Drift Product Updates and New Releases 🚢

[email protected] · March 2021

Follow this thread to keep up with the latest Drift Product Updates.

This post is part of a series that highlights product updates, or "ships," that we are sending your way.

At Drift, one of our mottos is "always be shipping." Which means we are invested in improving our products for you.

🚢🚢🚢

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[email protected] · March 2021

Drift Updates March 10th

https://video.drift.com/v/abl8GHjSr5q/

*Update to timezones selections
- What: Orgs can now connect their Pardot integration using Salesforce SSO to continue lead syncing!
- Why: Drift is expanding into international markets and we received feedback from our customers that their site visitors were confused as to whether their timezone selection matched the timezone of their current location when booking a meeting.
- Where: Book a meeting flow in a chat
- Who: All users on v2 widget
Profile settings redesign
- What: Your Drift Profile settings page just got an upgrade!!
- Why: Customers book about 25% of their meetings through their profile but the old profile settings page was out of date and lived in a super old codebase
- Where: Drift Profile (settings > my settings > Drift profile)
- Who: All users
*Added ability to extract conversation transcripts
- What: You can get a beautifully formatted and readable transcript right where you want it with just a single endpoint using Drift API
- Why: Customers want to use Drift's API to pass data into their BI tools Specifically, transcripts are cool because you can run sentiment analysis on them, you could use them to show context to managers or leads for training purposes, and you can even do some NLP / searching on what your customers / prospects want to talk to you about. Previously -- you couldn't get conversation transcripts out of Drift via the API. Nope -- just messages. And boy was it ugly. You had to parse through lots of junk just to get some messages people were sending back and forth to each other, objects weren't standardized in terms of their elements and what was in those elements, and of course it was paginated so -- go build some logic around page handling on top of all your message parsing!!
- Where: Drift API
- Who: All users using Drift API
New Pardot Integration OAuth
- What: Orgs can now connect their Pardot integration using Salesforce SSO to continue lead syncing!
- Why: Pardot was turning off support for user/password auth and forcing Salesforce SSO which would mean our Pardot integration would stop working for all orgs
- Where: Pardot integration settings (Settings > Integrations > Pardot)
- Who: Premium and above
*Update to the routing audit log
Who: All users
Where: New live chat (app.drift.com/conversations & desktop app)
Why: With organizations with larger amounts of users, sorting allows users to find what they are looking for, faster.
What: Added table sorting functionality to the Available Routing Audit Log Modal so you can now sort by name or status during routing
Watch this space every week for more updates.

Katie Costello (she/her) · March 2021

https://video.drift.com/v/abqENtvjXkq/

Drift Revenue Acceleration Platform

*Ship Subscription
- What: Ability to subscribe to weekly product ships for customers. Just click the star next to the title of this Community post!
- Why: We wanted to eliminate the friction from customers who wanted to know about our latest updates in the product. Previously they would have to check our posts in the Help Docs or in the Community each week themselves.
- Where: This Drift Community post
- Who: All customers!
*Search in bot flow
- What: Search for text within a bot flow!
- Why: Some of our customers have massive playbooks spanning 100+ nodes, and finding the node you're looking for has been a huge customer pain. Adding this feature will save time by highlighting nodes and buttons responses that contain the text you're looking for, as well as scrolling you between them at the touch of a button.
- Where: Playbook flow builder
- Who: Customers with access to bots

Drift Email

*Fast Lane Follow-up Email Campaigns
- What: A more seamless way for chat Fast Lane customers to leverage to follow-up with people that didn't convert with Fast Lane playbooks.
- Why: The Fast Lane team has noticed there is a significant drop-off with people that have filled out a form but don't book a meeting, our customers would like to make sure the people that don't convert are still followed up with. Before customers needed to setup a verified domain for sending which could take weeks and often required help from their IT team, but now Drift just sends it. We've set up a sending domain reply.drifttmail.com that our customers can use to send their email campaigns. Those using reply management: all replies will be routed to the teammate who's calendar was dropped in the playbook and the email.
- Where: Campaigns (https://email.drift.com/campaigns)
- Who: EAP Fast Lane customers using Drift Email

