Drift Desktop App Features

Download the Drift desktop app here! 

Drift’s desktop app currently supports our Free, Legacy Standard, and Essential plans.  If you are on another plan, you can use the desktop app, but please note that functionalities specific to your plan may be missing at the moment. We will be updating the desktop app frequently, and expect to have the paid features soon! Stay tuned!

How Drift’s desktop app differs from the Drift’s browser app conversation view:

In order to make our desktop app as simple, fast and reliable as possible, we have made several changes that will make it easier to chat with your leads.

You may notice that conversation statuses (Open, Closed, Pending) have been removed from the Drift desktop app. You never need to worry about managing a conversation’s status in the new experience. Once you’re done with a conversation, just let it stay in the list. To find an old conversation that you’ve had, simply scroll down in the list to find it, just like you would on any other messaging app or on your phone. 

If you would like to hide a conversation from your immediate view, you can instead hide chats by hovering over that chat preview in the left column, and clicking the “x” that appears to the right of the visitor information! To go back and find hidden chats, you can hit the “Show more” button at the bottom left of your view! If you’d like to show fewer chats again, click the “Show fewer” button. 

If messages haven’t been sent or received in a conversation for longer than 3 days, Drift will automatically hide a conversation to keep your view clean. To find these conversations again, simply click the “Show more” button to view them. To unhide a conversation, just send a message in the conversation, which will automatically make it an active conversation again. 

Upgrades to sending messages

Emojis 

The Drift desktop app has new and improved emoji functionality! In addition to using the emoji menu that appears when you hit the face icon to the right of the test composer, you can now simply type into your composer a colon (“:”) plus the name of the emoji you are looking for, and select your preferred emoji from the pop-up emoji menu (or just hit “Enter”)! 

Slash Commands

In the older conversation view, the only slash command available was a simple forward slash (“/”) and was only used for creating internal notes. Now, we have 4 new slash commands: 

• /note

• /sendtranscript

• /block

• /tag

 For more detailed information about these four slash commands, check out this help doc! 

Rich text

The Drift desktop app now allows you to easily format your text while you type! Just highlight the text you would like to format and the option to make that text bold, italicized, underlined, and/or hyperlinked will automatically pop up! You can also use key commands as a shortcut for these alterations: Command + B (⌘+B) to bold your text, Command + I (⌘+I) to italicize your text, and Command + U (⌘+U) to underline your text.

Pasting images / Attaching Files

With the Drift desktop app, you now have the ability to paste images into the message composer! You can copy and paste any image file (Command+C) and paste it directly into your composer (Command+V). Additionally, when you use the shortcut Command+Control+Shift+4 to take a screenshot you can directly paste that into the message composer as well (⌘+V)! 

To attach a file, you can drag and drop any file! You can attach multiple files at the same time, but the max size is 25mb per file. 

Details sidebar updates:

The Drift desktop app has an updated Details sidebar! This new sidebar includes the following sections: 

• Visitor info
• Tags
• Recent activity
• Conversation info
• Feedback link

Each section can be accessed by expanding the right sidebar (by clicking the arrow on top) or by hovering over each section’s icon when it is collapsed. The biggest difference between this sidebar in the desktop app versus old conversation view is that the site visitor’s recent activity timeline (that shows the visitor’s recently viewed pages) will be shown in this sidebar rather than the top of the conversation - this helps you quickly see what the pages the visitor is navigating to on your site while you are chatting with them, in real time!

Settings:

To change your agent availability using the Drift Desktop app click the dropdown arrow next to the Drift icon at the top left of your app! There, you can toggle yourself to ‘Available’ or ‘Away’. Click “Notification Settings” to turn desktop and email notifications on or off directly from here. 

To optimize it’s functionally, you will not be able to access any settings besides availability and notifications through the Drift’s desktop app - you will need to instead go to Drift in your browser for Setting configurations! 

To try out these amazing new features, download the Drift desktop app from here. 

Need troubleshooting help? Click here.