Let's talk about the elephant in the room: sometimes it's annoying or just plain tough to adopt a new product. Especially when you need to get your entire team up and running ASAP to meet your monthly sales goals.

At Drift, we study the Customer Lifecycle, which means we want to make it magically easy for Sales teams to get the value they're looking for: booking meetings. With our easy onboarding, they're able to crush the metric that matters to them ASAP. After understanding these teams, their workflows, and commonly asked questions, we've created this ultimate guide to getting your team started booking meetings on the same day they sign up :-)

Whew! Let's get started. 

Billing Plan: The features in this article are available on all paid Drift plans
 

In this doc we'll cover:

• The Invite
• Account Setup
• Meetings
• The Conversation View
• Contact Profiles
• Drift Profiles
• The Live View
• Mobile App
• For Admins

The Invite

When you're invited by an account Admin to join your team, you'll receive an email from notifications+invitation@reply.drifttmail.com. These invitations expire after seven days.

When you click the Activate Account button, you will be prompted to start setting up your account! 

Account Setup 

Just enter your name, and then you can preview your Profile on the right. (Upload a photo if you have one on hand, but you'll be able to do this easily later on too).

 

If you'd like, drag and drop or click to upload a photo to be used as your account avatar.

Click Continue to your Password.
As soon as you click Continue to Meetings, you can choose either a Gmail or Office 365 calendar to connect, so that you can start booking meetings immediately! You'll be prompted for your calendar account credentials.
 

Once you have successfully connected your calendar, select a specific Calendar availability from the dropdown that you want to sync with Drift (for example, some people have both a work calendar and personal calendar synced, but only want to account for work schedule when booking meetings): 

You can also choose to skip calendar setup if you'd like, by clicking Don't connect my calendar.

After that, you'll be prompted to install the Chrome extension. Before installing your Chrome extension you can take a look at all the meeting types you can create and the different calendar settings available. For more on the Chrome extension, read the doc here .

You can choose to install or skip install of the extension. You'll then be taken into your home dashboard!

 

Meetings

Now that you have connected your calendar, you can start "dropping" your calendar within chat conversations, email signatures, or Playbooks to book meetings!. You also have the option to customize meeting types, send guest notifications, set your availability and connect your Zoom account

Head over to Meetings to customize your meeting types by selecting Meeting Name, Length, Link (the url at which a user can book that specific type of meeting), Location, Conference or Zoom Link and Description. You can also require a visitor enter's their name and phone number before booking. 

Meeting Types & Settings

Guest Notifications

Create personalized meeting confirmations and reminders that will send to your guests when a meeting is booked and before it takes place as a reminder. 

Drift Profile
When a visitor clicks the Schedule a Meeting button on your Drift profile, they will be shown time slots for your Default meeting type only. To allow your clients to book one of the other new meeting types that you customized, you need to share the meeting URL/link directly with your client within conversations, email or playbooks.

Availability Settings

Under Meetings settings, you can scroll down and see settings for Availability.

Here you will be able to add your Timezone, Minimum notice time & Buffer Time.

For minimum notice time, for example, if you have a 4 hour minimum notice time, someone who tries to book a meeting with you at 12 pm won't be able to schedule until 4 pm or later, provided you have that time available!

A buffer time is the amount of time you would like to set between meetings. This is really useful for those calls you suspect may run long or to give yourself a breather!in between scheduled meetings. 

Drift Assistant

Finally, you can connect your Drift Assistant to automate meeting prep and follow-up.

For the Complete Guide to Booking Meetings with Drift visit this Help Doc.  

Before you go, you probably want to learn about how conversations look...
 

The Conversation Overview

 

Within Drift, here's what your conversation view will look like. Depending on your permissions (set by your Admin), you'll see all conversations or conversations that you're a participant in.

On the left, you'll see "My Conversations", "No Participants", "All Conversations" and any inboxes you have created within Drift. You will also see drop down arrows for each of these sections which all you to view open, closed, or all conversations for a given inbox. When someone "unknown" starts a conversation, they'll be shown as a "Site Visitor." Once they enter their email address, we'll enrich the data on the customer to give you a more robust understanding of who they are. 

 

On the right, you'll see the contact sidebar, where you can manage/view custom attributes, CQL score, and see additional information about the contact/lead.

You can ask for someone's email address at any point in the conversation (even outside of the email form!) and it will update in their profile. You can also edit which attributes are shown on the right from any customer's profile.

 

For more on the conversation view, read this help doc.
 

Conversation Status

Changing the conversation status is the primary way to organize your conversations. Ideally, you would keep all new, active conversations in their "Open" state.

"Closed" status speaks for itself. Whenever a conversation is over, change the status to "Closed" and it'll go into the closed queue. You can do this by clicking "X" to the right of any open conversation in the left-hand side bar, or at the top right of the conversation.

A conversation won't ever be entirely deleted, it'll remain in the customer's profile timeline. If they continue the conversation, it'll reopen and come through the "Open" queue.

Different sections of your conversations will be location in the left-hand side bar. Depending on how your admin set your permissions, you will see All Open Conversations, My Conversations,  & those with No Participants.

