Building Drift’s Site Concierge, from vision to launch

Role: Director of Product Design at Drift, a Salesloft company
Timeframe: 2023-2024

Summary: The B2B buying process was filled with friction, and engagement rates were really low with traditional chatbots. Drift needed to differentiate itself and become more than chatbot company. Collaborating with engineering and product management leadership, I helped launch Site Concierge in March 2024. Site Concierge is a suite of AI-powered apps - Bionic chatbots, Intelligent Search, Recommended Content and Meeting Booking - that deliver individualized experiences for every visitor.

Site Concierge was initially just an idea, but I led my team, with the help of my amazing Manager of Product Design Meera Nanada, to turn the vision into reality. We built a new infrastructure, a new content ingestion library, rolled out a refreshed widget styling with new component library, and delivered 4 brand new apps for site visitors to engage with. I was the Design DRI (directly responsible individual) for the launch, working closely with Sales, Product Marketing, Customer Success, Engineering and Product leadership to ensure our new product was delivering customer value.

Results from early adopters are very promising - we’re seeing 3x engagement using Site Concierge vs traditional chatbots.

Background

Drift is a buyer engagement platform that
helps businesses improve their customer interactions and drive revenue growth. Drift is best known for its lead generation chatbots, a bot designed to identify potential customers, collect their contact information and spark their interest.

Drift was facing three problems:

#1 Low engagement rates with existing chatbots

90% of Drift customers were seeing less than 2.28% of site visitors engage with the Drift chatbot, leaving 97% of site visitors using the old friction-full way of buying.

Across Drifts paid orgs, the engagement rate median is .71% and the mean is 1.46%. 90% of Drift customers were seeing less than 2.28% of site visitors engage with the Drift chatbot, leaving 97% of site visitors using the old friction-full way of buying.

#2 Websites are large and it is hard for buyers to find the information they need. They are also difficult for marketers to update.

77% of B2B buyers say their latest purchase was either very complex or difficult according to Gartner. Difficulty in getting access to the right information was one of the biggest reasons.

When a B2B buyer is researching independently, they try to gather requirements about the product or service. But if they can’t find the information they are looking for easily, they will move onto the next vendor.

#3 Drift needed to differentiate itself, and become more than a chatbot company

Drift was best known for its lead generation chatbots, but with retention becoming a problem and

HMW help our customers engage and qualify even more buyers? Let’s reinvent the website.

How do buyers want to engage with their prospective vendors? We hypothesize that by helping buyers engage in a way that they want, on their timeline, and help them accomplish their jobs faster, we will help our customers serve their customers better.

You can see the starting point, here:

We know from our research (6 interviews with buyers who worked across a variety of industries and company sizes, May 2021) that today buyers roughly follow this journey:

• Research independently until they narrow it down to 2-3 vendors

• They are triggered to reach out to vendors when they need additional depth and to get specific information about their use cases, to see whether it’s a good fit

• Decide based on trust, fit to requirements

• Throughout this process, managing internal stakeholders and processes

Pain points uncovered:

• Managing internal stakeholders and processes is a big pain point. Internal processes can be cumbersome, and buyers often struggle to feel confident in decisions made throughout the process.

• Research independently

  • Gathering requirements can be overwhelming and hard to keep track of

  • Buyers often look for recommendations from industry peers, not through vendors, to validate the quality of the tool / experience

  • Sifting through information thats irrelevant to their uses cases is a pain point

  • Keeping track of each vendors capabilities

  • Not finding detailed enough information on the site

• Research collaboratively

  • Can be slow and inconvenient getting to the right person / a real person who can actually answer my questions, slow response times

  • Free trials aren’t available so they have to go through more with the rep rather than trying the product and getting the information themselves more quickly (especially relevant for smaller purchases)

  • Feel like I’m being sold to rather than straightforward and honest partnership, or don’t feel like a priority

  • Lots of back and forth with vendor(s) as they discover new requirements and capabilities

