Drift Reviews: 4.4/5 — Solid Choice

Allows for many integrations through the use of PlayBooks into various web portals and can focus on presenting self-help information through guided interactive walkthrus before requiring human intervention/interaction.

Reports only focus on the agent that initially responds to a chat request, but does not drill down if chat is transferred to another agent. Initially had a way of building out templates for quick responses, but it doesn't translate/communicate well to all invited users.

Opens up all avenues of customer communication by providing a chat portal instead of only having phone and email at our service, which is available to integrate directly into the application as well as through a self-help or knowledge portal/center. Also allows for targeted campaigns in line with Sales efforts directly on subscription pages.

The software itself functions fairly well and while it is quite complex, it can be configured to drive results very effectively.

I manage more than six vendor relationships in my current role, and have managed many more in the past. But the customer support and service at Drift is simply the worst that I have ever encountered in the software business. The definition of the word "abysmal" is: immeasurably low or wretched. That is accurate to my experience. Frequently, when I reach out to support to address an issue the response I will get is, "Have you tried our chatbot?" or "Can you check with our resources?" Over the short life of our relationship I have been introduced to support team members that I never hear from again before they move onto another role. Sometime when a solution to a problem doesn't work, the question I get back is, "Why can't you make the change we suggested?" Not exactly helpful. Even our billing and contract negotiations have been a mess. For an annual contract over $50K, I expect to receive support when and how I need it. This is clearly a company that is growing too quickly that can't manage their internal support operations.

Additional customer acquisition channel.

Clean interface - and there is an iPhone app.

Basically, there are PHP errors from poorly written code - not something I'd expect from a tool of this price.

Trying to get my customers to be able to contact me - of course.

Good support and managed services, but heavily priced in the name of that.

The team is unable to filter out junk chats from the genuine ones. Pass on all the junk also to CRM. Slow implementation process. They were not able to even route the chats properly to the right team. Anyone would get any random chat. The team stops taking interest in the project the moment they know you are not going to renew. In my case, we told them 3 months in advance and since then, all silence.

Drift was solving no real business problems for us with no tangible benefits. The benefits that they claim - can be easily realised with a $500-$1000/year tool as well. The automation could have done wonders with the introduction of Chat GPT, none of that happened. The business and sales teams needed to be trained on this separately, they lose their interests very quickly. No tangible value to them as well.

When I was using Drift I though it was a great basic package and free was all I was needing at the time. Planning to subscribe to a plan at a later date .... not now.

I have clients that have left an important message and I can't get to. The password reset emails are not coming through to my email address. So I send drift a support request to send me a reset email manually and they closed the ticket without even looking at it saying it was a free account and free accounts don't get support. I don't care what the software is resetting and getting into your account should be supported but you get what you pay for I guess.

Chat on website

Honestly, hardly anything. The pricing is very misleading and agents are hard to get a hold. of.

The pricing, the features, the 'have to have this client' attitude of agents that claim to be support. They are always upselling

To many support requests and mobile abilities for our support team

I was an early adopter of Drift, years ago. At the time, their logic builder (which they call "playbooks") was pretty innovative. The pack has caught up on this specific feature and really on just about every other feature and functionality Drift offers. So the list of what we liked best with Drift is pretty short...perhaps their branding and how it's woven into their MQL/CQL (conversation qualified leads) rating. That's a nice, polished part of their service.