Xan Liuzzo · March 2021

Ships from 3/15 to 3/19

https://video.drift.com/v/abP4HNdWkMq/

*Store multiple contact attributes from a single visitor response
- What: Now, up to 3 attributes can be stored from a single response, enabling our customers to collect more data with fewer nodes for a better end user experience!
- Why: Sometimes, our customers learn multiple pieces of valuable information about a customer based on how they answer a single question! Our customers want to collect data about their customers as efficiently as possible so they can further personalize their interactions in the future, but before, they were limited to storing only a single attribute from a response.
- Where: Bot flow builder
- Who: Customers with bots
*Show connection events in the Pardot integration event log
- What: With this ship, a user can view Pardot’s event log and get a trace of every time this integration has been connected/disconnected from Drift.
- Why: It is important for an integration’s event log to show all activities for a certain integration. Customers like to see every event and due to the Pardot SSO update, they no longer can find out when they connected.
- Where: Pardot event log
- Who: Enterprise customers with Pardot
*Update to teammate filtering
- What: Teammate filtering now supports the new plan roles (admin, marketer, sales rep)
- Why: With the migration to new roles, and without this change, customers would not be able to see the correct roles corresponding to users listed in the Teammates tab
- Where: Manage Teammates page
- Who: Admin on 2021 plans

Katie Costello (she/her) · March 2021

https://video.drift.com/v/abLt4Qbxi2q/

Episode 55: Ships from 3/22 to 3/26

*New People report for fast lane playbooks

What: This new report give Marketers the ability to drill down into each lead who submitted a form, saw the fast lane, and what outcomes they've taken. We introduced a way to track when a conversation was held (a teammate and a site visitor sent messages) and made the table consistent with how contacts and activities are displayed across Drift.
Why: Current Chat Playbook reports count a conversation as a button click within a Playbook. For Fast lane, we learned pretty quickly that reporting on button clicks wasn’t sufficient enough because Marketers want to know more about the outcomes Fast lane is driving - holding real-time conversations or booking meetings with Sellers. To reflect this, we’ve revamped Fast lane reports to show the specific outcomes. Not only does it show the outcomes, we are also capturing and showing ALL form leads who submitted the form and didn’t engage with the Fast lane. This helps us take one step closer to expanding beyond just chat leads. Now that we have these form submission events, they can also be used in other parts of Drift like Account activity and Target account feeds to continuously give our Sales users a full picture of what’s happening across the website with their target accounts.
Where: Fast Lane Playbook Report
Who: Customers in Fast Lane early access program (EAP)

Xan Liuzzo · April 2021

https://video.drift.com/v/abQoqIzivfq/

Episode 56: Ships from 3/29 to 4/2

Updates to Android app
- What: Dark UI for Android
- Why: Customers expect a consistent look and feel across our products! After we launched Dark UI for iOS, we saw an uptick of daily user sessions. We believe it makes a lot sense to bring the Dark UI to Android and deliver the same user experience as our desktop app.
- Where: Android App
- Who: All customers

Katie Costello (she/her) · April 2021

Episode 57: Ships from 4/5 to 4/9

https://video.drift.com/v/abXgzOS253q/

*A/B Test Report
- What: Playbook variation (A/B test) reporting
- Who: EAP customers
- Where: Reports > Chat > A/B test
- Why: A/B testing of playbooks is a long desired feature, and previously only possible through a hard-to-use cookie-based method. Back in January we launched an EAP that allowed select customers to try out A/B testing on their site with minimal risk. Until now, customers were only able to export their results in a CSV, which was not pretty to look at, and would not differentiate playbook versions. Now, we've introduced first-party support for A/B test metrics, broken down by A/B version, which gives customers the insights and confidence to quickly iterate and optimize their playbooks in order to increase leads.
*New Reporting Metrics for Fast Lane Playbooks
- What: Fast lane reporting now displays metrics appropriate for this playbook type to help our customers better understand the impact Fast lane is having on their forms.
- Why: Current reporting metrics don't tell the complete story when it comes to Fast lane playbooks. Our customers had no way of knowing how effective their playbooks were post submission. Now by utilizing the new form submission events, we can provide them with the complete picture and the various outcomes Fast lane is driving at a quick glance.
- Where: Reports > Fast Lane Playbooks > Overview
- Who: EAP customers

