Tag: business text messaging

Instant messaging is a ubiquitous part of daily life for the majority of consumers. Over 41 million messages are sent out from messaging apps every minute while popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are used by nearly 3 billion users.

Naturally, the rapid proliferation of instant messaging over the past decade hasn’t just transformed communication between individuals — it has also had a significant impact on how consumers communicate with businesses. Last year, a study from Juniper Research found that mobile business messaging increased 10% from 2.5 trillion messages to 2.7 trillion while Twilio has found that 9 out of 10 of consumers want to interact with brands through messaging.

The increase in messaging between consumers and businesses has been further accelerated by the pandemic. According to a recent Forreseter report, over 50% of consumers increased their use of third-party messaging and chat to engage with businesses last year while about one in 10 consumers tried mobile chat for the first time.

But how has this shift in consumer behavior affected the relationship between businesses and their customers? Below we’ll highlight some of the most significant impacts of instant messaging’s rapid growth on the business community.

How Instant Messaging Is Changing Business Through Customer Convenience

When engaging businesses, today’s shoppers are migrating from traditional channels like phone and email to instant messaging services due to the unparalleled level of convenience they provide.

Instead of being subjected to long hold times delayed email responses, real-time instant messaging paired with intelligent automation enables brands to address consumers’ concerns and respond to their most common, frequently asked questions with instantaneous feedback. Examples of common inquiries that instant messaging can provide quick responses to include:

• Hesitancy surrounding shipping details: Potential customers may want more information about shipping related costs and timing to help them commit to making a purchase.
• Product availability: Customers frequently contact businesses to verify whether a product is in stock and can actually be purchased.
• Questions about product details: Leads might contact an employee representative with additional questions regarding product features, such as dimensions or materials.
• Uncertainty about the product’s value: If leads want more information about how the product or service will benefit them, a contact center agent can explain its value.

By providing instantaneous support to these sorts of sales-related questions, brands have seen lifts in conversion rates by as much as 4x when compared to shopping experiences that are unassisted by messaging services.

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Instant Messaging’s Impact on Customer Service Team

Instant messaging is a convenient communication method for both the consumer and the contact center supporting them. Through instant message based support, contact center agents are enabled to manage multiple customer inquiries at once rather than assisting shoppers one at a time – greatly increasing agent efficiency.

Additionally, when paired with messaging automation, support teams can provide their customers with self-serve experiences that are better aligned with customer preferences and can substantially reduce the volume of inbound issues that need to be addressed by human agents. By automatically resolving a percentage of inbound issues through automated chat experiences, agents can dedicate a greater percent of time to handling more complex customer inquiries and driving sales.

In the instance that a customer service chatbot is unable to resolve a customer inquiry through self-service, instant message chatbots can still increase agent efficiency by verifying basic customer information, like name or order number, before handing off to the human agent. This seamless handoff process allows human agents to spend more time actually supporting customers instead of capturing routine information.

Additionally, instant messaging-based conversations between consumers and businesses simplifies agents’ processes for following up with shoppers and keeping accurate records of past communication data. All sales or support agents see previous conversations and have the necessary information to tailor and personalized subsequent customer interactions.

Instant messaging makes communications more straightforward for all parties involved. When that convenience influences a consumer’s perception of a brand, they’re more likely to close a deal, renew a service, or make a purchase. In fact, 73% of consumers have indicated that positive and convenient experiences are essential for influencing their brand loyalties.

How Rich Instant Messaging Enhances Customer Support

In addition to its convenience and efficiency, instant messaging between businesses and consumers is also capable of providing superior, more clear support experiences. Providing support through traditional channels like phone can become challenging for both customers and agents, especially if shoppers have trouble describing their needs with words alone.

Rich instant messaging platforms allow consumers to use their smartphone cameras and take photos for support representatives. Rich messaging also enables businesses to embed maps, order tracking information, product catalogs, and more — directly within instant message chat windows.