Their customer support is abhorrent -- both during the onboarding and initial setup and post-onboarding. Having used Drift over many years and multiple brands, I can say with certainty it was not always like this. The decline in the responsiveness and ability of their CS team seems to correspond with their move toward enterprise/bigger clients. This should be a HUGE red flag to any SMB or start-up considering Drift. You/your account will be deprioritized and ignored for days at a time, sometimes longer. We had issues implementing Drift's chat for our Direct to Consumer e-commerce site. I'm not sure but I believe at least some of the CS team are outsourced/not full-time employees of Drift's team. Post-implementation, we realized the chat was not following our basic targeting and triggering logic. After dropping days and days of our own engineering time to troubleshoot this, Drift would not follow the rules we set in the Drift admin -- basic things like showing/not showing based on a user's device type. This was met with multiple delayed response periods from Drift CS. Ultimately, we were not able to resolve the targeting issues and removed Drift from our site. Despite this, Drift will not agree to wind down the relationship ahead of the end of our term despite the fact they recognized they didn't resolve our issue(s) in a timely manner and that we stopped using their services months ago -- they even had the gall to label our request to do so as a "cancellation of convenience". You know what's inconvenient? Paying thousands of dollars a month for a chat application that won't follow our logic and fundamentally doesn't work. This would be a nightmare for a venture-backed startup or SMB. Whatever Drift had going for it several years ago seems dead. Buyer beware / not recommended. Other shortcomings include: - lacking analytics (which seem largely unchanged from when I first used the service years ago) - an inability to change the size/placement of the chat window on mobile (or set a device-specific size) - b2b lead gen only; this is not a consumer-focused product in any way

I can't say there is any specific problem Drift solved for us, unfortunately. We were excited about the prospects of setting a /cart-specific playbook to fast-track high-value carts to our high-touch customer support/call center but we could never get the logic for the playbook to function correctly. See above/previous answer.

Seems like its supposed to have a lot of functionality but my team hasn't been able to make it work.

Haven't been able to get it functional on our site. Lots of issues.

None. None.

In theory, based off of demos, it should work.

Support is horrible. I am writing this review to see if this will finally help me get someone on the phone to walk through my issue. I just need to know how to send emails to download content via chatbot and then capture that information on Hubspot. If any users out there know how to do this, please send me your notes since the team at Drift doesn't seem to know how to do this.

So far nothing since the integrations seem to be faulty.

For someone who's utilizing the free account. It is efficiently helpful to share video recordings.

How the billing works. The card used for the upgrade was charged twice and there is no option for the self - service when removing the card details under the billing and plan page. I was also disappointed with how the agent handled the conversation. It is inconvenient to send an email to the billing department when you have stated the issue already to the chat support.

Improving their self-service chat support or improve their support team.

It's very simple to integrate drift. Installing the JS tag takes a few minutes.

Terrible support Bloated web app Buggy / broken mobile app Lack of integration with other apps 30-day cancellation policy when billed monthly

We were using drift to engage with our customers

I want to love Drift, their bot flows are fantastic and it was a breeze to set up that portion of the application. Incoming leads have a ton of data (although you're not able to update any of it if it's incorrect--see below)

-Our team was spoken down to for being a "small business" that they heavily hinted they didn't have time for if we wanted to verify that their functionality worked before agreeing to an annual pre-paid contract (in our case this made even less sense as we were telling them directly that we expected to have double the users within a year and would no longer qualify as small business). -Their navigation looks like every additional piece of functionality was given its own tab, with zero thought to if it should go somewhere else/in an existing one (ex: customizing what the bot looked like with colors and type options was in a different parent header (Customize) than customizing what the chat window the bot appeared in looked like with colors and type options (under Settings)). -Leads and contacts are populated with Company data externally. There is no way to update this for our team so that we know if contractors or personal email accounts are associated with different companies than what the singular external data is showing. -Within days after paying for a full year, they silently deprecated their Slack integration that allowed interaction between the two apps (which we'd made sure to verify worked and were vocal about liking/needing during the Sales process), and replaced it with a report-style Slack integration with no functionality. *Their own Support and Sales team was unaware of the change* and it took multiple levels of escalations (including having videos of previously working functionality forwarded over to us) to acknowledge that it'd been removed. When questioned about the reason behind this, they defended both the decision to do so AND not inform anyone because "we decided to go in a different direction". -Several months into production use, they removed the ability to use Segment integrations (purportedly as a business decision on their side). This was done without notice. Per their team, they thought that they didn't need to because it would continue to work on old integrations as long as they remained in place, so they didn't think they needed to inform us. There is no way to have it work again, though, for any additional sites (including subdomains), or if it's being set up again from scratch. It rendered the chat unusable (we can't have it deployed on only half of our site), but their only solution was to suggest that we were still perfectly capable of using Segment by setting our own integration up or by having our team manually integrate Drift into the site. We have not to date been allowed to back out of our year long contract even though our WORKING access was silently removed and we needed to migrate to a new application. We were never informed of the last two--we had to reach out to their team to find out why it was broken to find out that what we'd paid for was removed. In sum, Drift should have been a fantastic experience, and it should have been a lovely thing to get into place and use. Instead, everything making it possible to do so has been removed, and the only thing the team has made clear is that they have no intention of communicating impactful changes. The message that's been communicated is that these things weren't being used by many companies, and they're trying to focus on enterprise-size companies, but why would we continue to use them as we grow to that size if this is how they treat companies they don't actually want to work with? (just say it's not a good fit and move on, or notify that it's being deprecated and allow people to walk away/migrate to other services that are able to offer them what they need) I wanted to love Drift. Their entire value prop is that they provide stunning clarity into our own customers and leads. In the end though, the only thing that they've made clear is that they don't care how negative of an impact they have on the people paying them, to the point of actively obscuring information about business critical use from the clients using it. That kind of breach of trust isn't a company I would ever recommend working with or for. Who would bother to, when you have a host of other providers who are perfectly willing to be upfront and follow normal business standards?

