Drift vs. Intercom: Who wins the definitive battle?
When you talk about B2-B websites, you must have heard of the two most popular chatbot solutions – Drift and Intercom. Drift and Intercom are two widely used solutions in the business world. After all, they both provide live chat and chatbot solutions for websites. These tools provide great customer support when working in marketing or sales.
Speaking of the features, both solutions have customs chatbots, demo booking, and a newsletter. They are incredibly famous in the market for their sales and marketing capabilities. At an outer look, you will find them perfect for your business, but on looking closely, you will need good research before choosing.
It is important to have a deeper knowledge of the product before buying them. The same applies to Drift and Intercom definitive battle. Both are on the spectrum of an expensive budget with all the advanced features. To know who wins this battle, continue reading this article about Drift vs. Intercom.
What is Drift?
The "conversational marketing" category, which Drifts launched after Intercom in 2015 and expanded into "conversational sales," is now known as "revenue acceleration." Understanding the product's marketing strategy is useful. For teams in sales and marketing, there is a strong tool called Drift.
With an emphasis on live chat, emails, in-app messaging, and a chatbot to streamline the customer experience and direct inquiries to the appropriate departments in your business, Drift is a mobile and online messaging platform for sales and marketing teams.
To establish trust and shorten the client lifecycle, Drift allows businesses to engage with consumers in real-time or not via chat, video, audio, or email. Former Hubspot chief product officer David Cancel launched the company Drift.
What is Intercom?
Four Irish designers and engineers created Intercom in San Francisco in 2011. Intercom began as a straightforward live chat tool to assist businesses in connecting with their customers. It has developed over the past years to become a business messaging software for businesses worldwide, centralizing channels and enhancing internal corporate cooperation. Intercom, one of the most popular products globally with a 9% market share, bills itself as a conversational platform for sales, marketing, and support.
Drift vs. Intercom: Who Wins The Definitive Battle
Drift Vs. Intercom: Chatbot
Drift
A chatbot should be one of the first characteristics on which Drift and Intercom are contrasted. Both of them actively market their capabilities as chatbot providers. On the other hand, Drift primarily focuses on assisting clients in identifying and accelerating revenue possibilities as a chatbot service provider.
Not just that. Drift's AI-powered chatbot enables its users to create customized experiences without the assistance of a human, making it more user-friendly than its competitors. Additionally, it provides thorough analytics information for any chatbot you add to your website. You can discover how many and how many users interacted with your chatbot in this manner.
Intercom
One of Intercom's most popular features is its chatbots. They are simple to install and set up on your website. Intercom, unlike Drift, offers more than just chatbot services. They were first developed to support your agents' concentration on solving complicated problems.
Intercom is aware of how time-consuming and exhausting it may be for agents to repeat the same inquiries continually. They included the chatbot capabilities for that reason. Their chatbot has since been expanded to serve as a conversational sales, support, and marketing platform. It is one of the reasons Drift and chatbot functionality compete directly.
Drift Vs. Intercom: Interface
Drift
Drift's user interface appears to be relatively straightforward at first glance. Finding features, however, might impede your agent's ability to provide a real-time answer to a customer's query.
Finding every feature won't be difficult if you are an administrator.
But let's say you weren't a team member or admin who helped with setup. The elements required to improve the customer service experience will be difficult for you to access in that situation. What's worse is that the performance of their backend system will suffer if you migrate to another CMS platform.
Intercom
Intercom, unlike Drift, is renowned for its simple user interface. Your agents may easily access all consumer information thanks to it. The agents only need to click on a customer's name to get the whole conversation history and details recorded from a prior engagement.
You may even keep track of their previous comments and work with your representatives to improve or customize experiences in the future.
Drift Vs. Intercom: Human Handover
Drift
Drift makes sure that human transfer happens without a hitch, even if it offers chatbot services. Instead of a chatbot sending a discussion to a certain department, an agent takes control of an ongoing chatbot conversation to ensure that the consumer gets a resolution more quickly. Thankfully, this feature has allowed Drift users to assist consumers in avoiding repetition and enhancing the resolution rate.
Intercom
Another fundamental capability that Intercom's feature list is missing is human handover. This function might not seem like a major oversight when it helps you direct the proper interactions to the appropriate department. But if your agents can't see the chatbots providing the consumer with a solution, they can't step in and help. The chatbot will have to pass the chat to the agents before they can start a conversation with a consumer.
Drift Vs. Intercom: Pre-Chat & Offline Forms
Drift
Drift uses pre-chat and offline messaging forms in addition to its chatbot to collect leads. Although the functionality may not look very impressive, it helps the lead creation process.
