiful and direct contact option directly on my website - Direct targeting of specific customers groups with chat messages, emails and pop-ups -> Increasing the number of leads & sales

The interface and service is very easy to implement and setup. Lots of FAQ's and they use their chat bots to help you get started, very cool!

Pricing plans are limited in my view - either free plan or $400+ a month, seems there should be something in between for businesses starting and need additional functionality but cant justify the monthly spend

Chat bot allows visitors on website to get simple answers and interact with our staff for more complex questions.

so it's really cool to be able to find out who has been visiting your site. i have met a bunch of people who are interested in my services or want to interview me through drift.

the price of the paid version is relatively high.

connecting with web visitors

Very useful for starting a conversation with website visitors and turning them into top of the funnels leads. It gives the ability to website visitors to schedule meetings and other events with the admins, which is very useful for sales. It also allows you to target specific segments of the tracked users/visitors with different messages for better results.

The UI needs some serious improvements. Getting back to campaigns, for example, is completely counter-intuitive. As is the fact that you cannot alter the targeting of a campaign once it's published, and you have to create a new one. The Zapier integration was clunky, had to spend time figuring out what's the difference between a lead and contact to set the correct triggers. Equally bad are the user profile fields. You'd expect that full name/email/phone/country/etc. would be considered standard data fields for all contacts. Campaigns could be more customizable. For example you cannot setup an "email capture" widget to capture the emails of users who have initiated a conversation but haven't given their email yet. Last comment: maybe get some inspiration from Autopilot, and provide more pre-setup flows/targeting/messages/templates for the campaigns.

Drift is a very useful tool for ToFu lead generation. It has indeed worked miracles engaging website visitors. Also, quite unexpectedly, it has been working as a customer communication tool, which means that there might be grounds for Drift to move in that direction as well. (e.g. provide a bot able to answer pre-determined questions)

I like the direct communication that you can have with potential customers and the engagement data to cross refernce with other tools such as 6Sense.

It appears to be a tool that can kill 5 birds in 1, however, it overlaps with a lot of my existing tools in our tech stack which makes it a bit overwhelming when it's broken down for training.

None, if I'm being honest.

Drift allows me to communicate in real-time with customers and syncs with my work calendar.

I cannot change the notification sounds, which has caused me to miss a Drift. My Drift often disconnects or fails to link correctly with my calendar. It will frequently say I am unavailable when I am available until I refresh the page several times.

Connecting with potential customers through the website through a chat bot.

It is awesome to see who is on the webpage.

The workflows take a lot of time to set up and the bot is not very flexible

Helps us better engage with people browsing our website and see who is looking at what.

I find it very helpful to track the accounts that visit our site. I've also got a couple of good deals from visitors on the site and engaging with them through the chat.

This is only an annoyance because I am in sales, but I don't like all of the customer service chats that get routed to me. Having a better way to filter those over to CS would be nice.

Drift allows us to know which of our accounts are on our site daily. This allows me to focus on those particular accounts more and even engage live with the chat box.

I find it incredibly helpful to "tag" relevant people into client conversations.

It does not integrate with some of the other systems I currently use. It can also be a challenge for users not in that space to assist.

Drift helps me resolve client issues with my colleagues, which saves time by having all of the conversations organized in one place.

Playbooks are easy to create in Drift and they have a support/solutions specialist helping us out

Not easy to track data from within conversations easily and pass it onto our Data Warehouse

Drift is helping us engage users within the product through Chat, which allows us to assist them in adopting the product better

The chat bat is good enough. It works good enough for simple things like booking meetings and creating support tickets.

We have put in multiple tickets about reporting being inaccurate. Drift CS has gone down significantly. They only talk to us during renewals. Drift nickles and dimes you. As a manager, I wanted to see analytics on my reps videos and they told me I needed a video seat even though I already have a drift seat. Their pricing isn't worth the value.

Book meetings and creating support tickets through chat.

The chatbot is able to schedule prospect calls on the behalf of the salesperson.

Emails to notify the salesperson that someone is interacting with the chatbot are not sent immediately. A text notification would be very useful.