Xan Liuzzo · April 2021

Episode 58: Ships from 4/12 to 4/16

https://video.drift.com/v/abxVdx8ltvq/

*Disable GIF picker in the widget
- What: We added a toggle in the advanced widget settings page to give customers the choice to configure if their site visitors can send GIFs in a chat. When GIFs are disabled, the send icon will appear in its place.
- Why: Here at Drift, we love GIFs! However, we've gotten a lot of feedback from our customers that they would like the choice to remove the GIF picker from the widget, either to reduce spam or to have the chat feel more 'professional'.
- Where: Widget advanced settings: https://app.drift.com/settings2/widget/advanced
- Who: All orgs on v2 of the widget
*Team Routing Fallbacks General Availability
- What: Now customers can scale routing to meet the needs of their organization by configuring fallbacks for unresponsive agents and offline teams at the rule and team-level. Customers can choose to drop a calendar, send an away message, or re-route within the team once opted-in to the new fallbacks.
- Why: Customers want to ensure that Drift is routing leads to the correct rep and providing site visitors with the best experience. Before, customers used Team Availability to provide a safety net when reps went unresponsive but this setting applied globally, making it impractical to use if different teams needed different fallbacks (e.g. support vs. sales)
- Where: The global routing builder
- Who: Paid customers

Katie Costello (she/her) · April 2021

Episode 59: Ships from 4/19 to 4/23

https://video.drift.com/v/abDdWNpHiCq/

*Additions to the Opportunities influenced CSV
- What: Opportunities influenced CSV export now highlights if a human agent and site visitor held a conversation.
- Why: When our customers are diving into at how Drift has influenced their Sales pipeline, they want to be able to identify meaningful conversations that occurred without having to read through every conversation. "ConversationHeld" is now another part of the metadata along with "MeetingBooked", "EmailCaptured", and "CQLScore".
- Where: Reports > Pipeline/Closed Won/Sales cycle > Export CSV
- Who: Customers with the sales feature and Salesforce integration enabled
*New Notifications Modal
- What: New Notifications Modal with improved UX, porting over all configurable settings from old view
- Why: To allow users to modify notification settings in a more seamless, intuitive experience without leaving the convo view. Also ensures all old functionality exists in the new view.
- Where: New conversation experience (desktop app and browser version)
- Who: All users
*Update to account activity filters
- What: Pre-loaded filter options for custom attributes for account activity data
- Why: Sales reps and managers were having a bad experience filtering for custom account attributes because they couldn't see the available options.
- Where: Account Activity Page
- Who: All Sales users using the activity feed
*New metrics for Fast Lane playbook report
- What: The fast lane overview report shows the Salesforce pipeline, opportunities influenced, and avg time to opp creation based on whether the site visitor talked to an agent or booked a meeting through a fast lane playbook! Customers can also download the opportunities to a CSV to see each opportunity in detail.
- Why: This shows customers the impact of leveraging Drift to connect with their high-intent customers immediately after filling out a form. Fast lane has been consistently showing that it can lower the time to opportunity creation and that can lead to a HUGE impact on our EAP customer's business.
- Where: Reports > Fast Lane
- Who: Fast Lane EAP

Xan Liuzzo · May 2021

Episode 60: Ships from 4/26 to 4/30

https://video.drift.com/v/abFllGLXynw/

*Fast lane playbooks table
- What: View Fast Lane playbooks in a separate table within the Playbooks tab
- Why: A couple of reasons: 1) Fast lane is built for forms and we wanted to show it outside of Chat playbooks; 2) Fast lane doesn't take into account priority
- Where: Playbooks > Fast lane playbooks
- Who: Fast Lane EAP

Xan Liuzzo · May 2021

https://video.drift.com/v/abuaOEE72Ow/

Episode 61: Ships from 5/10 to 5/14

*Update to slash commands and shortcuts
- What: We merged slash commands (and added some) and shortcuts!
- Why: Slash commands weren’t easily discoverable resulting in users not being able to find actions like block or saved replies. 48.9% of users reported that they “couldn’t find things” or thought features were missing.
- By combining these into one menu, users should be able to see a combination of all the actions a user can do for a given conversation. For keyboard users, some of these shortcuts can now be typed as well!
- Where: /conversations shortcut menu and / composer command
- Who: Everyone

Katie Costello (she/her) · May 2021

https://video.drift.com/v/ab5OAZhfBkw/

Episode 62: Ships from 5/17 to 5/24

*Multi-Owner Routing General Availability
- What: Admins can configure Salesforce owner routing settings at the rule-level, providing greater flexibility in finding an account owner based on the situation. For example, when selling to companies that operate in more than one country, account owner lookup can be region-specific to handle visitors from different locales. This ship also features a fresh new upgrade to the routing rule condition modal.
- Why: When customers use Drift to notify and connect an account directly to the rep that owns that account, it enables a single person to develop context and build a relationship with an account . Previously we provided this capability in Drift with the ability to route to a Salesforce owner within the global Salesforce routing configuration, but we learned that this configuration didn't meet the complexity that our Enterprise customers need.
- Where: The global routing builder (Settings > App settings > Conversation routing)
- Who: Premium and above

[email protected] · May 2021

Sounds like a really powerful update!