None, anymore. It should have allowed us to connect better with clients and leads, which it was for a while doing adequately.

Flexible, good examples to use for creating playbooks.

Support is only available via chat and it's not efficient. Very challenging to try to get launched when they don't let you speak with someone to get questions answered unless you pay for Enterprise.

Convert more traffic on web site

It was easy to sign up and integrate with our site to try it out.

Impossible to cancel. We've not used the drift service in months and they continue to charge us despite our repeated requests to cancel. Every time we click to cancel on our account settings page, it takes us to a chat and the chat representative tells us that they will notify the billing department and get back to us in a few days. Just today we tried to cancel again, and the chat representative would not confirm that our account is cancelled. We're at the point of reaching out to the credit card company to process a chargeback and even change our credit card number to stop the billing. So unless you plan to use drift until the end of time, I highly recommend that you do not give them your credit card information.

Drift has caused problems, not solved them. No benefits realized.

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

I like the options of being able to customize decision trees to make sure that only the most qualified contacts make their way to me. I monitor the website and make sure that customers needs are being met and the automated suggestion feature makes my job way more fluid and through.

Sometimes the visitors that are about to come through the chat disappear but I think thats more user error.

As a one man band, its hard to answer and monitor all site visitors and requests. The automated responses that suggest links to what customers are searching for save me incredible amounts of time.

It’s a really cool product and feature.

Integration, reporting and service. Everything post-sale was problematic.

None, I ended my contract early during our 6 month 1st term.

Conversational marketing is the modern approach to attracting new customers. Drift has good basic functionality.

Drift has the positioning is spades, but the actual execution of their product is POOR. Service is totally via chatbot, and while it's okay for a simple question, the setup of this product requires more than just simple support. I don't think they have any adults that actually work there.

Capture of lead data on site traffic, scheduling of meetings. Benefits realized - I'm not sure yet.

Design on their website is really fancy and modern.

My user experience is really bad. As a new user, I wanted a free trial. There was an option for startups, I filled in a form, met all conditions. Received an email to activate my account (application approved), I clicked on it, set password. Then they asked for a card number, which I filled in (even with a wrong CVV intentionally, coz I didn't want to get charged during the free trial). Then suddenly I received an SMS that my account was charged 532 EUR... no kidding. I was like "WHAT?!" Sent a first message to support, the second one 4 hours later, the third one (email ticket) the next day, ... no response. Really annoying. I need to file a dispute in my bank which takes time and energy. So annoying! Note for self: stay away from Drift next time.

N/A

I like their ads, landing page and messaging

Drift is messy and very limited. They don't allow to see what's inside. If you want then you have to pay. So we paid their monthly subscription just to view their admin dashboard and to see they don't provide what is advertised.

We're Intercom user and were looking for an alternative. Drift advertised as the best alternative but it doesn't provide the advertised features. According to their pricing, you can send Sliders and Proactive Messages in Standard plan. But you can't. You have to subscribe to a higher plan because it requires premium Bot's features. Reached their support and requested a refund after one hour of signing up Drift. They simply turned down my request.

