Drift Reviews 2023: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Drift needs no introduction in the conversational marketing realm. Having over 50,000 clients is a testimony to Drift’s success and domination. But with new players emerging in the AI and chatbot landscape, coupled with the current recession phase, many people are asking the question — is Drift still the best option?

This question has bugged many businesses, putting them in a dilemma — whether to use Drift or not.

If you’re also one of them, this article will make things easier for you, helping you decide.

Here, we have written a detailed Drift review keeping several things in mind like:

• Current Market Scenario

• Authentic G2 Drift Reviews

• Personal Experience of Using Drift

• Our Domain Expertise

We have tried to remain as objective as we can, ensuring to show the good, bad, and the ugly side of the Drift backed up with authentic reviews and experiences.

So, without further ado, let’s begin.

What is Drift?

Drift is a cloud-based chat solution that automates a key part of a business’s sales process – lead generation. It does this by adding live chat widgets to the website, resulting in increased customer experience and loyalty.

If we talk about its key features, it includes:

• Chatbots

• Proactive chatting

• Geo-targeting

• Routing

Drift enables web visitors to communicate in real-time, thus generating more leads and improving sales opportunities. In addition, it also converts every communication channel into an effective and unique marketing platform that allows businesses to promote and close deals fast and easy.

I. The Good

Drift is one of the leading tools for chatbots and conversational marketing. Its key offerings and features make it stand out from the rest. In this section, we will talk about those in great detail, supported by Drift’s reviews given by its users.

1. Integrations

Integrations are a big plus point for Drift as it offers:

• 60 native integrations

• Zapier & Integromat integrations

• Inbuilt live chat

• APIs for webhook creation 

On top of that, Drift’s integrations are quite rich and broad in nature, covering a majority of sales functionalities and facets.

For instance, if we talk about Drift’s Salesforce integration, it offers:

• Two-way sync

• Creation of leads

• Creation of contacts

This empowers businesses to deliver a top-notch ABM experience, boosting their sales bottom lines.

Another major thing is that Drift specifically caters to mid-sized and enterprise businesses. So, if your business falls in this category, you can rest assured about any of your integration needs getting fulfilled. It is because Drift has it all covered for you with integrations to commonly used tools like:

• Marketo

• Microsoft Dynamics

• Oracle

• SAP

And we are not the only ones who are talking about Drift’s integrations. We found a lot of Drift reviews where users had expressed similar experiences.

Below is a collage showing snippets of all those Drift reviews.

(Source)

2. Easy to Use Interface

Drift calls itself “The Drift Revenue Acceleration Platform.” It is because their core focus is on sales engagement. This focused approach has worked for Drift. Whereas its competitors who try to inculcate multiple use cases end up delivering subpar user experience, Drift’s sales-focused approach has helped them deliver a top-notch user experience to sales professionals worldwide.

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We tried using Drift’s user interface and found out that the three components made it stand out. These were:

a. Chatbot Builder

Drift offers a visual flow builder for creating chatbot flows. Here, the chatbot flows are referred to as Playbooks. Each chatbot flow comes with multiple elements that help you to add and edit. This helps you to draft a conversation by defining questions and adding possible responses to them. You can also test the chatbot flow before deploying it on the website.

Somewhere I also feel that, since Drift has a limited list of elements at the moment, it makes it easier for users to build their playbook flows.

b. Live Chat

Live Chat is where Drift truly shines as it makes chat effortless and easy for both SDRs and the customers. It helps you to connect with your customers at their moment of highest intent. It also shortens the sales cycles by allowing you to have real-time conversations where you can resolve your customers’ doubts instantly.

Apart from that, with Drift Live Chat, you can:

• Create multiple inboxes to manage different types of conversations

• Reply instantly with Saved Replies

• Converse with users from web, mobile app, and even Slack

• Communicate with teammates using Internal Notes

• See who is on your site with Live View

• Sync chat information with CRMs

Drift offers the live chat feature in the free plan. Drift’s live chat allows its clients to connect with their website visitors and provide support or generate leads.