Xan Liuzzo · June 2021

https://video.drift.com/v/ab5665wB1Fw/

Episode 63: Ships from 5/24 to 5/28

*Widget preview in the bot builder
- What: Preview your widget design and playbook node/skill in the bot playbook builder
- Why: It’s important that users feel confident in both their widget design and playbooks, and until now it was only possible to see both together during a test. We’re replacing the default placeholder widget with a replica based on the org’s customization settings so customers can see exactly what their end users will.
- Where: Bot playbook flow builder
- Who: Customers with bots
*Add hyperlinks in chat
- What: You can add hyperlinks in your messages in chat. Just highlight the text you want to link and click on on the link icon.
- Why: This was a heavily requested feature!
- Where: Live chat (browser or desktop)
- Who: Everyone
*CSV downloads for Fastlane reports
- What: You can download the Overview, Performance, and People tabs from Fastlane playbooks
- Why: A post-launch fast follow that allows Marketers to export their Fastlane Playbook data so they can run their analyses
- Where: Reports > Playbooks > Fastlane
- Who: FY22 Advanced + Premium

Xan Liuzzo · June 2021

https://video.drift.com/v/abddvtBzUYw/

Episode 64: Ships from June 7 to June 11

*A/B testing for Fastlane Playbooks
- What: Run A/B tests on your Fastlane playbooks
- Why: A post-launch fast follow that allows Marketers to A/B test their Fastlane Playbooks to ensure they can test out different copy and bot flows to increase buyer engagement with the Fastlane, and increase connect rates between buyers and sellers via conversations or booked meetings
- Where: Fastlane playbook
- Who: FY22 Advanced & Enterprise plans
*Saved filters + Email Digests from the Account Activity feed
- What:
  - Users can subscribe to Daily Digest emails based on their saved filters so they will see the activity from accounts that they care about DAILY!
  - The "accounts" and "activities" feeds have been consolidated into one page that uses the same filters, greatly simplifying the user experience.
  - Users can save filters and switch between them seamlessly making it easier to see accounts and activities they care about, and encouraging habitual use of the feed.
  - Users can share Saved Filters with other users in their org, making it easier to onboard their teammates and see value immediately.
  - First time users start out with a preloaded "All accounts I own" saved filter, simplifying their onboarding experience.
- Why: We know that the Drift Sales Seat provides value, but users were experiencing too much friction in uncovering insights from accounts that they care about. The new Email Digest will let our customers see recent account activity and discover insights from the accounts that they care about directly from their inbox DAILY. If an account that they care about has been active on their site recently, they will see it in their digest and can reach out to them without the customer ever having to talk to the chat widget
- Where: Activity feed (Drift | Conversations)
- Who: Premium+
*Playbook performance warning
- What: Without anything to compare it to, a 1.2% engagement rate doesn’t mean much. We tackle this problem by highlighting underperforming playbook metrics so our users know which squeaky playbooks need the grease.
- Why: We provide our customers with a ton of data via playbook reports, but at the end of the day they’re just numbers. Saying a playbook has an engagement rate of 1.2% doesn’t mean much by itself. Is that good? Is that bad? (it’s not great)
- Where: Chat playbook reports
- Who: EAP
*Conversation filtering by topic for VSA customers
- Where: Conversation analysis
- Why: Customers want to know what their customers are talking about. They can search their conversations by keyword, but if they don't know what to search for they can't get the best insights into what people care about. Our AI bot already classifies every customer message by its meaning, so we do know what they care about!
- What: We now give customers the ability to see all of the topics people are talking about and filter their conversations view accordingly. Customers never have to wonder what things their customers are talking about— we tell them.
- Who: Virtual Selling Assistant (VSA) customers

Katie Costello (she/her) · June 2021

Episode 65: Ships from June 14-18

https://video.drift.com/v/abzzadDAoJw/

*Multiple Language Support
- What: Enterprise support for multiple languages! Users can create multiple widgets that align with international sites in over 25 languages.
- Why: Customers who see success with Drift want to be able to use us in their marketing strategies around the world, but struggled to expand to additional countries because they couldn’t ensure their visitor’s experience, from widget interaction to follow up email, would be in the correct language.
- Where: We’ve made updates to widget configuration, team availability, conversation rating, GDPR settings, meeting types, and automated follow up emails (chat transcript and chat fallback) to enable our customers to build a seamless multi language experience within Drift.
- Who: FY22 Enterprise customers
*Single Install Snippet
- What: We now have a single install snippet. Our customers now have the option to use one install snippet and dynamically target pages (don't worry, customers can still use a language specific snippet if they want it).
- Why: Enable our customers to launch a language specific widget on a new page without having to involve IT.
- Where: Settings > App settings > Drift Widget
- Who: FY22 Enterprise customers

