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If you are searching for options to expand your business or connect more with your customers and potential customers, then Gist is the best tool for you.

To succeed as a business online, you need a continuous flow of visitors and potential customers. Also, it would be best if you had a way to communicate and aid them with support. Then, Gist is a suitable tool to fulfill these requirements.

Gist is an all-in-one Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform to enhance your business by lead generation, nurturing leads, and providing professional support to customers. It provides you with tools like forms, chatbots, social media integration, email marketing, tracking, etc., to keep the flow of customers.

Here in this post, we briefly describe Gist, including its features, advantages and disadvantages, pricing, and FAQs.

 

TLDR – Gist Review Summary

 

Gist (GetGist) is a customer messaging platform that was founded by Raghavendra Rao Jitta in 2017. Originally called ConvertFox, the company was rebranded as Gist in late 2018. The company is headquartered in Delaware and currently has over 10,000 customers.

Gist offers a host of support and marketing features. Support features include live chat, chat triggers, chatbots, and agent performance reports. The marketing features include contact management, email marketing, and website popups.

There are three types of plans that Gist customers can choose from: the Support Suite, the Marketing Suite, or the All-in-One Bundle. Each of the three types has a forever-free option, a mid-tier Professional plan, and a Premium plan. Prospective customers can try any of the plans for free for 14 days.

Overall, Gist is a powerful cross-channel marketing and messaging software. If you’re in the market for a free or mid-tier solution, it should be at the top of your list. It offers more marketing features than close competitors like Crisp and LiveChat and is priced affordably. It’s not quite as advanced as high-end solutions like Intercom, which larger companies might prefer.

 

What Is 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.

 

Gist Pricing & Cost

 

Gist pricing ranges from $19 per month to $548 per month across the Support, Marketing, and All-in-One plans. As of late October 2020, Gist is offering discounts on all premium plans due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are free options with limited features for all three plan types.

Support Suite

• Free Forever: Free; includes two seats and basic live chat capabilities
• Professional: $29 per month; includes five seats and Knowledge Base
• Premium: $499 per month (currently discounted at $99 per month); includes unlimited seats and custom chatbots

Marketing Suite

• Free Forever: Free; includes 200 contacts and basic email templates
• Professional: $19 per month; includes 1,000 contacts and triggered emails
• Premium: $40 per month (currently discounted at $29 per month); includes 1,000 contacts and automatic event tracking

All-in-One Suite

• Free Forever: Free; combines Free Forever Support and Free Forever Marketing plans
• Professional: $48 per month; combines Professional Support and Professional Marketing plans
• Premium: $548 per month (currently discounted at $128 per month); combines Premium Support and Premium Marketing plans

 

 

 

Gist Key Features

 

In this review, we’ll walk through the key features that Gist offers and discuss how those features can support your business. Along with descriptions of the software, we’ll include images to give you a sense of Gist’s overall layout.

To learn more about how we research and rate software tools, read about SoftwarePundit’s review methodology.

1. Live Chat

Live chat allows customer support representatives, often referred to as chat agents, to speak in real time with website visitors. Visitors will use a window, or chat widget, to chat with a company on the website. Live chat is beneficial for companies that wish to offer live support to website visitors. When testing the live chat feature, we found that it was satisfactory. One drawback is that conversation history is slightly clunky to search through as it’s broken up into open, closed, and snoozed conversations.

2. Inbox

All chats are stored within the messenger inbox. There’s a team inbox as well as a personal inbox for each chat agent. Within the inbox, agents will be able to see a comprehensive list of visitor data, including their location and local time, last viewed website page, and when they were last “seen” on the site. Agents can sort their conversations by newest, oldest, priority, or by which visitors have been waiting the longest for a reply.

Below is a picture of the messenger inbox:

 

 

Agents can take additional actions within the inbox:

• See what visitors type before they send messages
• Schedule meetings with calendar attachment
• Send and receive files, images, and GIFs
• Mark chats as a priority
• Apply tags and segments to each conversation
• Close, snooze, or delete conversations
• Send private messages to teammates within each chat
• Email chat transcripts to visitors

3. Visitor Chat Window

A Gist chat window will be installed on your company’s website and visitors will use the window to send messages to chat agents. This window can be customized with your company’s colors, logo, and the window’s position on the page. Overall, the window has a clean, modern look and has a generous number of customizations, which would make it easy for you to seamlessly integrate it into your website’s design.

 

 

A few additional features you can add to the window include forms that ask for data processing consent, the ability to install the window only on specific pages, and typical reply times to manage visitor expectations.

4. Outbound Messages

In addition to chat, Gist allows you to execute marketing campaigns through email and the chat widget. These messages can be sent to segments of users for different purposes. For example, you can announce the launch of a new feature to your website visitors through chat, or create a monthly email newsletter for your best customers. Overall, this feature within Gist is incredibly easy to use given that all outbound messages are created the same way.

Below is an example of how you can build outbound emails within Gist:

 

 

The creation process is the same across chat and email. Gist customers write the message content, choose display rules, and send or schedule the messages. A few metrics, including the number of opens, clicks, and replies, are provided once messages are live. This will allow customers to gauge the efficacy of their outbound messages.

5. Forms & Popups

Forms and popups are eye-catching windows that appear on a site with the intent of engaging and capturing visitor leads. For example, this tool can be designed to create a popup window asking for visitor emails after the visitor has been on the site for 20 seconds. This feature overall is highly useful for lead generation and is somewhat unique as it is not offered by most other live chat competitors.