It also has a conversations inbox that allows users to download the Drift desktop application to house chats separately.

c. Reports

Drift’s dashboard is another feature that makes Drift a premium product. Drift’s dashboard is well-detailed and comprehensive, making it one of the most loved features by its users. Below are a few of the major success metrics offered by Drift.

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1. Leads Captured

It is the volume of emails captured

2. Lead Capture Rate

This denotes the percentage of emails captured

3. Qualified Leads Captured

The volume of emails captured that fits the profile of an ideal customer with the intent to buy

4. Qualified Lead Capture Rate

The percent of emails captured that fits the profile of an ideal customer with the intent to buy

5. Meetings Booked

The volume of meetings booked in a given time period

6. Qualified Lead/Meeting Conversion Rate

The percentage of total qualified conversions over total meetings booked

7. Opportunities Influenced

Total volume of opportunities influenced (created or impacted) by Drift

8. Opportunities Influenced

Dollar value of opportunities influenced (created or impacted) by Drift

9. Opportunities Won

Volume of opportunities won that were influenced (created or impacted) by Drift

10. Revenue

Dollar value of revenue created or impacted by Drift

This critical data helps businesses to gain key insights and help them to make insight-driven business decisions.

3. Account-based Marketing

Drift is perfect for account-based marketing. It leverages the luxury of its top-notch integrations and routing feature to offer feature-rich ABM chat functionality.

For instance, if you’re using Salesforce CRM, it can fetch all the required information the moment a visitor lands on the website.

It can also nudge the owner of that account, alerting them about their prospect’s presence on the site. Thus, the account owner can initiate the chat instantly and nurture the prospect.

Secondly, it can also enrich IP data for new visitors, showing the industry they belong to. Once it identifies the industry, it can route the visitor chat to the respective support rep responsible for managing live chats of that industry.

Not only this, but it can also enrich IP data for new visitors, showing the industry they belong to. This is truly a game-changer. Let me explain to you why.

Imagine this.

Your website is buzzing with activity, with visitors from all over the world engaging with your content and products. But with so many people coming and going, how can you possibly keep track of who they are and what they want?

That's where this amazing feature comes in. With advanced IP data enrichment, you can now instantly identify the industry of every new visitor to your site. No more guesswork, no more time wasted - just powerful insights that allow you to connect with your customers like never before.

And that's not all! Drift can even automatically route each visitor's chat to the support rep who knows that industry best. So whether you're in e-commerce, finance, or any other field, you can rest assured that your customers will get the personalized, expert assistance they deserve.

II. Bad

Now, we are in the critical part of our Drift review, where we will focus on all those aspects of the Drift that have some room for improvement. In a nutshell, the bad part.

No chatbot product is perfect, and the same goes for Drift. There are many recurring Drift reviews in which users have complained about many of the features and other factors that don’t work well.

Let’s have a look at them one by one.

1. Chat Routing

Routing is the process or manner in which a live chat is assigned to the sales rep. Many users have complained about the glitchy routing in G2 Drift reviews. Below are snippets of those Drift reviews.

Having a glitchy routing feature can cause a lot of chaos. It can route irrelevant chats to the sales rep, causing confusion and waste of time. In the worst case scenario, it can leave customers waiting for minutes and hours, making them frustrated and never to return. 

2. Pricing

Any Drift review is incomplete without a discussion on its pricing.

If you go to G2 Drift reviews, you’ll see a lot of people talking about Drift pricing.

But if you want to know my take, I feel that getting Drift pricing in itself is a huge challenge. Yes, I am telling you that from experience.

To get the Drift pricing, you have to go through the below process.

Yes, that’s the actual process of getting the quote.

In this entire process, I had to interact with two different people, go through 2-3 meetings, exchange 10 emails, and answer a bunch of questions (sometimes the questions were repeated) to get the final quote.