Explore Instant Messaging Opportunities

Instant messaging represents an evolution in communication methods between individuals and the businesses they shop with. Embracing SMS and third party messaging apps is crucial for businesses to remain competitive and provide the customer experiences that today’s shoppers prefer.

The Quiq Conversational Customer Engagement Platform provides an all-in-one solution for communicating with consumers at their convenience. It enables monitoring and managing conversations, plus keeping buyers interested with images, videos, emojis, and exclusive offers.

Contact us now to learn more about how instant messaging enhances communications. Trying a product demo is an excellent way to see firsthand how Quiq saves time and money.

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Google announced the expansion of Business Messages to their Search and Maps products in June of 2020. With this change consumers are provided the option to message brands directly and ask for the information they are looking for when searching for a business on Google. Quiq has learned a lot about how consumers engage with Business Messages. Read on or reach out to learn more.

The Impact of Google’s Business Messages on Customer Experience

First, this opportunity provides a new channel for consumers to connect with brands through their preferred conversational format. According to a recent Twilio study, nine out of ten consumers said they prefer to use messaging when communicating with brands. By automating Business Messages on Google, brands have the opportunity to reroute a significant volume of inbound inquiries through a channel consumers prefer — self-service messaging.

Additionally, brands that automate Business Messages through Google Search and Maps provide their customers a superior customer support experience that is capable of delivering immediate answers and feedback, 24/7. By being available for customers with immediate, around-the-clock support, retailers are able to drive customer loyalty while simultaneously rerouting support issues from call centers to a new, self-service channel.

Retail and eCommerce Use Cases for Messaging Consumers Through Google

Combining intelligent AI and Google Business Messages provides clear value to eCommerce retailers through three primary use cases:

1. Resolving Customer Support Inquiries for Local Business Locations

First, brands are now empowered to deliver automated customer support to shoppers looking for information from a specific, local business location.

For example, when a customer based in San Antonio searches for their favorite local grocery with the keywords “GroceryBrand San Antonio” they will be provided an option to start a Business Messages conversation with that specific store. With an intelligent automation solution, brands are then empowered to provide customers with specific answers and information related to individual locations. Questions like “what time does your store close?”, “Do you have this particular product in stock?”, or “What is this location’s COVID policy?” can now be answered in a way that is instantaneous, always-on, and without support from a call center.

2. Implementing a First Line of Defense for General Support Inquiries

Brands are also now empowered to position automated support through Google’s Business Messages as their first line of defense for all customer inquiries ⁠— not just questions related to an individual business location. For example, a shopper that has an inquiry about a product that they purchased online is now able to search for the brand that they purchased it from, start a Business Messages dialogue with that brand, and get the answers they need in an entirely self-service manner.

3. Driving Leads and Sales Through Conversational Commerce

In addition to driving efficiencies in customer service, automated conversations through Google’s Business Messages also empower brands to support sales and drive incremental revenue through consultative shopping assistance.

For example, when shopping for a new vacuum cleaner online, customers can search for their favorite brand name on Google, open a messaging dialogue through Business Messages, and ask a question like “What vacuum should I buy for my hardwood floor?” By combining Google’s Business Messages with automation, brands can then provide a series of consultative questions and answers to understand the shoppers’ preferences and direct them to their ideal product for purchase.

What to Look for When Evaluating Partners to Help Get Started With Google’s Business Messages

While retailers may be eager to deploy a new messaging channel through Google, it is important for them to be prepared with the right tools and tactics to automate the sudden influx of customer inquiries that it will yield.

But what are the important things to look for while evaluating automation solutions? When our enterprise partners describe what has enabled them to be successful, we often hear that messaging partners must be able to:

• Deploy highly-personalized AI-powered conversations

  Modern consumers demand personalization in their online shopping experiences and interactions with AI-powered digital assistants are no different. A recent Gartner report found that brands that deploy personalized messaging can expect a 16% greater impact on commercial outcomes than retailers who deploy basic automation that is incapable of personalizing their experiences.

