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,…
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Gist
Score 9.6 out of 10
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Gist is a unified marketing, sales, and support platform. It includes live chat, a help desk, knowledge base, email marketing, marketing automation, opt-in forms, and more.
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.
If your marketing model is selling products, services, or SAAS where you are doing inbound marketing and your website will do most of the lead generation and conversion, this is a great product. From live chat, support, event tracking, and automation, you could almost put your entire business on autopilot. If your marketing model is mostly outreach to cold leads and conversion, this software currently does not have any type of sales stages or task generation. I would still use Gist for website inbound but use another software for outreach and cold leads then when they become a lead put them into Gist for marketing automation.
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.
Customer service via a unified inbox so you dont have to separately monitor your twitter, Facebook or IG account for consumer communication there. Gist unified all into one inbox, better than anyone else I've seen in the market. They archive all communications and tie them back to a single user so you get unified customer history / data.
Marketing segmentation and automation: they track user history and behavior across the site and have super detailed segmenting capability, on par with ActiveCampaign's, but better I'd say. Better UI for the marketing admin person, and more unified data than in AC.
Live chat and chatbot. Usually it's either one or the other but with Gist you can do both seamlessly.
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.
Plan limits can be confusing. For example, there is a monthly charge for support and a monthly charge for "growth," plus there's a separate charge depending on how many contacts and seats you have. Perhaps this is normal in the industry, but it can make it a little challenging to understand the bill every month.
The vast amount of features means development will never be as fast as you'd like it to be (even though they release updates all the time). This may not actually be a valid concern, and it certainly isn't unique to Gist (who doesn't have a wishlist they're waiting on their favorite SaaS to get to?), but I do believe the likelihood of being stuck without your desired feature being developed goes up a lot as the product gets bigger and bigger.
Email deliverability has been less than perfect in the past, but it has improved drastically in the last year.
Gist is a quite reliable service with a lot of added values. We don't need to pay for different Saas for these important features. If I had an issue the team was super responsive and helpful, that is essential for every business. The email delivery is great, so virtually no email has landed into spam folder
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.
It’s pretty simple, but it does a lot so there are more complicated features which depend on an individuals ability for software implementation. I am not an IT expert and I’ve managed to implement everything myself, others that are more tech-minded may find everything easier.
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!
Fantastic support. Ask a question, get an answer within 24 hours every time. And sometimes within a few minutes. They've always come through for me, helpful and, even when it's an issue on my end, they point me in the right direction.
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.
Gist combines all our previous products into one application and adds many more features that would require more apps. Gist is excellent and a no-brainer all-in-one application when compared to having to manage multiple applications at higher cost. The support from the whole Gist team has been extremely responsive.
They are perfect for me as a someone who needs a lot of bang for the buck. The chat messenger device on my website alone has brought me new prospects that I did not have to spend money recruiting.
I am able to save hours of time with the automated emails that are GDPR compliant.
I don't have to pay for a designer to have excellent looking emails either.
