Conversica provides lead management software for marketing, inside sales and sales groups.
$1,499
per installation
Drift
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Drift is presented as a human-centric, AI-powered buyer engagement platform, a platform that automatically listens, understands and learns from buyers to provide individualized and human experiences at every touchpoint of the buying journey. The platform helps businesses translate conversational data and buyer behavior into deeper customer relationships, and also modernizes the B2B website experience. According to the vendor,…
N/A
Pricing
Conversica
Drift
Editions & Modules
Starter Edition
$1,499
per installation
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Conversica
Drift
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
A Conversica subscription includes an unlimited number of seats for marketers, sales reps and managers. Different editions include different levels of functionality to match your needs. The service is a monthly subscription with an annual commitment.
Conversica and Drift are both AI virtual sales assistant software designed to help salespeople automate processes such as lead qualification and meeting scheduling. Drift and Conversica are both most popular with small to mid-sized businesses, who can leverage sales automation to lessen the workload of their sales team. Conversica is the more popular of the two with larger enterprises, perhaps due to its lead generation features.
Features
Conversica and Drift both include essential AI virtual sales assistant software features such as sales process automation, but they also have a few standout features that set them apart from each other.
Conversica automatically follows up with leads that don’t quite meet the metrics for them to be reached out to by your sales team. This allows businesses to stop potentially interested clients from slipping through the cracks. Conversica can also be easily customized and can use machine learning to better understand the kinds of leads a business is looking for. In addition to generating leads, Conversica can also be used to drive attendance to events such as webinars or conferences.
Drift is a chatbot software that can ask users questions on your site to determine why they are visiting and if they are a potential lead. Additionally, Drift can help direct users to the content they are looking for, or the sales content the organization wants them to see. Businesses that use Drift can map answers from the chatbot right into their CRM or other sales software.
Limitations
Conversica and Drift can both help businesses qualify leads and store conversation data, but they also have a few limitations that are important to consider.
Conversica is highly customizable when it comes to identifying leads, but has limitations when creating custom emails or messages. In contrast, Drift allows for highly customized messaging. Additionally, Conversica does not create profiles for individual conversations, while Drift stores individual conversation data that can be accessed for future chatbot interactions.
Drift is a highly customizable chatbot that is great at handling leads already on your site, but it doesn’t have the same lead generation tools offered by Conversica. Drift has some limited lead generation features through features like email automation, but they are bare bones compared to other options. Additionally, many customers note that customer service with Drift can be slow and lackluster compared to other software.
Pricing
Conversica is priced depending on what features are needed by the business. Businesses interested in Conversica can get a quote for whatever set of features they need.
Drift offers a free version with limited chatbot functionality. Beyond the free version, the Essentials package includes lead routing and CRM integrations for $400.00 per month. The Premium package adds marketing automation features and personalized playbooks for $1,500.00 per year. Larger businesses with specific feature needs can reach out to the vendor for a quote on their Enterprise package.
Features
Conversica
Drift
Chat Analytics and Reports
Comparison of Chat Analytics and Reports features of Product A and Product B
Conversica is an excellent tool if you have a large database of potential students, sales leads, or other forms of potential customers/users. It does not replace human interaction, but instead supplements it - allowing your admissions/sales/retention team to spend their time with those individuals that are in most need of assistance - whether that be because they are "hot leads" for a sale, students with a sincere interest, or customers needing assistance beyond the capabilities of an automatic system.
It is recommended for any company; it is a comprehensive tool for teams interested in strengthening business management and improving efficiency. It allows you to automatically schedule support with customers, thus saving a lot of time. Large companies can establish a chat and communication between potential customers, answering their questions quickly; allow you to monitor and track your leads and new leads, to make it fully functional, it has a very affordable value so that it can be used in all companies, it will not affect their economic aspects.
Conversica is great at working low level leads and surfacing those that are in fact interested in your product or service.
Conversica is also useful in weeding out leads that are not strong.
Since Conversica is sending emails to various prospects, customers and opportunities, it allows sales, account managers, service etc, to focus on other activities, thereby saving time and freeing up resources.
Easy to implement - we were up on our site in hours.
Increases the volume and quality of buyer conversations - visitors get to value faster and qualify themselves by chatting in.
Surfaces relevant experiences and content to people faster based on targeted use cases.
Brings your brand to the prospect experience to stand out in the market. For example, our mascot Ollie Llama welcoming visitors on the homepage with funny llama.
The method of standing up campaigns can be a little tedious for administrators because it uses copy/paste of Salesforce Campaign ID instead of just searching for active Salesforce campaigns.
Understanding the conversation path options that the AI could take is improving greatly, but can still use some improvements for admin awareness when standing up a new conversation.
Understanding what conversation types exist and how they differ from one another is sometimes difficult to self-serv, but the Conversica team is always very good about helping out explaining these.
Whenever there have been challenges with the product, the team has always been hungry to fix the issues that we raise.
In-platform reporting on conversion metrics can be improved. For example, it's not possible to report on business vs non business email capture rate (currently reported by our CSM every week), and to get the most detail about meetings that have been booked, you have to export data and review in Sheets/Excel. Drift responds quickly, and they're already working on this... so by the time you read this review, the reports will probably be fully functional in the platform.
Tool is extremely powerful but comes with a heavy price tag. As long as we close more than 30 deals with year with Conversica's assistance it will be an easy choice to renew. If we don't we will have to figure out if these funds are best spent in other lead generation places.
The customer-facing usability is great, but managing drift from the back end can be challenging at times. This is mainly due to slow loading speeds when it comes to editing or viewing routing. Coupling this with no autosave function, changes are hard to make and can easily be lost.
Our account manager and support rep have been extremely helpful in helping us get the system where we wanted it. Given our original use case as a lead qualifier, a lot of the conversations needed to be altered or exceptions created in order to provide the customization we needed. Our AM and support rep were able to accommodate most of our requests and were extremely helpful in working with us on a solution.
The Drift team has been remarkably responsive to me. From support reps available in-app, to my account manager committed to my long-term success, to regular connections and interactions with their leadership team. They have been wholeheartedly committed to answering every question and solving every issue so that we can succeed as a team, and I can succeed as a marketer!
The implementation went smoothly. The only advice I would give for anybody looking to integrate Conversica with Salesforce is to ensure that either you or somebody within your organization has experience with process builder as you'll need to create some processes to force your leads into Salesforce campaigns for the Conversica system to pick them up.
I haven't looked into many other conversational ai products - we received a solid recommendation about using this and have been happy with the process and experience. Price was also pretty good, so we didn't feel a need to shop around on that front. If things change I'll do that homework, but we're happy for now
I have used a few different chat platforms, the most popular one being Intercom. They both have some similarities in functionalities and features. I have had more success with Drift and the calendar link/automation. I love the fact that a prospect can easily find my calendar link and book a demo without needing to speak with me.
We have found that each conversation type has a different ROI. Some are very hard to report off of, whereas others are easy. this is because some are more built around building awareness of what we offer where they may not purchase it for months down the line.
Has helped us to save on salaries. If staff were to try to do the same thing our AI Assistant does, it would take them many hours to be as successful.