Intercom
The Intercom's lack of offline message forms is one of its shortcomings. Filling out an offline message form is impossible if your agents are not online. While it might not seem significant in chatbots, users who prefer to communicate with agents directly rather than through chatbots would undoubtedly miss this functionality.
Drift Vs. Intercom: Compatibility
Drift
While Drift's solution also comes with a mobile app, it does not appear to have as much capability as Intercom's or is not promoted. If we only compare the data published on each provider's website, Drift's mobile app is inferior to Intercom.
Users may still engage in new or ongoing discussions with leads and customers, examine live profiles of leads and customers, and communicate with them. The app also provides real-time texting with your team and notes and remarks to increase collaboration.
The mobile app does not appear to allow users to search through leads or other users, and Drift does not appear to feature stored replies that would allow your agents to save time and automate responses.
Intercom
Intercom's mobile application has excellent functionality and gives you access to your complete Team Inbox. With Intercom, you can quickly watch conversations, see when you are referenced, and even communicate with your colleagues via internal notes, stored replies, and assignment management. It is similar to the features and capabilities you may find with well-known team collaboration solutions.
Users can start or continue discussions from their mobile apps, so even if you have to leave the office, you can ensure that no lead's question gets unanswered. Users may search through leads and other users within the mobile app to get even more insight. Agents may even view live profiles of clients and prospects, along with information on their web browsing habits, previous conversations, and more.
Drift Vs. Intercom: Feedback Collection
Drift
You may handle conducting polls and surveys with your consumers while having a live conversation with Drift. However, it does not provide its user base with a feedback collecting feature. That implies that once a chat session is over, you won't know whether or not your clients are happy with your services.
Intercom
In the case of the Intercom, the same is not accurate. Users of this live chat service provider have access to a feedback collecting feature. Once a discussion has ended, you can gather feedback. It will make it easier for you to comprehend two things. One, you'll be able to tell whether or not your services lived up to your customers' expectations. Additionally, you will have enough chance to evaluate your operator's performance.
Drift Vs. Intercom: Integrations
Drift
With about 28 connectors, Drift features the most important ones, such as Desk.com and Go CRM, in addition to well-known CRMs like Salesforce and Zendesk.
Drift also covers your interaction with Slack and HipChat. The interface with Knowledgebase and HelpDocs is also intriguing, maybe addressing a need for a solution that Intercom might otherwise address with their offerings.
Intercom
Intercom has about 60 integrations, a remarkable number from the beginning. Of course, this list covers the typical CRM connectors, such as Salesforce and Zendesk. Social networking, WordPress, collaboration platforms like HipChat, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, automation connections like Automate.io, and much more are among the other remarkable integrations.
It's crucial to emphasize once more that there are restrictions on integrations depending on the Intercom services you subscribe to. Salesforce, Github, and Zendesk connectors, in particular, are only available on the "Essentials" plan, requiring your company to subscribe to a more expensive tier of service.
Drift Vs. Intercom: Pros and Cons
Pros of Drift:
- Thorough investigation.
- Video chatting.
- Convenient.
- Chatbot.
Cons of Drift include:
- Limited customizing options.
- Exorbitant cost.
- Lack of multilingual assistance.
Pros of Intercom:
- Simple installation.
- Comprehensive integration capability.
- Excellent for scaling
- Automated communications
- Adaptable.
- Convenient.
Cons of Intercom:
- Expensive.
- A complex pricing structure.
- Subpar client service.
- The overemphasis on automated features at the expense of human assistance.
Drift Vs. Intercom: Plans and Pricing
When compared to Drift, Intercom first appears to have some more cheap subscription rates. Until you realize that it costs for your active contacts, that is. Moreover, bots and product tours are considered different goods with their invoices.
It costs at least $468/mo with the product tour enabled for the Starter subscription for ten agent seats and 1,000 contacts, including a live chat, knowledge base, and chatbot.
The issue is that Intercom charges its clients for more contacts. As a result, your financial obligations increase as you develop. In other words, the Grow plan includes 1,000 contacts, but you must contribute an extra $50 per month for every 1,000 individuals you reach.
The cost for Drift is not displayed on the pricing page, suggesting extremely customized pricing based on clients' needs.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Drift and Intercom are advanced all-present-in-one tools for marketing, customer support, sales, and team support.
Drift provides a knowledge base, live chat, calendar integration, account-based marketing, and conversational landing pages.
Meanwhile, Intercom has product tours that are important for SaaS businesses with all the important features.
Both Drift and Intercom have high automation in business when the technology isn't fully developed yet. Although the price can be high for both products, choosing one can be very fruitful for your business.
