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Drift Review – Pricing, Features, Reviews

Drift Review

Last Updated: March 2024

So you’re looking for all-in-one customer service software that will help you improve your workflows and customer experience. Drift is unquestionably one of the most popular customer service / marketing platforms on the market. However, the market is flooded with customer support platforms, each of which is tailored to specific business needs. To make an informed decision, consider diving into a detailed Drift review to assess if it aligns perfectly with your goals.

We also understand how time-consuming it can be to read through Drift’s feature lists and pricing options in order to fully comprehend what the platform has to offer. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. In this post, we will give you an in-depth, Drift review to help you make the best decision for your company.

Drift Pros and Cons

PROSCONS
  • Communicate easily with website visitors in real time to generate leads.
  • It includes convenient live chat features that allow you to connect your customers or prospects with team members.
  • On both the front and back ends, the platform has an excellent user interface.
  • Drift is priced way higher than their competitors. Not affordable for small and medium-sized firms.
  • Adoption of new features such as video chat, email playbooks, and ABMs is a somewhat time-consuming process.
  • The mobile app needs more features and customization options.

Drift Pricing and Features

Pricing and Plans (Rating ⭐4.16/5, 25 reviews)

Pricing and Plans

Drift has three pricing tiers and one free tier. Every plan includes a customer success manager, strategy reviews, onboarding assistance, and live chat support. They also provide custom pricing based on your needs, with the option of purchasing additional seats per user for your sales, marketing, and service teams.

  • First, let’s look at the Premium plan. This package is intended for smaller teams and includes Custom Chatbots, Drift Intel, Encryption at Rest, and Drift Deal Room.
  • The Advanced plan is intended for medium-sized companies. This plan includes everything in the Premium plan as well as Drift Fastlane, A/B Testing, and Advanced Lead Routing.
  • The Enterprise plan, as the name suggests, is intended for larger organizations looking to personalize at scale. It includes everything in Advanced plus Drift Workspaces, AI-Powered Chatbots, Custom RBAC, and more.

The most common objection to this platform, according to most users, is its pricing. The platform can quickly become expensive, especially if you have multiple teams and want to route leads and conversations between them. If you want AI-powered chatbots to provide 24/7 support for your team, you’ll have to go with their Enterprise plan, which isn’t cheap.

Let’s take a look at what customers are saying about Drift’s pricing plans:

The Pricing structure of this tool is very complex. It is very hard to understand what is the amount that you are about to pay to achieve this tool. The support from Drift itself is not a very strong aspect of this software. They have to consider their support and work on this matter.

⭐5/5 Barbara-éctor M.

Their most powerful automation features, like lead routing, fastlane and AI powered Drift chatbots are only available if you opt for the more expensive pricing plans. Helpdesks like Saufter on the other hand come packed with plenty of automation features to improve efficiency at a fraction of the cost.

Interface and Customization (Ratings ⭐4.43/5, 46 reviews)

Interface and Customization

Drift’s dashboard is well-organized and simple to use, in our opinion. The overall design is much more modern than the majority of customer experience tools we’ve tested. Drift’s interface is simple and modern, with a search bar to help you find contacts and conversations quickly. 

We like how you can easily switch between chatting with contacts and sending them an email from the same window. There’s also a detailed, CRM-style view into the contact’s profile, with the ability to add contact fields, tags, and notes. Overall, Drift is simple to use and does not require advanced technical skills or extensive software user experience.

Originally I had a bit of a tough time editing bots in the playbook designer. With time I’ve become more comfortable mapping out our new playbooks, truthfully isn’t my favorite interface to deal with.

⭐4.5/5 Alex L

I think its a great app and interface! I love the salesforce and pardot integrations. Keep up the good work. I am sure they will just enhance it. Be able to create nurture flows is my forte.

⭐5/5 Sevdija N

Reporting and Dashboard (Ratings ⭐ 4.44/5, 34 reviews)

Reporting and Dashboard

The platform includes a number of reports that show not only your team’s performance, but also Drift’s performance. The unified dashboard of the platform provides a comprehensive view of performance metrics and interactions that affect your operations. Let’s take a look at some of the most important reports available:

  • Reports on Conversations: The conversation stats dashboard provides a detailed breakdown of customer conversations.
  • Revenue Reports: This view shows Drift Influenced Opportunities, Pipeline, and Closed Won Revenue.
  • Overview report: This report gives you a comprehensive view of your sales pipeline.
  • Meetings Report: Determine which companies and teams are scheduling the most meetings over a specified time period.
  • Playbook Report: View how your customers interact with your Playbooks.
  • Fastlane Reporting

Reporting is okay for the most part, although some additions would be welcome – eg. being able to get an overview of comparative performance between the different teams set up in Drift and having the agent and team name visible when looking at conversation ratings at a Playbook level.

⭐4.5/5 Imraan A

Drift reporting is excellent, but I wish there was a way to choose specific metrics from the multitude of reports they offer and create a custom export list.

⭐5/5 Joseph B

Overall, Drift offers a variety of well-designed reports to help you assess the success of your day-to-day customer support / marketing operations. You can quickly identify underperforming teams and members who need to improve. What else? You can compare your team’s performance to industry best practices and even drill down to specific views to see how they’re doing.

