“Work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger. More than ever, hour after hour, work is never over.”
Daft Punk said it best: Work is never over. But is that really true? Could work be over, and still better, if you only focused on the activities that moved the needle for your business?
It’s not a far-off dream.
G2 recently released their 2023 Spring Awards, and in them, we were thrilled to see Drift named a leader in nine categories! And all nine of these categories drive towards the same end goal: reducing the amount of time and money it takes to get your business to its most optimal state.
Wondering how? Let me break it down for you using Daft Punk’s lyrics 👇
1. Work It Harder
Working harder doesn’t necessarily mean doing more things or logging longer hours. Instead, it means putting quality effort into the tasks that matter most to your business. Live chat, AI sales assistants, and buyer intent data providers are great tools for sales teams to prioritize their work.
Live Chat
G2 definition: Live chat software allows companies to communicate with their website visitors in real time via chat windows.
Drift’s live chat software allows sales reps to start conversations with prospects on your website when they’re at their highest intent — i.e. actively thinking about and researching your product. This ensures that your reps are spending their time with the people who are most likely to buy. Plus, it makes for a better buyer experience, as the buyer no longer has to sit around and wait for someone to maybe answer their question (and in doing so, make their work day longer).
Even better, if reps find that they’re answering the same questions over and over again, they can create saved replies to essentially copy and paste answers to simple product questions. And if they’re not sure of the answer, they can leverage AI suggested replies to guide them in the right direction, without ever having to leave the chat.
AI Sales Assistants
G2 definition: A virtual sales assistant uses machine learning and natural language processing, along with other intelligent programming, to optimize the daily routines of sales reps.
Using Drift’s AI Bots, site visitors can voice their intent in their own words, find answers to specific questions instantly, get personalized recommendations, and book a sales meeting at any time of day. This means that sellers can sign off at 5 p.m. and rest easy knowing that nighttime buyers will still be able to get the information they need. Not to mention that the AI stores the conversational data and tracks the visitor’s activity across your site to calculate an engagement score, which helps reps prioritize their outreach the next day.
Buyer Intent Data Provider
G2 definition: Buyer intent data providers aggregate and deliver context around when prospects and customers are interacting with a brand. Buyer intent is the probability that a customer will purchase a product, and these types of tools capture research around actual buyer journeys and signs of their purchase intent.
While some brands use third-party data, or data gathered by outside sources like Facebook or Google, to create personalized experiences for their buyers, Drift leverages a first-party data strategy — using data gathered from the buyers’ activity on your website — to truly meet the buyer where they’re at on their journey with your product.
Drift Prospector allows reps to see what emails prospects have opened, what website pages they’ve visited, what content they’ve downloaded, as well as what contacts at which accounts are most engaged with your brand. With this information, reps can be much more proactive and personalized in their outreach.
Plus, what better way to know you’re focusing on the right task than by receiving a notification that tells you exactly what to focus on? With Drift for ABM, reps receive real-time alerts when their top accounts are engaging with their content. This way, they can reach out to start a live conversation when the prospect is already thinking about them.
2. Make It Better
Making your workflows better doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel, and it doesn’t need to come at a higher cost, either. It simply means doubling down on what you know already works.
We know that digital buying is the new norm. And thanks to customized B2C experiences on sites like Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify, today’s buyers expect — and want — personalized website experiences. So, how can you give buyers more of what they want? With Conversational Marketing, chatbots, and digital experience platforms.
Conversational Marketing
G2 definition: Conversational Marketing software, also known as messenger marketing software, engages potential customers with personalized, one-on-one conversations en route to specific product recommendations or offers.
Our 2022 State of Conversations report found that 41% of buyers demand friendliness, approachability, and easy communication during their website experiences. With self-serve buying journeys being the new norm, it’s safe to say that having an always-on resource on your website is a must.
Drift’s Conversational Marketing platform helps site visitors get the answers they need quickly and easily, all while providing you with the insights you need to hold informed conversations. Not only does this improve your chances of converting buyers, but it also helps your team make the most of their workday.
By integrating Drift with your CRM, you’re able to hyperpersonalize your targeting to ensure that the content you’re sharing will resonate. Plus, by using a Conversational Landing Page, you can drive targeted ad traffic to a personalized landing page where buyers can easily start a conversation with one of your team members as they’re engaging with your content. And even if they don’t want to chat right then, with Drift Prospector, your sales team can see that the visitor interacted with the content and reach out accordingly.