Drift allows prospects to interact with the company on the website even when a live person is not available immediately.

We can see what pages people are viewing

The set up was complicated and I don't think the agency that suggested it knew how it worked so it's been less than effective for us. I seem to miss conversations if I'm not online and there's no way to reach out to the people that I missed.

Not really sure

Fantastic overall user experience and interface. It's super easy to setup on your website and customize it to your needs.

The speed at which they develop features is also questionable. Sometime it feels like they're rushing things to be the first on the market, which results to things breaking sometimes.

to drive and qualify digital inbound traffic.

That you can chat with potential customers and automate part of the experience if you are not at your desk

The iOS keeps crashing which makes it hard when i am out of the office, so the team at the office is the ones answering.

Ability to capture more leads from our website

Drift has some basic chat functionality. The playbooks are semi-advanced.

The support has been lacklustre. I have been trying to cancel our account for no less than 3 months with zero engagement from Drift aside from an email 3 months late to tell me my last billing will be in a month's time. There is, of course, no click to cancel, so we just have a subscription service that continued to run despite several support tickets lodged and chats with their reps where we are told a representative will reach out, but never do. Additionally, there is no NPS feature or way to grade chat conversations post a company rep engaging with a lead. The market place is significantly less advanced than Intercom and we switched happily to Intercom, despite the higher price. While Drift has things like an ROI calculator on their own website built with the bot, this isn't something you can develop with Drift because 'our developers do not want to release the code'. Intercom support are prompt and help us create whatever we want, including interactive tutorials inside our product to assist onboarding. Additionally, there is no ticketing system with Drift. So if you want to use this for in-product tech support chat for SaaS, Drift cannot help you. Intercom, again, does this very well.

We wanted a more intuitive chat tool but also a system that enabled us to harness the power of chat bots. The benefits realized were slim, owing to lots of time spent using Drift but a platform lacking depth to do much aside from auto-responses.

Drift makes it easy for prospects to find out basic information and book calls very easily. Also while someone is monitoring the response back and forth is extremely important for developing potential customers and dispositioning before they reach our sales team.

I don't like the mobile experience at all. I feel that the notifications are confusing. If you have 5 people messaging you it will only show 1 notification and it's hard to know who you're talking too quickly without being in the app. Booking calls are great but sometimes we get no info from the people booking because it is not a requirement and we're losing out. When people stop the bot chat and re-engage it the chat does not do anything. It looks like we go unresponsive. You must have someone monitor it.

With Drift we're able to qualify leads better through the Bot feature and get qualified to leads to our sales reps as quickly as possible.

I love the design of the bot itself and the entire concept of the product, conversational marketing. It's caused me to think in new ways about marketing for my B2B company. I'm also a huge fan of the Drift brand (shoutout to DC & DG, love your podcast!) They also roll out new features fast, which is really nice.

I have received poor response time and delayed follow up from the 2 account managers I've worked with at Drift. The second one is much better than the first, but it still takes several business days to get a response, oftentimes requiring me to nudge them for an answer. The analytics/reporting features of Drift are also complicated and hard to navigate. I find it hard to get answers to simple q's b/c of the platform's navigation for reporting. I do like the new playbook analytics visualization, but the fact that that resets anytime you update the playbook is frustrating (i.e. I understand the point behind that, but I want to keep the analytics for very simple changes; at least save them historically somewhere!).

I purchased this product in order to book more meetings for my sales team. However, this product has honestly required more work than results.

It’s great at presenting well on my site and for clients

It doesn’t do a great job of notifying you about the lead in as timely a manner as you’d like.

It allows less traffic to fall through the cracks

Has better interface than livechat. Canned responses are also possible.

The channels it create is a little bit confusing, especially if you integrate it in slack. There is also 5-10 seconds delay from us receiving the messages (we tested this on several devices and computer)

Quicker response to client inquiry. We have stopped using this and went back to using LiveChat.

Chats and bots management, user friendly

Integrations to Salesforce and outreach, support

Communication with prospects

When it works it's great, you can chat very quickly with customers if it loops you into a conversation. It is very speedy and I know that customers can see that.

