3 areas where Instagram chat automation will help your ecommerce
After proving to be a smash hit on both Messenger and Whatsapp, the ability to apply automated responses to direct messages is now available on Instagram. This is big news, with benefits for many aspects of your ecommerce operation, but let’s focus on how it can impact three key areas—sales, customer satisfaction and your customer service team.
The addition of this powerful tool to a platform with an ideal user base for online sales creates a new world of opportunities. Applying chat automation on Instagram will deliver an immediate boost to your sales efforts there along with a better overall experience for everyone involved.
Here’s how Messenger API for Instagram from Facebook, powered by Zowie, can have an immediate impact on your bottom line, your customer engagement and the people you depend on to make those customers happy.
1. Sales & conversions
Engage with customers when they’re ready to buy
Automated responses to direct messages on Instagram allow you to instantly join conversations started by customers. They can reach out to you for any number of reasons, but often it’s because they want more information about you or your product.
By engaging with them right away, you’re taking advantage of this interest to move your conversation forward. What better time to reward their engagement and to match their willingness to talk about how you can help them? Automated replies to customer inquiries let you deliver the most important message of all—we’re listening.
With an automated response to customer questions, you keep their focus on you and your brand, keep them on your site and keep them thinking about how your product is just what they’re looking for.
Which is better—an immediate reply with the information they want or a promise to “get back to them” when your customer service staff returns to the office? Take advantage of the chance to move every customer another step through the sales funnel with automated responses on Instagram chat!
Use limited-time, direct personalized offers
You can take immediate advantage of customer interest through automated chat responses on Instagram by going a step further with conditional, limited offers designed to close the sale now.
After all, what better time to reach out with a special limited offer than at the moment when the customer is ready to buy?
Messenger API for Instagram and Zowie give you the endless flexibility needed to tailor offers to any conditions you like. You can, for example, respond to certain questions for certain products with a code that will offer free shipping or a discount if the customer buys in the next thirty minutes or twenty-four hours or under whatever conditions you want.
This can prove to be an especially effective way to break the all-important psychological barrier before a first purchase from a new customer but you can apply it whenever you want. Take advantage of a golden sales opportunity at the moment of greatest interest. Use codes generated by your CRM platform to turn customized responses in Instagram into conversions.
Don’t slow down when you’re scaling up
Rapid growth is always the goal, but any organization, especially in ecommerce, can experience bottlenecks caused by growth that make further expansion difficult.
Customer Service departments are often the location of those bottlenecks. When a customer base rapidly outgrows the number of agents ready to support them, the problems start to mount.
Automating responses to simple and repetitive inquiries makes it possible for your CS team to keep up and support general company growth goals. Using Messenger API for Instagram can contribute to that portion of automated responses that allows your CS to meet the demands of a larger customer base and help pave the forward to bigger and better things.
Automation now can help to bring greater sales later. Don’t let your plans for growth get lost in avoidable customer service issues!
2. Customer satisfaction
Instant answers for some, faster answers for others, better service for all
By automating your replies to common inquiries on Instagram using Zowie, you drastically reduce one of the biggest pain points for customers when they’re looking for the answers they need—wait times.
Automatic replies to simple and repetitive questions mean literally no wait time at all. Instagram users ask a question and they get an immediate answer. For more complex issues that require personal service (or if someone simply prefers to speak with a customer service agent), wait times are greatly reduced thanks to all those simple questions being answered automatically and removed from the call queue.
No one wants to listen to “Your call is important to us. Please hold for the next available agent…” over and over while wondering if it’s really worth the time spent waiting or if the call will be answered at all. With Messenger API for Instagram and Zowie, you can surprise and delight customers with faster response times than they expect and a better overall experience.
24/7 support
Automation tools don’t take breaks, days off or vacations. Once you go live with Messenger API for Instagram and Zowie, you’re ready to respond to customer inquiries at any time, day or night, no matter if your customer service staff is active or not.
Ecommerce doesn’t have a closing time and your Instagram page doesn’t shut down overnight. Asking customers to contact you during business hours or promising to get back to them on Monday simply doesn’t work anymore. Your sales efforts are live 24/7 so your customer support needs to be too.
By responding immediately to customer issues, you’re staying top of mind and helping them take another step in the sales process. By making them wait, you’re risking being forgotten and leaving them in the same place they were before. Sounds like an easy choice, right?
Don’t ask (or make) anyone wait for a reply from you—use automation on Instagram for instant customer support.
Automations based on customer behavior
Using Messenger API for Instagram and Zowie, you’ll get insights into what your customers are interested in, exactly what they ask about and places where you can update your automations to address these issues in the future.
No one knows your business better than you do, but there’s always a chance that something might be under your radar. It could be a market trend, a blind spot on your website, something about the purchasing process that can be improved or a thousand other things.
By seeing the questions that customers ask that aren’t addressed by the automations you’ve already made, you can respond with a new automation on topics or details that you didn’t think about before.
This means that something that requires attention from customer service today can be handled automatically tomorrow, to the satisfaction and benefit of everyone involved.
3. Your Customer Service team
The freedom & flexibility to resolve complex issues
By using Messenger API for Instagram and Zowie, you’re diverting a significant portion of your customer issues away from your CS team towards automated replies. Does this mean your CS has nothing to do? Of course not—there will always be complex issues to resolve in the world ecommerce.
What it does mean is that your CS team is free to devote the time and attention needed to sort out complicated matters related to things like lost shipments, payment problems and all the other issues that require a deeper dive.
Without automation, the queue of phone calls, emails, social media messages and other contact points is much longer. This means that CS agents are under pressure to reach numbers targets and process as many issues as possible. It becomes a numbers game rather than a matter of quality.
This is a recipe for serious customer satisfaction problems. Using automation for the simple issues means giving them more time to resolve the bigger problems in a way that leaves everyone happy.
A happier customer service agent is a better customer service agent
CS teams have a tough job. Dealing with an endless waiting list of customers, many of them angry, is a difficult way to start your day. Doing it every day can have predictable effects on anyone.
Automation of simple answers and the freedom to concentrate on handling more complex issues as described above have a positive effect on CS agents and their approach to the job. There’s less stress, less pressure to meet unreasonable goals and more satisfaction from helping customers in need.
This means better interactions with customers, a better level of service and a better overall experience for both sides of the conversation.
CS teams are more efficient, more stable
We’re going to cheat a little here and combine two related ideas into one.
First, automating replies to chat inquiries helps to make CS teams more efficient by allowing you to keep them at a certain level even as sales volume increases. Doubling your number of customers, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean doubling your CS team since the portion of customer questions handled by chat can be increased.
This has obvious consequences for cost efficiencies and your bottom line.
Secondly, automation can help to reduce a standard and always difficult issue in the world of customer service—turnover. As we’ve already noted, it can be a tough job under the best of circumstances. If your local labor market is especially tight, recruiting and training CS agents can be a serious bottleneck that holds back growth (and costs more all the time).
Automation of repetitive tasks can improve the work conditions of your customer service team and eliminate some of the impact that comes with an already stressful task. Decreasing your turnover by just a bit or extending the average employment period can deliver major benefits when your accounting year comes to a close.
Ready to add all this and more to your Instagram presence? Want to know more about what chatbot automation can do to boost your customer engagement? Just click here and set up a demo with Zowie and get all your questions answered while discovering a new world of opportunities!
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