Xan Liuzzo · June 2021

Episode 66: Ships from June 21-25

https://video.drift.com/v/abbbUX6kIsw/

*Saved filter based Site Visit ABM Notifications
- What: Users can fine tune their site visit notifications according to any of the filters available in the account activity feed. With this, any org can also easily support multiple notification recipients on a single site visit. For example, this means any user in an org can subscribe to site visit notifications on any combination of the following scenarios:
  - Any target account the user owns with the custom "Has Open Opportunity" field set in SFDC
  - Any account in which a known contact visits
  - Any accounts in which a contact with role "CMO" visits a page
  - The AE Owner / BDR Owner / RS Owner is not you and for some reason you just want to get someone else's notifications
- Why: Drift strives to meet users where they are. Recently, we made some huge strides here by allowing users to configure and receive account activity digest emails based on their own saved filter preferences. This feature takes that idea one step further by allowing users to configure and receive real time site visit push notifications tailored exactly to their preferences, rather than shoehorning every user's experience into the same mold.
- Where: Activity Feed
- Who: FY22 Premium and above

Katie Costello (she/her) · July 2021

Episode 67: Ships from June 28 - July 2

https://video.drift.com/v/ab61QvKQSIw/

Drift Revenue Acceleration Platform

*Workspaces
- What: A way for our customers to manage their different regions by workspace, keeping each business unit's settings separate and clean from other areas of the business.
- Why: Allowing our Enterprise admins to manage their settings by region makes it easier for them to model their business in Drift and expand.
- Where: Settings > Organization settings > Workspaces
- Who: FY22 Enterprise customers

Drift Email

*New and Improved Email Editor within the Email Campaign Builder
- What: While the editor might not look any different at first, we fixed a lot of issues our customers experienced when editing their campaigns. The main one being copying and pasting is now supported and tested on MacOS AND Windows devices.
- Why: 7 of the latest email triage issues were editor-related -- making it the highest amount of tickets related to a specific theme
- Where: Email Campaign Builder
- Who: Drift Email Customers

Xan Liuzzo · July 2021

Episode 68: Ships from July 5-9

https://video.drift.com/v/abTgbQ2dKAw/

*"No data" account activity digest email
- What: Previously, when we shipped account activity digest emails, we opted not to send emails to users when there was no activity in accounts they subscribed to within the last 24 hours. This was done to avoid spamming users with non-actionable content. We discovered that this created a confusing user experience and eroded trust in Drift when users were not receiving emails that they were expecting. Now, the first and second time a user has no activity in accounts they've subscribed to within the last 24 hours, they will receive a custom digest email with product education (pictured below) and CTA's to modify their digest filter conditions.
- Why: Features aren't done when they are shipped. It's important to collect customer feedback, iterate, and improve the user experience until it's the best it can be.
- Where: Your email inbox
- Who: FY22 Customers

Xan Liuzzo · July 2021

Episode 70: Ships from July 19-23

https://video.drift.com/v/abHvjCDgsU5/

*Delete domains from SparkPost on DKIM deletion in Drift Chat
- What: Now when a customer deletes a sending domain in their account, we update the DKIM record and delete from SparkPost.
- Why: A big source of customer escalations was domain verification which became problematic for Marketers when they removed their domain from http://app.drift.com. Marketers weren’t able to reverify that domain because we weren’t properly deleting that domain from our email provider, SparkPost. Before, if a customer had previously verified a domain in a test org when it came time to verify the domain in their actual org they were unable to fully delete the domain from their test org without help from an engineer.
- Where: Email sending domains (Settings > App settings > Conversations) & SparkPost
- Who: Customers on paid plans

Xan Liuzzo · August 2021

Episode 71: Ships from July 26-30

https://video.drift.com/v/ab8d4tpbsG5/

*Improved contact attribute routing
- What: Routing on contact attributes applied by the bot works reliably!
- Why: Customers often need to qualify chat visitors by asking questions in playbooks, then route based on the chat visitor’s responses. However, that didn’t work reliably because routing executed before the contact attribute finished applying on the site visitor. This led to frustration since leads were getting routed to the wrong person and confusion since the contact attribute routing rule wasn't matching. Question nodes needed to be added between where the contact attribute was applied and the routing node to wait for the attribute to finish applying. Now, routing on contact attributes works reliably, which means that there no longer needs to be a question node between where the contact attribute is applied and where the conversation is routed.
- Where: Within playbooks where a contact attribute is applied and routing happens
- Who: Customers on paid plans

