I lost the opportunity to have conversations with a few leads thanks to Drift 🤦♂️
I have Drift setup on Browse AI. I have their desktop and mobile apps installed so I get a notification when a visitor wants to have a conversation.
I just opened it and saw messages from weeks ago. Never got a notification on mobile or desktop or email. Nothing.
I lost the opportunity to have conversations with a few potential customers because of Drift. That's literally the problem they're supposed to solve.
Any alternative you'd recommend? Looking for something lightweight and reliable that doesn't collect user data.
I posted this on Twitter and reached out to Drift support too. I just want to know how this could happen. Was it me not seeing an option that needed to be turned on because of poor UX, or was it a technical issue?
Once they respond, I'll post an update here and on Twitter.
I switched from Drift to Helpscout. While Drift was mostly fine, I liked the "email first" nature of Helpscout. It's impossible to miss something.
I actually turned off live chatting on the website and I feel that things have been better (both from a support standpoint and customer acquisition standpoint). People actually read the site and documentation instead of trying to chat with me the second they see someone is available.
Also, this was an interesting post written recently about increasing conversations by removing the chat bubble: https://www.atlistmaps.com/in-good-company/chat-bubble-blindness
Thanks Jordan! I appreciate hearing about your experience.
Help Scout seems very interesting. The only drawback I see is that they don't have a free plan to get started, just a 15-day trial. I like their design more than the others. I may give them a shot.
"Chat bubble blindness" really resonated with me. I feel like I don't see them anymore. I find them annoying. I might experiment with changing the support link to
Live Chat & Supportand remove the bubble from all other pages.Re. turning off live chat entirely: I feel like that makes a lot of sense for Closet Tools because you already have a great documentation in place and you've already heard almost everything people ask about. I'm not at that point yet. I'm not yet sure what needs to be documented or how to prioritize those subjects.
Good point! I do think it was good having live conversations being able to walk people through the on boarding and adjust it for where people got stuck.
Nowadays it’s too much, but back then it was critical.
Update
Three alternatives were recommended to me:
I already implemented Crisp. I can actually find everything I'm looking for quickly on their dashboard. This was not the case with Drift!
One more change: I'm going to change our "Support" link to "Live Chat & Support" in the next release to see if it results in more conversations. (Thanks to Jordan for mentioning an article recommending this)
Update on my Drift support ticket and tweet: They haven't responded to my support ticket yet, but their "Head of Voice of the Customer" replied to my tweet with instructions on notifications settings. I checked, all notifications were enabled, but none were received. Screenshot here.
Thank you everyone 🙏
The exact same thing happened to us. We missed a lot of customers following a PH launch, because we didn t reveive any notifications. Changed to Crisp.
Ah. That sucks.
So far 3 people have recommended Crisp. Also, they offer a pretty generous free plan.
I use https://crisp.chat/en/ on Blanq and I get an email alert every time someone chats on my website. It has worked without any problems.
Thanks! So far Crisp seems like the most recommended alternative