• Deliver actionable insights that empower every team

  When engaging in thousands of automated conversations with customers, eCommerce retailers generate a significant amount of customer data that has limitless potential and value for their various teams. Without the assistance of an experienced automation partner, however, this valuable data and insight simply goes to waste. By partnering with an enterprise-tier partner, like Quiq, retailers can ensure that they are properly gathering consumer insights through conversational automation and are able to synthesize that information into practical insights for different teams across the entire organization.
  

• Provide hands-on support through a team of award-winning automation experts

  Conversational automation is a complex undertaking for any enterprise business and hands-on support is vital for ensuring its success. An effective automation solution is the result of a collaboration between internal teams and a proven, experienced team of conversational experts that can consult on strategy, integration, conversational design, and ongoing optimization.
  

Ultimately, while Google’s Business Messages provides online retailers a significant opportunity to connect with their customers more, it has to be deployed in the right way to leverage its full capability and avoid common pitfalls and complications. If you are interested in learning more about getting started with deploying automated messaging through Google, please schedule a free consultation with one of our conversational experts today.

Wouldn’t it be great if your brand could offer personalized web chat assistance to customers at exactly the right point of their customer journey? Contextual engagements like this could assist customers on specific pages when they have a coupon problem, can’t find the right product, or have a question about their order.

We’ve got some great news for you. Proactive Web Actions are now part of Quiq. Let’s take a deeper dive into this powerful feature.

What are Proactive Web Actions?

Proactive Web Actions are personalized chat engagements that help customers based on where they are in their shopping journey and what they are trying to achieve. Web Actions work by leveraging information about where customers are currently on your site, as well as any additional data you may have on past customer engagements (such as their current order status, whether or not they’re part of a loyalty or rewards program, if they’ve recently abandoned a shopping cart, and more).

These data points can then be combined to create highly contextual web experiences. Customers on checkout pages almost certainly don’t have the same questions as those viewing a product category page and your web experience should react accordingly.

Why Proactive Web Actions?

Proactive Web Actions help:

• Support each online consumer based on their unique position in the customer journey
• Increase website’s conversion rates
• Improve the overall customer experience

Forrester has previously cited that 53% Of US online adults are likely to abandon online purchases if they can’t find a quick answer to their question. With Web Actions, brands can detect when shoppers are struggling to navigate product listings or finalize their checkout and proactively engage them with the support that directly applies to what they’re trying to do.

Additionally, while 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase when brands offer experiences that are personalized to them, the majority of chatbots today leverage the same generic messaging to initiate conversations with website visitors. Web Actions, however, account for consumers’ demand for personalization and only engage customers with messages that are crafted to help them as unique consumers.

Use Cases and Examples

While Web Actions can be applied to any number of scenarios, we’ve found that this feature can be most impactful when applied to the following use cases:

Addressing checkout issues

In the instance that a customer is struggling with a checkout flow, brands can leverage Web Actions to quickly engage the customer and proactively address any trouble they are experiencing.

There are numerous ways that brands can identify customers that are struggling to checkout like an unusually large amount of time a customer is spending on a checkout page or even based on a particular action the customer takes.

For example, eCommerce brands can use the Quiq platform to identify shoppers who are struggling to use their promo codes onsite.

With Web Actions, brands can engage those customers and offer immediate assistance.

Helping customers self-serve, faster

For shoppers seeking customer support, their first instinct might be to visit your website’s support page in search of a call center phone number or an email address they can reach out to.

Unfortunately for both your customers and agents, these channels are typically not the most effective way to quickly resolve questions and inquiries. Customers may have to wait days for an email response or wait on hold for 90+ minutes because agents can only handle one call at a time.

With Web Actions, brands reroute customers looking for email or phone support to a self-serve automated assistant.

