Drift

With Drift, you can create customized chat experiences for users based on all sorts of criteria - the page they're on, the number of times they've visited, the channel they used to get to your site - and to target specific businesses with targeted messaging. Building the chat flows (Drift calls them "Playbooks") is generally quite easy, allowing you to quickly build out new bots once you get a hang of the platform. Drift also includes support chat built right into the product, meaning every time I get stuck, I'm able to reach out and get a hand from one of their product experts right away.

We haven't been using Drift for that long, and there have already been a number of instances where I or one of the other users in the company have attempted to do something that seems obvious, only to find out the tool doesn't allow us to do so. We're always told that a feature request has been submitted, but there's no way to know how long it will take before we get whatever little tweak we're looking for in order to provide a smoother, more pleasant chat experience on our site.

I inherited drift from my predecessor, and immediately found it to be a very powerful and useful platform. It offered simple chat solutions, sent follow-up emails to people who didn't see your chat automatically, and provided numerous other useful features. It had a simple chat window that caught people's attention and generated chats, all of which we found very useful for our needs

Drift has a couple key problems - one being the overly simplistic and confusing backend UI. For users, there were just so many options on the admin side of things, and using it, I immediately felt lost and confused. This likely would have been different if I'd been part of the team that set it up, but starting to use the platform required quite a learning curve to customize it to our needs.

Perhaps more significantly, I used Drift for a period of time while updating my companies website - and upon switching to Wordpress and using Drift, I started to notice a significant increase in load time - with lighthouse & gtmetrix revealing a significant load time (I believe it was over 1.3 seconds of load time) caused by Drift's code. Needless to say, load time is key in website conversions, so I switched away from the platform pretty quick after that.

Love Drift. It is very easy to use but more importantly, it is very easy to love using. This is important in software adoption and Drift is one of the best examples I have seen of this in recent years. They've built an awesome product, which does everything you need it to - but the fact that it is fun to use DRIFT makes it an even more compelling product.

Hard to say. Probably the fact that although the core product is free (and you get lots of awesome features), you have to upgrade to the 'fullest licence' in order to get the 'uber cool' tools such as allowing the 'chat users' to book an appointment directly into the Calendar of the chosen agent.