Drift Live Chat (Ratings ⭐ 4.46/5, 284 reviews)

Drift Live Chat

Drift chat can be used to manage customer service inquiries as well as generate inbound leads. This chat feature allows your prospects/customers to ask questions before taking demos, schedule demos with us, or find specific topics on your website. A key feature that assists in this regard is the live tracking feature, which informs you of who, where, and when customers/prospects visited our website.

Chat Bots have to be Drift’s most talked about feature, and we’re sure you’d like to learn more about it. Firstly, these Chat Bots are available on the Premium, Advanced, and Enterprise Drift plans. Here are some use cases:

  • Proactively engage, qualify, and convert buyers from any page on your website.
  • The Drift bot can be trained using actual conversations your sales team has with potential customers.
  • Use the information shared in AI conversations to understand the buyer’s pain points and share the best solutions.
  • The bots can be used to interact with customers, answer their questions, and even schedule meetings.

A combination of Drift’s live chat and chatbots ensures the best possible around-the-clock customer support. 

Drift’s bread and butter is its chat, and it’s great, but they also have other useful features like Conversational Landing Pages. My favorite thing about Drift is the A/B testing functionality. It makes it easy for us to optimize our messaging. They also have great account support (shoutout Nick and Andy)!

⭐5/5 Joseph B

Email Features (Ratings ⭐4.48/5, 97 reviews)

Email Features

Drift is well-known for its extensive email features, not only for support, but also for marketing and sales campaignsEmail Bots are exactly what you need to start conversations with all of your best leads and follow up with them with minimal effort on the part of your sales/marketing teams. The following are three of the most popular Email Bots:

  • Follow Up Email Bot
  • Abandoned Chat Email Bot
  • Webinar Email Bot

There is also a Dashboard where you can view all of your account metrics such as the number of contacts that have been updated, the total number of replies, and the number of new contacts.

Drift helps us convert more leads on our website and have more engaging conversations with our prospects with their email and video tools too. It has consistently increased our web conversion rates over time.

⭐5/5 Tom H

Drift Email also includes multi-language support, allowing you to send and receive auto-replies in multiple languages. The platform can even categorize emails in multiple languages. English, German, Spanish, and French are among these languages.

Drift is helping us to be able to react and answer our customer’s questions in real-time when they don’t necessarily want to hop on a call or be sent an email. It’s the quickest way to service our customers with any questions they have, quickly and efficiently.

⭐4.5/5 Nicholas N

A standout feature if you’ll be using Drift for Sales and Marketing – When a customer responds to your Drift Email campaign, you can configure your bot to send back a response based on intent. The bot will bring in the appropriate lead owner and track the interaction in your marketing automation platform.

Marketing and Sales Features (Ratings ⭐ 4.56/5, 132 reviews)

Marketing and Sales Features

Many teams purchase a helpdesk for support, but want to include their sales and marketing teams so that they are all on the same platform. Drift is definitely a platform that can help in this regard since it comes with plenty of marketing/sales features. 

Drift integrates with our other marketing and sales platforms seamlessly, which allows us to reach people intelligently and track interactions in a variety of ways. I also appreciate the support from the team every step of the way — even well after launch!

⭐4.5/5 Jess L

Visitor Intelligence has to be one of Drift’s most important marketing/sales tools. Drift provides real-time visitor monitoring that highlights customer/prospect details as they browse your website. This makes it easier to get to know your website visitors in real time and identify opportunities to reach out. You can also filter and segment visitors in the live preview to align with your marketing objectives. It’s also worth noting that the contact information of previous chat participants is saved on Drift, so no one has to re-introduce themselves.

When you bring on sales users to do live chats in Drift, you’ll get the most benefit by connecting the buyer to the exact person they would work with to answer their questions and guide them through the buying process.

⭐4.5/5 Phil G

Drift comes with three major features to improve your entire sales process.  

  • Inbound Qualification: Use AI bots to convert conversations that happen after-hours into your pipeline with features like ABM Notifications, Internal Notes, Sales Real-Time Dashboard, etc.
  • Outbound Qualification: Use Team Reporting, Drift Prospector, and integrations with LinkedIn and Salesloft to centralize data and determine which accounts to prioritize.
  • Deal Management: Use ABM Notifications, Drift Video, and Drift Live Chat to gain engagement insights and deliver a more streamlined sales experience.

Bottom Line

Drift is clearly a great choice to opt for, especially considering the platform’s wide array of features, making it an excellent choice for most businesses. The bottom line is that you can’t use this platform’s valuable features or services effectively unless you’re on the higher pricing tiers. Many of the platform’s features, in fact, are only available at the Premium or Enterprise plan pricing levels. As a result, if you own a small or medium-sized business, this platform is probably a no-go.

We hope this article compared to other Drift reviews cleared up some questions and made it easier to make a decision. 

Also, if you’re just getting started with helpdesk systems and want to make it easier for your support reps to provide the best service possible, Saufter could be the platform for you. It is a multichannel customer service help desk designed for small businesses and enterprise teams. The platform is designed to be cost-effective, easy to set up, and most agents can get started on Saufter with little to no training.

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