The calendar syncing doesn't work very well and I always get routed only when I am off offline for a reason. I pretty much never get live chats, and it always routes it in a way that doesn't make sense.

I've been told that we have more leads after using Drift but I've pulled the numbers and we have the same amount, so I am not sure that it is solving a "problem". Like I said when it works it definitely speeds up the process but I'm not sure our customers need that.

Setting meetings with prospects that show interest.

I don't like how there's an imbalance when it comes to team routing.

Drift is helping team members book more meetings with interested prospects, which leads to happy customers and more business.

I like the idea of what it should do. Book meetings with prospects while they are on the site.

It doesn't really work the way that you would think unless you manage the platform in a structured and organized way.

Get meetings booked while prospects are on site. Convert digital engagement into client interaction.

Ability to run playbooks for people who aren't buyers coming to your website. Direct them to HR Material etc.

Overly complicated to setup and manage, didn't improve conversion of chats over products that cost a fraction as much.

We had the most basic Live Chat tool you could put on our website and recently decided to upgrade by switching to Drift. We've now spent 3mo running the Drift tool and our conversion rate of chats hasn't improved at all while our User experience for both the end user and Admins is terrible and time consuming. At this point we would have been better sticking with our existing chat tool and never moving to Drift.

the chatbot functionality is great where we can have different playbooks to decipher between good quality leads and not so great leads

notifications are very poor. I have to constantly refresh my page to receive notifications. It can be glitchy

trying to generate more MQLs for our team

I guess the fundamentals are there, like their name though they have just 'drifted' the last few years

Having been with Drift for 3 years the best summary I can give is that this is a company in decline. We recently decided not to renew. First year we had a full customer success manager with QBR's, 2nd year we had a customer success manager, I mean i knew his name and he helped escalate technical support tickets but he wasn't a ''success'' manager in the sense of helping us optimize our playbooks, no regular meetings; 3rd year the CSM just disappeared - nothing, nada. When the time came to renew about 2 months before, suddenly they took an interest in our account (money). When I asked ''oh nice to hear from you, but where have you been the last 10 months'' they said, oh we took away CSM managers on your account level, now there is just CSM on demand. Now I have no idea what ''CSM on demand'' as a concept is, but when you're paying $15K p.a requiring an I.O/contract and C-level signature I think this type of martech buy deserves a CSM. Even if the frequency of meetings need to be reduced, you can have a CSM reviewing an account every 1-2 months. They just removed this and never even told us!! Aside from there downgrading of their CMS function and lack of transparency, they seem to have moved their basic customer support to India. These chat support handlers are appalling - I mean they know nothing. My knowledge of Drift is better than theirs. The one exception to this sea of mediocrity is Natali a CS representative based in London - who deserves a huge pay rise. In terms of product, again nada, nothing. I literally saw just one product release over the last 2 years. Everything else needs improving - their playbook builder, reports - all need UX/UI improvements. I am currently onboarding with Qualified and the difference is light and day.Drift is missing simple things like the ability to move the playbook around by mouse, to change the width of buttons, to customize the chatbot UI. Intergrations are also minimal and poor, exasperating our marketing ops team.

They are supposed to support conversational marketing and they could if they had a customer success team in place and a product team shipping new products and product improvements.

Easy to have conversations with customers.

Being thrown into chats that are not sales-related or in the correct territory and looped into chats that are outside working hours even when I'm offline. Most of the time, it has incorrect data on who we are speaking with.

Nothing. Most customers that use Drift are looking for technical support and don't have sales-related questions. We cannot loop the support team into the chat and force our customers to leave our chat and start another on a different page. The opposite of great customer service. Zero upsides for the sales team to be active on Drift.

- Allows reps to respond to a prospect when they hit out website quickly - sleek UX for admins and users - custom branded - partnership - great support from their team

- users had to be "on standby" to respond as fast as possible when a prospect opens a chat - Expensive to scale - international languages became tricky outside of the normal suspects - data wasn't always the cleanest nor most accurate

- following up with website visitors in a quick manner - website chat tool - converting website visitors to paying customers - routing support requests to the appropriate channel