Instagram is a place where people come and discover new ecommerce brands. People get inspired by stories and posts from brands, enquire about their products, and choose to buy from them.
Direct messaging plays a crucial role in helping people connect with businesses in personal ways through story replies, direct messages, and mentions. When a business can quickly respond in a personalized fashion, it builds trust and loyalty, turning casual browsers into customers, and customers into brand advocates.
With the Instagram DMs API,
- you & your team can manage all IG messages right from DelightChat’s dashboard alongside other channels (like email, Messenger, WhatsApp, FB/IG Comments, etc.), and
- you never have to share the IG account’s credentials with everyone in the team thereby alleviating privacy risks.
Before this, you could only respond to Instagram posts & ad comments from DelightChat. But now, brands can also respond to direct messages too ever since Facebook released the Messenger API for Instagram.
Why should DTC brands care about the Instagram DM API?
If your brand is using a customer support tool like DelightChat, you are already responding to Instagram comments from the dashboard itself without ever having to visit Instagram on mobile or desktop.
I can safely say that it would be super helpful if you could reply to direct messages on your Instagram account from a single screen.
Here are a couple of examples where Instagram DMs could prove useful:
1) Oftentimes, people ask for pricing, product information, delivery date, order status, and a bunch of other stuff on your brand’s posts & ads. In these cases, you can get on a 1:1 conversation with the person over a DM and solve the issue in a matter of minutes.
2) They might also directly message you for support. These queries can range from order tracking to reporting damaged goods. If you’re using DelightChat, you can effortlessly reply to these DMs quickly and solve their issue, thus creating happy customers.
The advantages of managing customer service with Instagram DM integrated with DelightChat
Instagram is all about instant gratification. That poses a challenge to DTC brands – how can you reply to your customers instantly?
If you are unable to respond quickly, you might
- lose out on a sale or,
- leave an existing customer angry.
To avoid that, you can use an omnichannel Shopify helpdesk like DelightChat that can help you reply to comments on Instagram as well as DMs, while seamlessly managing other support channels.
Here’s how you can easily manage customer service over Instagram DMs with DelightChat:
1) Collaborate with your team
Earlier, when you & your team were directly using Instagram to manage your messages and comments, it was almost impossible to keep track of who was answering what.
With DelightChat, that’s no longer an issue. You can assign an Instagram DM ticket to a relevant person, tag it appropriately (for example, “Discount” for discount related questions), and even chat with your team members right within a ticket to resolve the same.
2) Start a DM from a comment
A potential customer commented asking about the price? No need to wait for them to message you as that might never happen. You can instantly start an Instagram DM right from that comment and help out the person with the relevant details.
3) Search for conversations
On Instagram, you fall prey to endless scrolling to find a conversation you might have had with a customer.
This isn’t the case with DelightChat. Since we are deeply integrated with Instagram direct messaging, you can search for a particular conversation by simply typing the IG handle for that person.
4) Automate repetitive queries
If people are asking the same questions over DMs over and over again, you can choose to automate replies to some of them.
You can have a standard response drafted for repetitive queries with regards to price, product details, delivery date, influencer collaboration, etc., and have that response sent every time the same (or similar) query comes in.
Here’s an example: A lot of our customers get queries related to pricing with queries like “price please”, “pp”, etc.
In this scenario, you can send them a templated message with the product page’s URL which contains all the info including the price of the product.
Instagram DMs is quickly becoming one of the leading channels for DTC brands to grow their sales, build rapport with the customer and eventually turn them into repeat customers. If your brand hasn't invested in Instagram DMs yet, you should start today.
Manage Customer Support on Instagram DMs
Managing Instagram support becomes harder as your company grows.
Customers want you to like and reply to their comments, handle queries on DMs, take “price please” comments further over DMs, and stay engaged with them on a platform they love to use!
DelightChat lets you handle your support from one screen, collaborate with your team, and automate replying to common support queries like “price please” on all your support channels.
Let’s make it easy for your team, to offer superior customer support everywhere with DelightChat.