Monthly contract, theoretically we can bail out relatively easily (yet to be tested)

Drift doesn't provide an evaluation account. So you have to pony up as you spend several months trying to work around its numerous limitations which are not identifiable during the sales process.

Basic triggering of conversations based on segment.io data.

The app interface is highly performant and intuitive.

Drift told me explicitly, several times, that my Drift help articles would not be indexed by search engines. Then, as I'm leaving Drift, all of a sudden they are indexed. Apparently there is a huge disconnect between Drift's internal teams. Update to review. Drift billed me for multiple months after I cancelled my account. And I've asked them multiple times in the past week to cancel my billing. It still shows billing active 1 seat. Wow. Just wow.

Help chat, knowledgebase, sales

The best feature is its easy integration with clearbit. It appends data very nicely and is good for getting extra info about leads. Unfortunately, this feature is only available on the highest tiers.

As far as chatbot software goes, it's not terribly intuitive for sales teams to use, and the bot features do NOT integrate seamlessly with human conversations. Moreso, the team proved to not be forthright about the terms and testing period of their software. I made very clear to them that our company was interested in testing a solution, but they required that I adhere to their TOS when canceling the service, which required 30 days notice before the beginning of the subsequent monthly billing cycle. Not only was the TOS unclear, in my opinion, about when that would be triggered, but their team was also not willing to be flexible or communicative about that process. They were given more than 20 days notice. Additionally, one of their key features for us was a tool to request a business email if a personal email address was submitted. However, this feature was not functional for a majority of the period we were testing the product as the system continued to store the first email given.

The business problem we wanted to solve was making an easier point of entry for our customers beyond a form fill out. Ultimately, the drift bot provides no benefit that any other chat tool can, and the bot features are not sufficient for a business of our size without significant work.

It’s a basic chat product with the marketing veil of having created a new category. It’s literally a chat widget on steroids.

They launched too many features too fast and they aren’t very good. Reminds me of hubspot 4-5 years ago. It’s also a pain to effectively integrate w crm systems. Much easier to use hubspot a basic chat.

Consumer chat.

I like the concept of the product, but so far I haven't experienced anything that I like about it's actual functionality.

Dishonest sales process that promised a dedicated customer success team member to assist with the integration and launch. Instead, it's impossible to reach an actual person and the only onboarding assistance is a series of automated emails that don't even come in a sequential order, each containing several random links to things that may or may not apply to your use case. Reaching support on their website is also impossible after the sales process is over. Chatting with the bot offered on their website brings you to a dead end offering completely irrelevant information. If they can't get it right on their own site, it shouldn't make you feel too comfortable in the product getting it right on your site. The scheduling functionality is a big selling point, but it only works with Google calendar or Office 365. We don't use either, so the functionality is completely lost.

Was looking to automate the chat process to help more website visitors without adding additional human resources. So far, we haven't realized that benefit and we're losing confidence after seeing that Drift can't get that right on their own website and don't offer the guidance promised in the sales process.

I love the idea behind conversational marketing and creating a connection with the prospective client vs going back and forth before the conversion occurs. The Drift support team was available and answered questions as they popped up. The front and backend UX is solid. Very clean and pretty easy to use. The exception being you need to know that some areas autosave while others require the save button being pushed - ideally it would all be autosaved or at least uniform in design.

Drift's integration with microsoft office broke and made it so prospective clients could not schedule meetings. This was a core functionality that we needed for our business. After letting Drift know the integration wasn't working, it took them a week to fix it. The issue created delays and we ultimately chose not to go live. Since the software had proven to be unstable we decided to cancel with Drift and asked them for a full credit. Rather than issue a full refund they tried to assure us the problem was fixed but in our mind, that ship had sailed. Then they offered to credit us for half of what we had paid as if it were something we could negotiate on. In my experience, if a product or service doesn't do what it is supposed to the customer should be credited in full. Beyond this core functionality not working there were other bugs that support was able to solve but it seemed to always be something.

We wanted to make it easy for prospects to get info via chat and a bot and seamlessly schedule a meeting with an advisor. We were not able to go live with Drift because their integration with Microsoft broke

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.