Chatbot
G2 definition: Chatbots, which are often called virtual agents or virtual assistants, are used in place of a human to conduct specific tasks or provide information based on written or spoken requests.
As we said at the start of this section, personalization is paramount in 2023. Chatbots are a great way to kick-start this process.
Drift’s custom chatbots are able to identify where a site visitor is on their journey with your product and personalize their experience accordingly. Through routing rules set by your team, the chatbot can route the visitor to a sales rep, their customer success manager, or a support agent based on their needs. And, if the visitor is simply there to browse your offers, the chatbot can serve up educational content to assist the visitor on their self-serve journey. When everyone is talking to exactly who they’re supposed to be talking to, both the buyers and sellers win.
Digital Experience Platform
G2 definition: Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) help organizations leverage customer data in marketing channels such as websites, social media platforms, advertisements, and customer touchpoints such as customer service, e-commerce platforms, and so on. DXPs are primarily used by marketers to incorporate customer data into multiple steps of the customer journey.
A perfect way to make something better is by leveraging data to let you know what’s working and what’s not.
Through integrations with your CRM and marketing automation platform, Drift’s Conversation Cloud lifts the curtain on your customers’ buying experience to better align your marketing and sales teams. And, thanks to all of the first-party data gathered on your website, you can get a more detailed view into your marketing campaigns and optimize your efforts accordingly.
The end result? More seamless buying experiences that reduce the time and money it takes to turn leads into revenue.
3. make it faster
It’s no secret that, in a digital selling environment, speed wins. Our 2022 State of Conversations report found that the longest amount of time a buyer is willing to wait for a response is one day — and that’s with emails. Social media, web forms, phone calls, and live chat? You’ve got a couple of hours, max.
So, how can you meet these speed expectations without burning out your customer teams? Customer self-service, bot platforms, and Conversational Support are your answer.
Customer Self-Service
G2 definition: Customer self-service software provides a platform for end users, prospects, or customers to access information and perform tasks without the need for live chat or customer support representatives.
By incorporating knowledge base and ticketing integrations into Drift’s chatbots, you can create custom playbooks that will route customers to the resources they need without looping in a human rep. If the bot cannot dig up the right resource, it will automatically create cases and tickets through your ticketing system and notify your support team.
Bot Platforms
G2 definition: Bot platforms are tools used to build and deploy interactive chatbots. Companies utilize the tools to create intelligent, conversational bots to interact with customers and help provide information to users.
At Drift, we do our best to make playbook building as seamless and fast as possible. Reusable blocks speed up the playbook creation process by allowing marketers to reuse certain conversation flows across multiple playbooks. So, for example, if you’re always offering the option to “Get a Demo,” you don’t need to build that conversation flow over and over again — instead, you can simply copy and paste. These blocks ensure that your site visitors will get a consistent, branded experience no matter where they land on your website.
Plus, with conversation routing, you can set your playbooks to automatically route to certain people based on the content of the conversation. This ensures that all conversations are streamlined to the right department in real time.
Conversational Support
G2 definition: Customer service teams use Conversational Support software to engage with customers and prospects across multiple channels and offer a more personalized customer service experience.
Drift’s Conversational Service platform gives you a 360-degree view of your customers, so you know how to best serve them based on their maturity with your product. Our detailed analytics allow you to see what pages your customers are visiting and what types of conversations they’re having on those pages. You can then use this information to prioritize your product updates, as well as have more productive conversations on an individual level.
Conversation Tags also allow customer teams to categorize the most commonly asked questions in chat to help them create more relevant help docs. With all of these features combined, you will be able to get answers to your customers, faster…maybe even before they know they have those questions.
Final Thoughts
“Work it harder, make it better, do it faster.” At a time when speed and efficiency are everyone’s biggest priorities, these lyrics might sound menacing. But, with Drift, they don’t have to be.
Thanks to conversational solutions like those that make up Drift’s Conversation Cloud platform, you can make your website do more of the heavy lifting for you, so you can focus on the work that really matters without adding more hours or budget to your plate.
Ready to start having more quality conversations at lower cost? Let’s chat.
