How to Use Instagram Chatbots for Your Brand’s Customer Service

Social media has greatly redefined how conversations are happening online, including how brands handle customer service. It has been established for many years now that social media has become more than just an online space to socialize. For brands, it’s also the ideal platform to connect with your target market.

The challenge for brands today is that many online users expect instant answers and quick fixes to their concerns. While it’s not always feasible to have a dedicated team of people to work 24/7 for customer service, brands can make use of chatbots to address this.

What Are Chatbots and Why Are They Important On Instagram?

Chatbots are conversational tools that use artificial intelligence (AI) to communicate with people who contact your brand. The tool basically functions on the basis of pre-programmed triggers and corresponding actions.

Chatbots can be used on any platform that supports messaging, but it’s especially useful for Instagram marketing. Why?

• Instagram users are more receptive to brand content: According to Instagram, 90% of their userbase follows brand profiles.
• Instagram users are also more ready to make a purchase: Instagram also found that majority of users have reported visiting a business website after seeing their content on Instagram Stories.
• Instagram demographics consist of both men and women: Instagram’s overall userbase is split almost equally between both genders, which can be a good opportunity for brands.

3 Benefits of Using Instagram Chatbots

The main benefit that chatbots offer to brands is convenience — they automate the communication process, making sure that your customers are not neglected when you’re offline. But more than that, Instagram Chatbots also offer the following advantages:

1. Saves you time and resources

In a similar vein, Chatbots make it easier for you to interact with your audience and answer commonly asked questions without having to hire an extra pair of hands.

2. Boost brand reputation

With the right communication strategy, audiences can feel valued even when they’re interacting with your chatbot. Being able to provide good customer service through your social channels eventually leads to a better customer experience and brand reputation.

3. Increase conversions and sales

You can automate sales through your chatbots by recommending products to your customers. Streamlining the sales process not only increases conversions and sales but also improves user experience.

Getting Started with Instagram Chatbots

You can use Facebook’s Messenger API for Instagram to create your Instagram chatbot. The platform has a detailed step-by-step guide on how to configure a chatbot for your Instagram page, but here’s a short overview:

1. Have both a Facebook Business page and a Professional Instagram account. The two also have to be connected to enable the Messenger API and many other features.
2. You need to have a Facebook Developer account to get access to their API as well.
3. Once both steps are in order, you can start configuring your chatbot. The basic principles are that you create an action for each trigger — for example, you can specify a list of commonly asked questions and program their corresponding actions.

This goes without saying that using the official Messenger API for Instagram requires some technical knowledge to successfully configure.

You can ask for help from full-service digital marketing agencies like Ilfusion for this, but you can also opt to use a third-party service such as HeyDay, Tidio, and ManyChat to make the process much easier for you.

Important: Only trust reputable conversational AI platforms; otherwise, Instagram may detect the activity as spam and will limit your account.

3 Quick Tips for Using Chatbots for Your IG Customer Service

1. Personalize your approach

Add a touch of personalization to your automated replies, such as mentioning the name of the user at the very least.

Some AI chatbot tools also allow you to get more insight into the user your chatbot is interacting with, and you can tailor your responses based on the information they provided. This is especially useful if you’re using AI chatbots to provide personalized product recommendations.

2. Don’t rely too much on chatbots

As counterintuitive as this may sound, you can’t rely too much on chatbots because AI, by nature, isn’t perfect. Reserve chatbots for easier and common inquiries, and make sure to let humans handle the more complicated ones.

Some high-quality AI chatbot tools offer an option to escalate complex inquiries to human customer service representatives.

3. Monitor your chatbot activity

One of the things that marketers overlook is regularly checking the exchanges between chatbots and the users. Doing so will help you gain insight into how you can improve your products and/or services, as well as how to make your chatbot responses better.

Prioritize Customer Experience and Boost Your Brand’s Reputation

As more conversations are taking place online, particularly on social media, automated messaging has slowly become a necessity for brands. However, as we mentioned, AI is still a work in progress, and using a chatbot is not a complete solution for your brand’s customer service.

Nothing could ever replace the value of a human touch when interacting with your audiences, so whether you decide to use a chatbot or not, it’s essential to prioritize customer experience in your strategy.

For more tips on social media marketing and digital marketing, head on to our blog at https://www.ilfusion.com/blog.