Another major turn-off is Drift’s value-based approach to pricing. They don’t have definite pricing, which is why they keep it hidden. They assess the value of their customers and then give quotes as per their perceived value. This means they quote different prices to clients per their client value assessment.

And not to forget, Drift pricing for its premium plan is quite high compared to its competitors.

Yes, Drift’s premium plan will cost you  $2500/month. And to make matters worse, you will be billed annually.

Also, the renewal cost for Drift is quite steep. So, every year, you will be paying a lot more than the previous year.

With the world heading towards a global recession, Drift pricing and steep renewal costs certainly seem to be out of place, especially if you are tight on budget.

This is why many Drift users are drifting away from it in search of reasonable chatbot pricing in 2023.

(Source)

Okay! Now we head towards arguably the most interesting part of the Drift review.

For this, I went through all the one-star and two-star Drift reviews and found out a few common complaints. Our team also talked with a few ex-Drift clients, where they shared their experiences. On top of that, I have also mentioned a few other points which I feel would suit this section.

In a nutshell, I haven’t backed out from calling a spade a spade.

1. Penalizes You to Grow

Choosing Drift can be a huge roadblock to your company’s progress. It is because Drift penalizes you to grow. It has a charge-per-user model of pricing that will lead to enormous bills every time your team grows.

Not only this, but it also notoriously charges you separately every time they come with a new feature. These additional costs can break your bank if you are a budget-sensitive company.

Many users have faced the above problems. We also had a chat with a few ex-Drift users, and this is what they had to say.

Compare this to WotNot, which doesn’t charge you per seating. Yes, WotNot is about breaking the tyranny of “per seating” charges. This is the reason why it is extremely popular among small and medium-sized businesses.

2. Non-customization

Whenever a business incorporates a chatbot on its website, the obvious expectation they have is that the bot should be in line with its branding. And to cater to this need, chatbot companies offer a great deal of customization.

But that’s not the case with Drift. Customizations in Drift are almost non-existent. With Drift, the only customization you can do is — change the color and avatar of the chat widgets. If you see Drift chatbots on various websites, they all look the same. With such obvious similarity, anyone could figure out that it is a Drift chatbot.

Branding is not just for sales. It is also a company’s identity. And Drift directly challenges that with its minimal customization options.

Instead, chatbot companies should give their clients full flexibility to make the bot look like their own.

For example, at WotNot we believe in the principle that the client needs to have complete control over their bot. Hence, we allow our clients to make changes in the CSS of the chat widget to make changes in size, shape, and other key dimensions. This significantly helps them to make their bot truly look like their own.

3. Customer Support

If there was a competition of what would top the “Ugly” section, customer support would win hands down. Drift’s customer support has to be its weakest link. Don’t believe me? Go to the G2 Drift reviews and check out all the one-star and two-star ratings. You’ll find a majority of reviews talking about how poor their customer support is.

Drift’s poor customer support is not because of a lack of manpower or technical infrastructure. Drift is a big name, and it would be naive to think that they have any lack of resources, be it human or technology.

Drift’s abysmal customer support has more to do with their attitude and their biased treatment of their clients. Yes, and it’s not only me who is saying this. Have a look at the below G2 Drift review.

Yes, it has become common knowledge by now that Drift has totally shifted its focus to big enterprise clients. This means they provide top-class customer support to only those clients that fall in that category. The rest of their clients are simply ignored and deprioritized for days and sometimes months.

Even Drift has accepted it indirectly. Look at the below replies from Drift where they have approved of their poor customer support.

Conclusion

So, that was the detailed Drift review guys! We tried our best to put an objective Drift review that highlights all the aspects of Drift – the good, the bad, and the ugly. I hope this Drift review helps you to reach a decision regarding Drift. And in case, if you want more options apart from Drift, you can always check out the list here. And if you don’t want to bother going through multiple options, then here is a worthy Drift alternative, you must check out.