Fairly flexible product Ability to have a bot reply for you

There is NO communication from Drift regarding product enhancements/changes/issues - they role out changes (many with bugs) and NEVER send out a message/email etc. I'm sure there are features we aren't using (and are paying for) but don't know about because they don't tell us. In addition, they role out customer facing changes that negatively impact our brand/customer messaging and I have to reach out to them through multiple channels to get someone to respond to me and admit there is an issue and that they will take care of it. They're definitely overpromising and underdelivering In addition, Drift claims to be a "conversational tool" but they DO NOT OFFER phone support. If you call the phone line they say to go to their website and chat with them....LAME! Finally, I dislike their company brand/image. Very amateurish and they don't appear to want to help customers. From the selfie posts on LinkedIn from their employees and CEO I can tell that it is not a company I'd want to personally work for. In fact, when I see their LinkedIn selfie videos I cringe.

Not solving many problems...sometimes causing more headaches for us

Marketing from drift is cool. Product is awful. You've a ton of interesting options to segment your leads. It's cool to have those options but it would be better if they were working properly.

Drift is ultra expensive for what it is, it's full of bugs and i'm glad to use it at a small scale for now because you can't scale at all with a tool like that. It's not reliable. All the contact property (phone number, company name, full name) aren't registered properly, so you can't pass those data to your sales. You've to do everything at hand because it's not working fine. I've to copy paste phone number in conversation + company name + full name to transfer the mising information to my sales. It takes a ton of time, we're less reactive because of this bottleneck. Drift created a white paper about lead response, apparently 58% of companies didn't respond. Yes with Drift you're sure you're gonna ghost 58% of your leads because you can't pass the contact property properly to your sales. My sales justed called me ruight now to tell me : "Why you're transfering lead to us with no phone number, name and company name ?" What i'm supposed to say Drift ? "Well, we're scammed by this company for now, i'm sorry. I can't do anything about this and it seems they don't care about this. So just wait, pray and see." These guys are really good to evangelize about conversational marketing and lead response time and all this nice fluff to attract new clients. But what a surprise when you discover that what they're saying is just fluff, the product experience is awful and the product isn't able to do any conversational marketing properly. The purpose of this chat is to be fully automated. Well, i apologize to break your dreams but you're gonna be disapointed by this "automation". I reported those bugs for months but apparently, nobody cares at drift ! They only care about growth. They're saying for month that the technical team is on it and it's still not fixed. I don't even know if they're aware that is supposed to be a core feature of drift. This core feature is broken for month but nothing is fixed, i guess technical team is too busy because they've to create a new buggy tool every month. So they can't have any time to fix anything on this. And finally... they're not offering any compensation for those bugs. "Our tool isn't working fine ? Our core feature is broken for months ? Cool, you still gonna pay 500$/month even if you can't use our tool for what it is supposed to do." You can't trust a tool like that for your lead gen. 500$ per month for this is a real shame. You gonna think, if i'm so upset, why we've not switched yet ? Because unfortunately, i not found any decent alternative for now. Hubspot bot is promising but it's way too limited for the moment. So if you're creating a decent alternative, get in touch with me now, we'll be happy to switch from this scam that is called drift and we're gonna give you 500$ each month for it.

Right now, they're not solving anything, Drift is creating problem that we didn't have before.

Their marketing. Lots of bells and whistles, but none really deliver

The entire app is incredibly buggy. Does chat increase engagement and leads for your sales team? yes! do you need to overpay for complicated, buggy software to make that happen? no I wanted to love Drift. I'm a marketer and was salivating over Drift for 6 months before I finally convinced our CFO to increase our chat cost 10x to get Drift. Unfortunately, the app is incredibly unstable. Right now for example, Slack integration is completely down, which caused us to not be alerted of a chat and lose someone who was interested in pricing. Onboarding was a mess. The bot constantly loops and we launched only to have Drift release a new version of the bot a week later that rendered our old bot useless. The support team spent days trying to fix it, but of course the bot was down that entire time. The list goes on...

Lead engagement Lead qualification