Xan Liuzzo · August 2021

Episode 72: Ships from August 2-6

https://video.drift.com/v/ab2qD1C0Zw5/

*Inboxes for Workspaces
- What: All new workspaces only have 1 default inbox
- Why: Not all customers have a need for a Sales/Support inbox, so instead we are changing default inbox creation to the inbox's name being the org's name
- Where: Workspaces (Settings > Organization settings > Workspaces)
- Who: FY22 Enterprise
*QR Code for the Mobile App
- What: With two clicks the customer can scan a QR code that redirects them to Drift app on the app store or google play store.
- Why: Receive notification when your lead is on your website. Talk to the hot leads anywhere on your phone. Giving the customer fill capabilities available to them. Drift app is not the easiest to find on the app store and this makes it easier.
- Where: Convo view
- Who: Everyone
*Unified playbook experience (opt-in)
- What: All legacy playbook types (Live chat, announcement, etc) now share an edit experience with modern bot playbooks
- Why: First, this update unites two very different playbook editing experiences and makes it so that customers only have to learn one paradigm for editing their playbook. Second, this allows us to remove some very old code and reduce triage by keeping the entire playbook experience in one place.
- Where: Playbooks
- Who: All customers

Katie Costello (she/her) · August 2021

Episode 73: Ships from August 9-13

https://video.drift.com/v/ab0IJaNA7W5/

*Updated Playbook Performance Report
- What: A new way to visualize playbook performance. In addition to the existing tabular view, we’ve got a graph! In addition to the same data as the table, the new graph also shows when your playbook was published.
- Why: Understanding how your playbook is doing over time is incredibly important for optimization, and seeing performance as a trend against publishes makes it super easy to understand how your playbook is doing at a glance.
- Where: Reports > Playbooks > Chat (https://app.drift.com/reports/playbooks/chat)
- Who: All paid customers

Katie Costello (she/her) · August 2021

Episode 74: Ships from August 16-20

https://video.drift.com/v/abDt2wxdNk5/

*Resolved ‘UNKNOWN’ status for invoices on Billing tab of Plan and billing settings
- What: This new temporary status, "Available on invoice," is to resolve the confusion by having the customers download the PDF which contains the accurate status.
- Why: Customers are reporting that they see ‘UNKNOWN’ on their billing invoice screens which is causing a sense of confusion because the invoice PDF contains the accurate status.
- Where: Settings > Organization Settings > Plan and Billing
- Who: All paid customers

Xan Liuzzo · September 2021

Episode 73: Ships from August 9-13

https://video.drift.com/v/abwauiRUHY5/

*Drift Video - Hiding Captions by Default
- What: Now when you watch Drift Videos, the captions will be hidden my default. However, you will still have the option to turn them on.
- Why: In many cases, people who are watching their videos do not want captions shown by default. We wish to provide an experience similar to that in YouTube where the option is there, but we do not force the user into it from the start.
- Where: Drift Video
- Who: All Drift Video users
*Account Update Email Verification
- What: Now you can update your account email address with a lovely email verification message that'll really get you excited to make up a new email address time and time again.
- Why: Adding a verification step on account updates allows us to make sure someone has access to the email they are trying to change along with adding resend logic which in turn makes Drift a little more secure. This change also helps us meet security requirements for the Drift app to get accepted to the Salesforce AppXChange.
- Where: Settings > My settings > Account
- Who: Everyone
*Email Verification on Org Creation
- What: Adding a verification step on org creation allows us to make sure someone actually has access to the email they are trying to create an org with no crimes make Drift a little more secure
- Why: Imagine this: you're the CMO of a fresh new start up and today's the day you're opening your very first Drift account you're so excited to dive into conversational marketing and join the best in class platform, but as your entering your email... what's this? You see the error message email already in use. Oh no no no, this can't be right you think to yourself I'm certain I haven't used this email before. You try again: email already in use. You feel crushed, defeated. Your dreams of creating your very first playbook are slipping away... all because of an imposter. This change also helps us meet security requirements for the Drift app to get accepted to the Salesforce AppXChange.
- Where: Org creation (http://app.drift.com/letsgo)
- Who: New Drift users
*Captcha on the login page
- What: Having a captcha for login prevents against malicious parties being able to brute-force their way into our customers' accounts. This makes our app more secure and subsequently builds customer trust!
- Why: It's the year 2753. Robots have taken over the world and have reduced all of human civilization to mere rubble. All institutions in society have been crushed under the tyranny of the machines. But there is one hope. One conversational marketing tool that has stood the test of time against all of the robots' attacks: Drift. This also meets one of the security requirements for the Drift app to get accepted to the Salesforce AppXChange which is a huge deal!
- Where: Login page (http://start.drift.com)
- Who: Everyone