 

 

The forms are highly customizable. Much like outbound messages, the forms and popups are created by writing the content, choosing display rules, and deciding when they will be deployed. Gist provides an array of different popup types that vary by design and location. :

• Popup
• Slide-in
• Sticky bar
• Fullscreen
• Welcome mat
• Embedded

6. Chatbots

Chatbots are software programs that can converse with visitors when customer support representatives are unavailable. Bots can be programmed to conduct simple tasks, like asking visitors for their names and email addresses, or they can be more advanced and carry out full conversations. Gist offers a chatbot workflow builder with a variety of options for customers to create varied and complex bots. When building bots, we found the workflow builder to be simpler to use than in some alternatives.

Below is an example of what the bot builder looks like:

 

 

7. Chatbot Abilities

Below is a list of some of the Gist chatbot capabilities:

• Send a welcome message
• Capture visitor name and email
• Tag a contact
• Send a calendar to book meetings
• Ask a question with predefined answers
• Ask a question with an open answer
• Route the conversation to an agent
• Ask for visitor ratings once a chat has ended
• Close the conversation

You will also be able to set rules about when bots can be displayed. The bot can be displayed based on segments, visitor location or behavior, and the webpage that the visitor is on.

8. Events Tracker

Event tracking is a marketing tool that helps businesses understand how visitors use and interact with their websites. This feature is fairly unique to Gist and is overall extremely helpful for customers to understand which parts of their websites are getting engagement. It is also straightforward to configure each event to track. Gist offers a proprietary event tracking tool with two options: Simple Mode or Event Visualizer.

9. Simple Mode

With Simple Mode, your company can track the number of visits to each page on your site. You’ll name the event to keep track of its purpose, and then select which URL you’d like to track. Once the event is “defined” or set live, Gist will start tracking the amount of times that page is accessed. Each event’s data will be available in a graph within the Events Tracker tab:

 

 

10. Event Visualizer

The Event Visualizer is a more complex event-tracking tool that you can use to track clicks on specific buttons or links that are on your website. This will help you understand which specific aspects of your website are drawing customer attention. Creating events to track with Gist is simple – you use the visual editor to select on-page elements and define the events.

 

Additional Features

 

Gist offers additional features to support customer engagement goals and team productivity.

 

Feature	Description
Agent Profiles	Gist customers can create public agent profiles where visitors can book meetings, find contact information, and chat.
Calendar Integrations	Chat agents are able to connect to Google Calendar to allow visitors and leads to book meetings without corresponding over email. Calendar invites can also be sent to visitors directly through the chat widget.
Import and Export Contacts	Customers who are switching over from another software or have an important contact list saved as a CSV file can upload those contacts directly into the Gist interface.
Integrations	Gist has built integrations with over 30 software tools. Though this number of integrations is on the lower side compared with competitors’ integrations lists, Gist integrates with Zapier, which facilitates integrations with over 3,000 applications.
Knowledge Base	Gist customers can create a Knowledge Base, which hosts helpful articles for visitors to read to learn about their businesses. The Knowledge Base can be customized and has a chat widget so visitors can converse with chat agents.
Live View	Chat agents will be able to view a list of visitors on the site and read information about the visitor such as email addresses, current URL, and amount of time on the site. Agents can directly chat with visitors from this feature.
Reports	Gist offers a dashboard of reports that helps teams understand their live chat and customer support performances. Some metrics that are included are conversation volume, agent responsiveness, and overall team performance.

 

Gist Alternatives and How They Compare

 

Intercom

Intercom is an online tool that helps your business with communication, marketing, and lead generation, similar to Gist.

It offers businesses a way to provide support to users with live chats, emails, tickets, conversational bots, articles, and so on. Moreover, it helps you generate leads and engage users with multi-channel marketing campaigns, retargeting, and more features.

To add more features to your support and marketing, you can integrate with tools like Salesforce, Stripe, Jira, social networks, Slack, Google Analytics, etc.

Secondly, the package starts at $74 per month when billed annually. Otherwise, you can select individual packages as per your needs. Nonetheless, you can choose a free pack with limited features to start with.

Zendesk

Zendesk is another cloud-based platform like Gist that specializes in Customer Relationship Management. It provides services related to customer support, sales, and generating leads.

With the help of Zendesk, you can contact and support users in real-time across different channels – SMS, web, mobile app, phone, email, and social media. Likewise, you can use chatbots to engage with customers and reduce resolution time for agents.

Also, you can integrate different tools like Salesforce, Maestro QA, Google Play Reviews, Zoom, TeamViewer, Dropbox, and many more to improve customer satisfaction and support.

The pricing of premium packages starts at $19 for Zendesk Sell and $49 for Zendesk Suite. However, you can use a free trial for a certain period, including essential features.

Klaviyo

The following tool in line with Gist is Klaviyo, a popular email and SMS marketing automation platform. It helps to deliver personalized experiences across owned marketing channels like SMS, email, in-app notifications, and the web.

Furthermore, it offers sales and customer service that help you grow traffic, convert visitors, and run inbound marketing campaigns.

Besides 200+ integrated tools, you get to collect real-time customer data, access the templates library, and track customers’ behavior.

As for the price, the first 50 SMS and 250 emails are free. After that, you have to upgrade to a paid plan as your list grows. You can start your pricing at $20 for 500 contacts.

 

Is Gist Right For You?

 

Gist is a customer engagement software with a wide array of customer support and marketing features. The software provides an all-around customer support experience and has some unique marketing features not found in most alternatives.

Overall, Gist is a powerful tool with particularly rich marketing features that will boost lead capture and provide a well-rounded view of visitor activity. If you’re a business of any size looking to provide live customer support while achieving marketing aims, the All-in-One Bundle is particularly useful. While the Premium plan is normally a bit steep price-wise, the current discount is extremely advantageous.

If you’re searching for a solution that’s focused on live chat, look at Crisp or Tidio

If you are interested in trying any of Gist’s plans, sign up for a 14-day free trial.

 

Gist Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)