You know how when you make your bed, your room looks cleaner?
Well, that’s basically what we did here at Drift in August.
We spent the month tidying things up for you, so all of your interactions and conversations with your customers are as smooth and as easy as possible.
You signed up for Drift to talk to the people that are visiting your website and using your product, and we never want to get in the way of that.
So August was less about shipping new features, and more about making the existing stuff work that much better.
Here’s what’s new in Drift from August.
PS. Not using Drift yet? Get it for free. Just click here to learn more.
Driftbot Is Now Live In Your Account
Earlier in the summer, we told you about Driftbot. And with the launch of Drift 2.0, we gave early acccess to a small group of customers — but now we’re ready and we’ve rolled it out to everyone.
So, when your website visitors write messages via Drift, the Driftbot (which you can name and give your own avatar) will jump in to make sure they get routed to the right person on your team, which you can also set.
Routing will help your team manage the volume of chats you get, and make sure conversations get to the right person on your team.
And speaking of volume — you know how sometimes you just can’t get to a conversation right away? Well instead of ignoring the person writing in, Drifbot will hop in and let the person know that you’ll get to them as soon as possible. It’s a nice way of setting expectations for chat when someone comes to your website, but doesn’t stop them from saying hello.
All you have to do to turn it in on in your account is head over to settings in your Drift account.
A Cleaner Slack Experience
Our Slack integration has quickly become the most popular integration for Drift customers — but one of the things we learned was that it’s been hard to make sure that things don’t slip through the cracks when you’re using Slack.
So this month, we made some major design updates to the Slack integration to act more like the experience you get when you’re logged in and using Drift.
Now, you can change the status of conversations right from the main channel, and when you close conversations, they go away like you wanted them to.
And on top of that, the message that’s posted in Slack will dynamically update whenever new messages come in, or the assignee or status changes.
If you’re brand new to Drift, you will have this new experience by default.
And if you’ve been using the Slack integration, just head here and disconnect and reconnect the integration to get access.
(I know. This is the Drift equivalent of when the cable guy says “did you try unplugging the cable box and then plugging it back in?”)
A Cleaner Design For Announcements
Announcement campaigns are one of the best ways to start new conversations — but we heard your feedback loud and clear.
Many of you said the old announcement design seemed a bit, well impresonal — so the new design comes across much more like a conversation than a billboard:
And while we’re talking about cleaner design, here’s another thing worth mentioning:
If you have a high volume of conversations each day, you know how messy it can get when trying to answer and close those.
In the past, the experience was super jumpy (OK, let’s be honest…it was bad). We were switching you between conversations, and things would disappear without explanation.
So this month we took a hard look at the conversations user experience in our web app and gave it some serious loving.
Now, when you’re powering through conversations in the Drift interface, everything should feel smooth as butter.
(I’ve always wanted to use that line).
When Were You Last Active?
This is one question we heard on the other end of Drift messages this summer: “How do I know if someone is there or not?”
So we added a last active number at the top of all conversations that your customers and visitors see. This will help set expecations for your visitors and customers in the case that you’re not available to get back to them right away:
And if you’re online, it will say so. Other times that will display are things like “Active in the last 15 minutes” and then in 15-30 minute intervals from there.
Messages Now Send 10x Faster
When you sent a message via the Drift widget in the past, it sometimes would take a while to send. Like..5-10 seconds to send.
I know, I know. Not cool. That’s an eternity today.
So, we fixed it — and now, messages aren’t just faster. They are 10x faster. All messages will now get pushed through instantly:
A Few Others Things From August
- When you turn on a campaign based on “display when” conditions, such as a URL, the campaign will no longer follow that visitor or customer. It will only display when the person is on that page or meet those conditions, as it should.
- We added support for 10 more languages! Here’s the full list of languages we support..
- Our iOS app is in beta. Click here to get early access.
As always, we’re here if you need anything. Hit us up on chat at anytime.