For more on conversation status, read this help doc.

Set Your Status

Rep status is important to understand as a team, in order to organize who's responsible for new conversations coming in. If you are set to "available", this means that you are able to take new conversations and they may be routed to you at anytime. 

To change your status, click your avatar in the bottom left of your screen and flip the switch there. You can also click on the drift logo, in the top left of your screen when you are in conversations to set yourself away for a period of time, or indefinitely. 

 

Here are the status types and what they mean:

Available

• You will be routed into conversations according to your teams' routing rules and Playbook setup.

Away

• You won't be added into any conversations that are round-robin-based, unless there's a calendar drop included in the Playbook.

Conversation Participants 

When a conversation comes in and no one is in the catch-all rule or if your team is away, the conversation may go unassigned. These conversations will exist in the "No Participants" queue.

 

If you want to add another participant from you team to join the conversation, simply use our slash command /invite and your teammates names will populate. You will also be able to see who is currently available/away.

On the right hand side under conversation details. you can also see who is already in the conversation.

 

Operating Out of Your Queue 

As you can see above, there are several different conversation queues. All new conversations can always be found in "Open."

Recommendations:

• If there's one person in the catch all rule, operate out of the "Open" queue.
• If there's more than one person in the rule, operate out of the "Your Conversations" queues. This will keep reps from stepping on each others' toes.
• If you have a lot of bots running, where technically there are no participants in the conversation, then always check the "no Participants" queue and make sure every conversation has a participant. No lead left behind!

Notifications

You can customize your notifications by clicking on your avatar (bottom left) and choosing "Notifications".

 

These settings are at a rep level, so each person can adjust them to their liking.

You can be notified in 3 ways: Email, Browser, and Mobile.

Recommendations: Only set notifications for conversations assigned to you. If there's always someone monitoring incoming chats in the app, there's no need to be notified whenever any new conversation is started.

For more information on notifications, check out this doc.

Email Fallback

Email fallback is a feature that allows for conversations to be continued, even if a customer leaves the page.

If someone doesn't read your message for 15+ minutes, you'll see this message in the conversation (only visible to you):

 

The customer will receive an email that has the chat transcript included, like this:

 

The customer can then either respond via email to continue the conversation (it'll continue in the same thread) or they can click on a link that will take them back to the website page.

For more information on the fallback email, check out this doc.

Tagging

Tagging is just another way of organizing conversations. We use it for a variety of different reasons, including marking new leads, feature requests, bug reports, follow-up required, etc. It's really up to you to create a system that works best for the team.

Here's what it looks like when you choose a conversation tag:

 

The beauty of tagging is that you can filter based on them. For example, if I wanted to view all conversations with a "follow-up required" tag, I can filter and then work through the list on its own.

Here's what it looks like to select a custom filter with tags:

Saved Replies

These are great to use as a quick way to answer common customer questions. To add a saved reply to a conversation, use the slash command /savedreply to add it to the composer bar.

To configure your saved replies, go here. (This can only be managed by an Admin)

Check it out:

 

Internal Notes

Internal notes are a great way to communicate the state of a conversation with your team, or just a way to make a note for yourself later. 

For example, if I have a customer who wants more information on pricing and we decide to take it offline, I can make a note that we have a call. Or, if someone wants to follow-up with a customer, notes are helpful to know the last action taken on someone's account.

Use the slash command /note to post internal note. You'll see the composer turn yellow to indicate internal note status.

 

Contact Profiles

The contact profile is where you can find helpful information and context about the person you're talking to. You can filter by their activity, update their profile attributes, view conversations or meetings booked. You can also view the pages they've seen and the Playbooks they've engaged with.

You can also proactively send them a message.

For more on following contacts, read this doc. 
 

Drift Profiles

Drift Profiles are like a digital business card. It gives customers a direct channel to reach you. They allow customers to chat with you directly, schedule meetings, etc. They'll look something like this once they're live: 

 

Visit my actual Drift Profile here!

For more information on setting up your personal profile, check out this doc.

 

Booking Meetings

There are several ways to book meetings outside of a playbook or bot flow. Your customers can book meetings through your drift profile, or you can send them a meeting link right in the conversation. 

 

This is how it will look on their end:

 

The Live View

The Live View is a tool that allows you to see a live feed of identified customers, as they're on your site. This is another way to proactively message leads or customers while they're most engaged and high intent.

 

You can view what page an identified customer is on and tailor a unique message to them at the optimal point of contact.

Mobile Apps

Close deals from your Uber! We have native apps for both iOS and Android. 

So that's a good place to stop for onboarding on a rep level.
 

For Admins

Inviting New Team Members

You can manage your team and invite them to your Drift account here. Once they receive the invite email, they can go through the signup steps on their own.

Customizing Drift

You can customize your business hours, widget targeting, widget design, and more here.

For more Admin-related tasks, check this doc here.

Integrations

Setting up integrations is the best way to build Drift into your existing workflow, you can setup your Salesforce integration , knowledge base integration, or use Zapier to build almost any other integration you might need.