Xan Liuzzo · October 2021

Episode 76: Ships from September 27 to October 1

https://video.drift.com/v/ablxSADkG35/

*The Audiences Top Pages report is back
- What: All the reports within Audiences are functional and faster than ever, thanks to changes we’ve made in how they’re calculated. In particular, customers can once again tell which pages their visitors are viewing the most within an Audience segment.
- Why: Audiences is a well used feature we provide to our enterprise customers (and prospects) to understand how well they’re reaching visitors on their website and what opportunities they have to be more successful with Drift. Every night, it processes a massive amount of data generated by all our customers’ site traffic and boils it all down to a form they can use to gain insight and make informed decisions. Drift has gained many more customers since Audiences launched, and it's been feeling the strain of all that growth. In August, the process that powers the Top Pages report within Audiences reached a tipping point and was unable to process the data it needed to each night. Scaling Audiences to handle that growth wasn’t simple and the team decided to be transparent with customers and disable the report until we could implement a solution.
- Where: Audiences
- Who: Enterprise customers

Katie Costello (she/her) · October 2021

Episode 77: Ships from October 4 to October 8

https://video.drift.com/v/abq44nQVaI5/

Drift Revenue Acceleration Platform

Updates to SFDC integration page
- What: New Salesforce Integration Page! This launch includes a new and improved UI with a reorganization of the settings options for a crystal clear experience. It includes fresh instructions and UX to make the experience just a little bit more smooth. And it breaks out important settings like 'Accounts', 'Contacts', or 'Cases' that were previously hidden in a nested tab view into top-level settings pages.
- Why: Salesforce is one of our biggest integrations and there are a million different settings possible. This creates a better user experience.
- Where: Salesforce Integration page
- Who: Everyone with the SFDC integration
SFDC account sync
- What: New Salesforce Account Sync Options! With these new Account Sync settings, we made it possible for orgs to sync ALL of their accounts from Salesforce AND made it easier to control which accounts are targeted accounts. This is a huge step in the right direction and will make prospecting new opportunities even easier. All new orgs connecting to Salesforce will default to the 'Sync All Accounts' setting. In the next few weeks, we plan to migrate as many existing accounts as we can to this new 'Sync All Accounts' setting.
- Why: We just launched new Account Sync settings for the Salesforce integration, making it easier to sync all of your Salesforce accounts into Drift. Previously, only 7% of Sales Seats were fully setup with accounts in Drift. That means 93% of the time, Sales reps would go to Prospector and won't see any accounts that they own. This was a huge problem. What good is prospecting when you can't see any activity to prospect from? Fortunately, this won't be a problem for long.
- Where: Salesforce Integration page (Accounts tab)
- Who: Everyone with the SFDC integration
Automatic Account Attribute Mappings from Salesforce
- What: Upon connection of the Salesforce integration, we generate: 1) a set of basic account attribute mappings automatically and 2) an inferred set of "owner" based mappings automatically.
- Why: Before during customer onboarding and Salesforce setup, our Customer Success team has had to manually create "Drift attributes" to enable orgs to map their Salesforce account fields into Drift for use throughout the app. This is a time-consuming, confusing, and error prone process and has frequently come up as an area for improvement in CS Quarterly Business Reviews. Moreover, if this mapping step isn't done, the filtering system we built in the account activity feed (Prospector) is unusable, which prevents customers from seeing value from the Drift Sales Seat immediately.
- Where: Salesforce Integration page
- Who: Everyone with the SFDC integration
We are also excited to announce that Drift is now listed on Salesforce AppExchange!

Drift Email

Unified Auth between Chat and Email
- What: Email users no longer need to login via http://email.drift.com if they've already logged into http://app.drift.com -- we'll leverage the Drift token present in their cookies if available to help with switching between the Email and Chat apps.
- Why: This is the first step in our master plan (to tie Email features closer to Chat with everything living in a single app (http://app.drift.com ) ) and gives customers the immediate benefit of not having to log in with both sets of credentials.
- Where: All email.drift.com pages
- Who: All Drift Email users
Email campaigns in Chat
- What: The improved customer Email + Chat experience has to start somewhere! Up first is the migration of the Email campaign builder (used for sending emails and configuring reply bot responses). Now all Email Bots customers will navigate to the Chat app to set up their Email campaigns.
- Why: This allows for a more seamless sending process (audience managements already lives in Chat).
- Where: http://app.drift.com/email/campaigns
- Who: Drift Email users

Xan Liuzzo · October 2021

Episode 78: Ships from October 11 to October 15

https://video.drift.com/v/ab0Up4xbGS5/

Drift Revenue Acceleration Platform

Auto Conversation Rating drop
- What: Automatically drop a conversation rating for your teams at the end of their chats
- Why: Our goal, by launching the ability to auto-trigger rating requests for every agent on a team, is that every service conversation gets a rating request sent to the end-user in real time
- Where: Settings > Organization settings > Workspaces > Team > Conversation rating
- Who: Advanced and Enterprise
Conversation search & alerts
- What: Search conversations based on keywords and filters (playbook, teammate, CQL, outcome, topic, tags). Customers can save their searches and set up email alerts to keep a pulse on new conversations related to their interests.
- Why: This new way to search for conversations gives Marketers insight into what conversations they are having with site visitors. In this new iteration beyond the beta, we've made an experience that encourages customers to quickly start a search with keywords, AI-powered topics, or outcomes.
- Where: Conversation search (magnifying glass icon) in the navigation bar Drift | Search
- Who: Premium and above
Conversation following
- What: This change provides buyers with a continuous conversation experience so when a buyer engages in a conversation and browses a seller’s website, the conversation will follow them along their buyer journey.
- Why: By prioritizing active conversations, customers will see fewer abandoned chats, fewer duplicate conversations across agents, and better rates with their customer outcomes like emails captured and meetings booked. Also, there are no hacky workarounds to have the conversation follow. Our system will track an end user's last active message and check if it was sent within the last 30 minutes.
- Where: Conversations on your site!
- Who: FY22 customers (Beta)

Katie Costello (she/her) · October 2021

Episode 79: Ships from October 18 to October 22

https://video.drift.com/v/abWOa4bCoC5/

Drift Email

Fresh reports for email campaigns
- What: Email campaigns reports have been given a much needed update and now leverage the latest reporting charts/tables. We kept the same metrics as in the old reports but now display them in a cleaner and searchable view.
- Why: These reports have historically not been easy to use, the lack of search on the People tab in particular resulted in customers paging through hundreds of results just to see a certain person's engagement with emails in a campaign.
- Where: Email campaign reports
- Who: Email bots customers

Xan Liuzzo · November 2021

Episode 80: Ships from October 25 to October 29

https://video.drift.com/v/abQ5WSlBuR8/

Revenue Acceleration Platform

New Look for Android App
- What: Updates to the Android app!
  - User presence: Now you can see who's online
  - Sorting conversation fix
  - Adding support for sections
  - Adding support for All inboxes, you don't need to search for your conversations any more
- Why: It is easier to use and to navigate and gives a more similar experience to our web app
- Where: Android App
- Who: Everyone

Katie Costello (she/her) · November 2021

Episode 81: Ships from November 1-5

https://video.drift.com/v/abkYvC4Tu68

Custom Blocks Beta
- What: Now, marketers can create node flows ONCE, and paste them to their heart's content in their playbooks! No more repetition and wasted time, thus, a happier and more productive customer.
- Why: In the Past, marketers have been forced to repeat the same node flows for multiple playbooks.This pain is specially true for Enterprise customers which tend to have DOZENS of playbooks. Imagine having to manually scan all your playbooks every time you need to change all the repeated nodes,
- even having to create spreadsheets to keep track of the piles of playbooks that you need to update (true story). Doesn't sound scalable, right?
- Where: Access Custom Blocks through the playbooks page, under the Library tab.
- Who: Customers on FY22 Advanced and Enterprise plans

Drift Product Updates and New Releases 🚢

Comments

Drift Revenue Acceleration Platform

Drift Email

Ships from 3/15 to 3/19

Episode 58: Ships from 4/12 to 4/16

Episode 60: Ships from 4/26 to 4/30

Episode 61: Ships from 5/10 to 5/14

Drift Revenue Acceleration Platform

Drift Email

Drift Revenue Acceleration Platform

Drift Email

Drift Revenue Acceleration Platform

Drift Email

Episode 80: Ships from October 25 to October 29

Revenue Acceleration Platform