Not What I Expected
July 20, 2022

Not What I Expected

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Chat

Overall Satisfaction with Drift

We use Drift as our on-site chat function on our e-commerce furniture website. Buying furniture is a medium-to-high consideration purchase. Our users and customers have full-spectrum questions ranging from pre-purchase questions on products and services to post-purchase but pre-delivery questions on status, to post-delivery questions. Across the board, this is a very sensitive and important touchpoint for our business.
  • Branding
  • Integrations with other applications
  • Chat
  • Customer support
  • Troubleshooting
  • Implementation
  • Training
  • chat
  • lead capture
  • live chat
  • In my opinion it had a negatively impacted our engineering team (hours of wasted work)
  • I believe it slowed down our page speed
  • I found it hurt our SEO
intercom
zendesk
freshchat

Do you think Drift delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Drift's feature set?

No

Did Drift live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Drift go as expected?

No

Would you buy Drift again?

No

Their customer support is abhorrent I believe. Both during the onboarding and initial setup and post-onboarding I found. Having used Drift over many years and multiple brands, I can say with certainty it was not always like this, in my opinion. The decline in the responsiveness and ability of their CS team seems to correspond with their move toward enterprise/bigger clients I believe. To my mind, this should be a huge red flag to any SMB or start-up considering Drift. In my experience, 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. I found that post-implementation, we realized the chat was not following our basic targeting and triggering logic. From my point of view, dropping days and days of our own engineering time to troubleshoot this, Drift would not follow the rules we set in the Drift admin I found. Basic things like showing/not showing based on a user's device type. I found 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 I discovered. We stopped using their services months ago. They even had the gall to label our request to do so as a "cancellation of convenience" I discovered. In my opinion, what's inconvenient is paying thousands monthly for a chat that won't follow our logic and doesn't work. I believe this would be a nightmare for a venture-backed startup or SMB. In my opinion, whatever Drift had going for it several years ago seems dead.