  • Getting repetitive information

• Decide

  • Dealing with internal procurement process

  • Ensuring all stakeholders are bought in

  • Anxious and uncertainty that they are buying the right thing, that they uncovered everything

• Sentiment towards chat

  • Participants generally did not associate chat with the buying process

  • All chat is equal - if they have had bad chat experiences with any chatbot, they are unlikely to engage with it anywhere

  • Didn’t think to use chat for buying - they would use it more for support

  • Assumption that it would not get them to the right person

  • Unlikely to answer a general question (how can we help?) but would engage with the right person / book a meeting

  • Harder to come back to, whereas once I send a form/email I can forget about it until I get a reply

  • Seen as quicker and more direct

• The ideal buying experience

  • Is fast, timely, and efficient

    • make it easy to book time with the rep

  • Is personalized to buyer’s use case

  • Makes buyers feel like a priority to vendors

  • Is educational and a partnership, predicting buyer’s needs and proactively providing relevant content

  • Leaves buyers feeling confident with their decisions along the way

March 2023

• Buyer research with 7 B2B shoppers who had experience evaluating software and talking with sales teams before purchase

• What we found

  • Users need information transparency

    • want answers as fast as possible

    • frustrated by avoidable meetings and lengthy dialouges

  • Users need efficient communication

    • Skepticism around value of chatbots

    • Unnecessarily drawn-out exchanges

    • Pointed to parts of website

    • Like connect with humans when it means quick answers and/or richer content

  • Users need perspective from users

    • Actual product usage and outcomes

    • Third-party and network opinions of service (e.g. G2)

Competitor teardown

Key takeaways:

• Any solution we design needs to be flexible and work for multiple use cases. If a customer just simply wants to have chat, we need to allow for it.

• Chatbots have become commoditized. While Hubspot, Marketo, Zoominfo, and Salesforce do not offer complex configurations like us, using their chat is a way to reduce tech stack/costs.

• Booking meetings was a common feature across all competitors (and is also what buyers mentioned using the widgets to do)

• Three offered ways to engage with the widget, outside of chat:

  • Self-serve by searching through help docs (Intercom, Crisp Chat)

  • News announcements (Intercom, LiveChat)

  • Upcoming webinars (LiveChat)

• However, we need to evaluate if solutions like these actually help buyers in their buying process, or just look nice and make marketers feel good.

Initial concepts

The squad completed a 2-day design sprint in March 2023 which focused on diverse, rapid, problem solving. They looked at the buyer research that had been done, created How Might We’s, brainstormed and sketches, then moved to detailed solutioning.

• HMW support shoppers with a quick buying experience?

• HMW positively change shopper's perception of widgets?

• HMW provide more relevant content at the right time for shoppers?

We then brought the three concepts to research calls with buyers, and this was the feedback we received:

• Participants preferred widget presentations that weren't obtrusive and distracting.

• 3/4 participants picked the widget design that exposed all the options before clicking in as their favorite (the fourth person picked it as their second favorite). They found it helpful that they could easily see all the ways the widget could help and saw this widget as being more than just a chatbot.

• The two concepts for using the widget to re-engage site visitors (book a meeting and "Pick up where you left off" slide out) were met with mixed reactions. We'll want to do more work/research on those interaction methods before prioritizing them.

• The 3 participants who saw the interaction of a book a meeting button immediately opening a calendar thought it was convenient and straight-forward! Two participants expected to enter additional information after selecting a time.

Now that we knew what buyers were looknig for, we needed to make sure Marketers would adopt and be willing to put this on their website?

Marketer validation

Now that we knew what concept buyers preferred - we needed to validate that marketers would be willing to adopt and put this on their website. We conducted a round of research with customers / marketers and got positive reactions from all participants.

Key takeaways

• Concern around the lack of a hook

• Concerned whether site visitors would understand what each button was

• Wanted to know how they would customize which actions showed up

• Marketers dont want to show all options to site visitors (unless they know nothing about them)

• 2/3 mentioned they don’t let just anyone book a meeting, need qualification first (not surprising)

We started exploring more ideas: