Who can believe it’s 2024 already? I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks 2023 flew by.
Before we dive headfirst into the new year though, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on all of the exciting updates we made to the Drift product suite over the past year.
Throughout 2023, our product team was busy acting on customer feedback and optimizing solutions to empower all of our customers to create the most frictionless, streamlined website experience possible. This included integrating GPT into our live chat experience, building out new AI products, and reimagining what Conversational Marketing means for B2B businesses now and into the future.
But a sentence can’t sum up all that we did in 2023, so, without further ado, let’s recap everything that happened in Drift over the last year 👇
Pssst! This video also appears in our TL;DR series, where our product marketing team walks through the updates we make to the Drift product suite every month. Subscribe here so you don’t miss any updates!
January: Faster Playbook Building
Our first order of business in 2023 was introducing reusable blocks to our playbook builders. With these updates, now marketers can save countless hours of playbook building by reusing conversation flows across multiple playbooks.
February: Better Buyer Insights
This month was all about enhancing our 6sense integration. Now, when you connect your 6sense account to Drift, your sales reps will be able to see key 6sense attributes (buying stage, intent score, profile fit, and profile score) directly in Drift’s Live View and live chat. This means your sales reps will now have even more context on who their buyers are before going into a conversation.
March: More Seamless Conversations
As luck would have it, we became one of the first B2B SaaS vendors to partner with OpenAI to release our first GPT feature — AI Suggested Replies! This feature helps sales reps quickly and easily respond to questions in live chat without having to leave the conversation to find the answers they need.
With AI Suggested Replies, when a site visitor asks a question, the AI will automatically suggest a reply based on your website content and marketing materials, as well as the context of that specific conversation. Your reps can customize the suggested reply before sending the response or dismiss it if it doesn’t meet their needs.
April: More Data, All in One Place
By building a Drift iFrame within Salesforce, we made it easier for sales reps to get all of the insights they need for more targeted outreach — without needing to leave their Salesforce dashboard. With the iFrame in place, your sales reps can see key account engagement data from Drift in Salesforce to allow them to better understand how their accounts are engaging with your brand.
May: Comprehensive Reporting
We created a Routed Chats Report to help Drift admins find areas for improvement within their Drift instance, hold chat users accountable, and overall, improve the customer experience. With this report, your admins can see the response rate of routed conversations, the time it takes for a human to respond to a conversation, and what percentage of chats hit an automatic fallback.
June: More Opportunities for Global Conversations
We know that our customers’ site visitors speak a multitude of languages. That’s why we added GPT Translations to our GPT integration to help your chat users talk to their site visitors in whichever language they prefer without ever having to pull up Google Translate. Currently, our GPT Translations support nine different languages: English, Spanish, German, Russian, French, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Dutch.
July: Faster Fastlane Setup
Decreasing friction continued to be a top priority in the second half of the year, which is why we created Fastlane Quick Setup. Now, your Drift admins and marketers can set up a Fastlane playbook in under five minutes without any help from the web development team.
August: Easier Playbook Collaboration
Knowing all too well that building a playbook is a team effort, we created the Playbook Collaboration feature so that anyone on your team (regardless of whether they have a Drift Seat or not) can partner with your Drift admin and provide feedback on playbooks by leaving comments right within Drift.
September: More Personalized AI Responses
We didn’t just set our GPT responses and forget about them. Instead, we continued to improve the quality of those responses by adding features like Content Ingestion, which allows teams to upload their own PDFs, Word documents, and web pages directly into Drift’s AI for more on-brand and relevant responses.
October: Conversational Marketing Reimagined
In one of Drift’s biggest product launches ever, we announced the reinvention of Conversational Marketing.
We shared our vision for a world in which AI works for humans to deliver more individualized and relevant website experiences at scale. This included the introduction of three new, cutting-edge products: Site Concierge, Bionic Chatbots (which are informed by September’s Content Ingestion feature), and Drift Engage.
November: Next-Level Prospecting
To help reps better prioritize their account outreach, we infused our Prospector tool with more AI capabilities.
Our AI Account Fit Score categorizes all of your reps’ accounts based on your ideal customer profile and past opportunities to show you who is most likely — and ready — to buy. In addition, our AI Account Engagement Summaries provide a snapshot of the key actions taken by an account over the past two weeks. This ensures that your sales reps always have the most relevant information on hand to deliver proactive and effective outreach.
December: More Precise Targeting
We rounded out the year by adding Custom Contact Attribute Targeting to our playbook targeting settings. This allows your Drift admins to set a playbook to target a visitor based on any contact attribute, such as job title or role, as well as any custom contact attribute from Salesforce to provide more granular targeting at the contact level.
That Puts a Bow on 2023 🎁
That’s a wrap on our 2023 product updates!
Looking back, it was certainly a busy year with lots of exciting updates. That said, we’re even more excited for what’s to come in 2024 as we continue to evolve our buyer engagement platform to help you deliver the right experience to every site visitor, every time.
