Building a business isn’t only about marketing and selling to your customers. Ideally, you want to accompany your customers all throughout their life cycle. Communicating with them doesn’t stop after a sale. After sales, they might need support or onboarding.
If you think about what parts make up such an all-round communication system, you’d need marketing automation, support tools, a help centre, a CRM – just to name a few. Plus, they all need to talk to each other. This means you’re required to open your purse strings.
Gist has declared its mission to enable businesses to have a complete view of their customers through all their stages – at scale. Its platform is specifically designed to have email marketing automation, live chat, and a help desk so that
Marketing teams can create a customer experience in every interaction with a contact
Sales teams can gather intelligence about a contact
Support teams can help customers
All that without having to juggle not only multiple chat apps but emails and social media accounts.
In 2017, Gist was launched as ConvertFox, by Raghavender Rao Jitta. In late 2018, it was rebranded as Gist.
Pros and cons of Gist
Gist is an all-in-one software for live chat, email marketing automation, and support. It comes with a set of tools so that you and your team can market, sell, and communicate with your contacts. It has features like chatbots, forms, 24/7 automated meeting scheduling, and agent performance reports.
Gist is a web app so you don’t own and install the software. You can choose its Marketing Suite, Support Suite, or the All-in-One Bundle. All 3 suites are subscription-based and also have 3 plans including one that’s free of charge forever.
When signing up pay attention if you want to experience its forever free plan. It’s a link under the 3 options.
Pros
- Supports over 44 languages
- New features are added regularly
- No upsells
- Easy to integrate with WordPress
- A wide range of integrations
- Easy to use
Cons
- The forever free plan is very limited
Who is Gist for?
Gist is more than just an all-in-one multi-channel marketing tool. If you choose its All-in-One Bundle, it gives you
- Email marketing
- Marketing automation with a visual editor
- Live chat
- Automated scheduling
- Help desk
- Help centre creator
- Team communication
- Deals (to improve sales)
Most of the above listed tools are used at some time or other in every business with an online presence.
Now, if you looking to solve the puzzle of finding the right tools and making them talk to each other, Gist hopes to solve it for you. In other words, it provides you with all the tools you need to have full-fledged marketing and after sales support in one interface.
Out of the gates, Gist comes with a collection of Native integration between tools and third party apps as well as WordPress plugins. This means it’ll most probably work on any website or with any app.
Key features
Gist has an extensive featureless which is why I’m going to walk you through its key features and how these can help your business.
Thanks to its many native integrations, the web-based platform integrates with WordPress sites (with a plugin) and other sites and apps (Javascript code snippet).
Once you’ve connected your site, the live chat will show up. Even better, you’ll see all conversations in Gist’s interface, no matter if it’s a chat from your site or from a dedicated mail.
Live chat and chat bots
You first need to install the plugin or Javascript snippet on your website to allow tracking and for the live chat to show up. You can change the chat window appearance, or just turn it off altogether.
Having a chat means you can clarify pre-sales and of course, after-sales questions in real time with your site visitors.
You can edit the messenger appearance, or even choose to turn it off if you’d like.
With Gist’s linear chat bot creator, you can create chat bots to answer questions, collect lead data and book meetings 24/7.
Inbox
The inbox is very handy. You see all conversations regardless if it was a chat, email, or from social media in the inbox.
Each person responsible for answering the chat got their own personal inbox, but there’s also a team inbox. The inbox shows the conversation with all the meta data such as data and time, location, recently viewed pages, and so on.
Outbound messages
For your outbound messages, you have the choice to execute marketing campaigns via email and the chat window. As you’d expect, you can send different messages to different segments. These messages can run permanently or are executed just once. You’ll also determine their display rules and when to send it. Of course, the key performance indicators are also provided.
Forms
Any self-respecting marketing automation provider today comes with a form creator to help you capture contact data to grow your list.
You don’t need prior coding knowledge with the drag-and-drop form creator. Just like the outbound message, you can choose the display rules and see its metrics.
Event tracker
Once your sites and apps have been connected, Gist tracks how visitors use your site to help you understand what they do and how they interact with it. With help of this data, you can understand which parts of your website are not performing well and you may want to improve them.
Gist user interface
Even though Gist is so powerful and lets you do many things, its interface is well-thought-out and uncluttered. Its no-frills and intuitive interface makes communicating with your contacts a smooth job.
Support
Eat your own dog food, that’s probably Gist’s motto. You can find a chat icon on all pages of its website and chat with its support team when you got a question.
If you find you can’t wait for a reply, you can use its self-help resources. You can browse its searchable knowledge base, or read its blog.
Gist prices
Gist has 3 suites. If you only need to provide support, you can go with its Support Suite. The same with marketing. If you want to do everything, you’d need its All-in-One Bundle. Each of these suites are made up of 3 plans including a free tier.
If you only need the marketing tools, the prices are in the ballpark of other providers. If you’re eyeing the All-in-One Bundle, the price may look high at first glance. But you need to factor in the subscription prices of the other tools and maybe also the time and effort your tech person needs to integrate them.
Is Gist right for you?
Acquiring a new customer has its price. But if you lose them after the first sale, you need to go through every bit again to get the next customer. It’s much easier if you can make the customer happy throughout their life cycle.
Overall, you’ll need many tools to create an engaging customer experience. With Gist, you get an all-around customer support experience software. It will not only boost your lead generation, it will help you communicate with your audience through all stages.
However, it’s not all roses though. Gist seems to practice some dark patterns. For example, it tries to guide you to sign up to a paid subscription. But that’s just a small niggle.
Original post here: Gist review
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