September was a busy month at Drift.
Alright alright…when do we not say that?
But it was one of our most productive months yet in our short history.
We launched knowledge base integrations so you can instantly give customers the help they need when they write in via chat, we launched our iOS app so you can talk to customers on the go, and a whole lot more.
Here’s what’s new in Drift in September.
PS. Not using Drift yet? No worries. Get your account for free right here.
Knowledge Base Integrations
To match the way that people buy today, most businesses have a collection of help docs and FAQs — a place online where people can find answers to their questions.
But let’s face it: even with a help doc for every possible question someone could ask, people will still always contact support.
And that’s exactly where Drift can help with our new knowledge base integrations.
We’re using our chatbot (aka Driftbot) to help you surface links to help docs you’ve already written.
So now, when someone writes in via chat on your website or inside of your app, Driftbot will instantly be able to give customers the help they need, which means you can save your brain power for the bigger questions people will ask.
Today, you can integrate Drift with knowledge base software from Help Scout, Helpjuice, WordPress, and Zendesk — and all of these integrations are available starting with our free plan.
To set this up in your account, just head to the integrations page and then you can connect your account to Drift.
iOS App
It’s here! Drift for iOS. So now, you can respond to customers and visitors from anywhere. Just search “Drift Messaging” in the app store, or head here to get the direct link. Get Drift for iOS.
Drip Integration
With our Drip integration, you can get the combined power of messaging and marketing automation. Translation: an easier way for you to generate more leads and get more engagement.
Here’s one quick example:
With this integration, you could re-target people who are on your email list, but did not open the email you sent them — and then re-target them with an in-app message. This one is powerful because with email, average open rates typically hover around 20% — so even if you’re able to get open rates north of 40%, there will always be a huge group of people that don’t engage with your content.
Using Drip? Here are a few more examples of things you can do with Drift and Drip in this post on the Drip blog.
Capture Emails Without Lead Forms
Now when you’re using Drift, you can collect emails and generate leads simply by having conversations with the people that are on your website — no forms necessary.
Whenever somebody mentions their email address in a chat with you, we automaticaly convert that person into a lead and enhance their profile with an avatar, their location, their job title, who they work for, and much more.
Account Owners
In addition to helping you get more leads, now it’s easier to manage them in Drift too with account owners.
All you have to do is assign an owner to a contact, and then all conversations associated with that contact will automatically be assigned to that sales rep (at Drift for example, we use this for our sales reps and our customer success team).
Offline Mode And Setting Your Status
Sometimes you need to run to a meeting or just step away from chat for a second.
Instead of turning Drift off or worrying about missing live chats while you’re away, now you can easily toggle the Drift widget to offline right from the dashboard:
In addition, you might want to set yourself to away while a colleague of yours takes over chat duty. Or, you and your team do shifts and rotate who’s on chat. Now you can just set yourself to on-call to get conversations auto-assigned to you, or do not disturb in order to be left alone 🙂
A Few Quick Hits From September
- You may have noticed the welcome message and composer in the widget got a design update — much cleaner.
- We spent a lot of time speeding up Drift. More to come on that front, too. We can go faster.
- Instead of inviting team members one-by-one, we added a feature that lets you invite everyone on your Slack team in one click. Boom.
- Internet Explorer. It’s always a thing. Well, here’s the good news: the Drift chat widget is now fully supported in IE 11.
- You will always know how close you are to reaching your contact limit in your account with the new in-app contact counter. This should never be a surprise.
As always, we’re here if you need anything. Hit us up on chat at anytime.