When a customer clicks the “email us” button, Web Actions can proactively engage the customer and offer support through web chat instead, both of which often offer faster responses and resolution than a customer would receive over email.

Provide pre-purchase assistance

Web Actions are particularly impactful when it comes to increasing conversion rates and guiding website visitors to purchase. Quiq data has shown that visitors who chat with an automated assistant are about 3x more likely to purchase than those who don’t.

For example, when shoppers indicate that they’re struggling to find the right product by lingering on category pages, Web Actions can be triggered to offer support and help them find what they’re looking for.

All data on past customer interactions (like preferred price point) can be used to make highly personalized and contextualized product suggestions.

Transforming Web Chat with Enhanced Personalization

As consumers continue their transition to online shopping while leaning on messaging channels to replicate the personal touch of brick and mortar shopping, it’s crucial for eCommerce brands to offer personalized experiences. By deploying Web Actions, brands not only help customers get the answers they need faster, but also free up sales and service teams to focus on the most valuable customer interactions.

Want to learn more about how proactive Web Actions are transforming personalized online shopping? Contact one of Quiq’s conversation experts to discuss how to get started with proactive web actions.

More than ever before, eCommerce businesses’ overall revenue is directly tied with the quality of their customer service. Today’s customers value shopping experiences more than price or product selection and can easily transition to one of many competitors. 86% of consumers say they would spend more for a better experience, and 76% of consumers said it’s far easier now to take their business elsewhere than ever before.

According to the 2020 ROI of Customer Experience Report, 94% of consumers outstanding experience with a brand say they would recommend it to family and friends. In contrast, only 13% of consumers who had an abysmal customer experience with a brand would recommend it.

From these statistics, it’s possible to conclude that marketing and sales alone aren’t enough for eCommerce businesses to remain competitive, maintain a substantial market share, and grow their brand reputation. They need to go above and beyond to implement outstanding customer service strategies, before and after closing the sale.

Here are 5 successful customer service strategies that eCommerce brands can quickly implement to improve their overall customer experience.

1. Build a Strong Customer Service Team

Start by hiring an excellent customer service team and creating an environment that promotes staff retention.

Conversational Engagement Platforms, like Quiq, are meant to augment human agents, not replace them. When offering top-notch customer support, software can’t replace the need for well-trained and skilled customer representatives.

Here are six strategies to attract talented, customer service-minded professionals.

• Hire the right people: Hire for attitude. Look for employee representatives with empathy, patience, and excellent communication skills.
• Train employee representatives: eCommerce hiring managers must train their employee representatives to understand their products and services and connect with their customers on an emotional level.
• Equip customer service agents: Brand leaders should provide a platform to offer the best consumer experience without stress, overwork, or burnout. For example, Quiq’s Conversational Customer Engagement Platform enables companies to engage with customers across different channels in one centralized place, providing easy, simultaneous responses.
• Track agent’s performance: Using surveys, management teams should collect feedback from customers on their experiences with employees and use the insights from these ratings to evaluate each representative’s performance.
• Reward excellent performance: Incentivize top-performing employee representatives to motivate others to do more.
• Listen to employee representatives: Ask for and listen to worker feedback to understand their needs.

When hit by a significant financial setback, customer service might be one of the first places C-suite leaders look to cut costs. However, this strategy is counterproductive. According to customer experience research, 50% of consumers would switch to a competitor after a bad experience, and 80% would switch after more than one bad experience. To keep consumers from switching to competitors, managers must prioritize customer service.

When it comes to the finesse and care it takes to navigate complicated customer inquiries or assist distressed customers, nothing beats a knowledgeable, well-trained, and accessible human agent. That’s why many channels, like Apple Messages for Business and Google Business Messages require brands to have live agents to escalate conversations to.

2. Personalize Every Conversation With Consumers

Personalizing customer conversations means tailoring support and service to their exact needs and expectations.

Customizing services to meet consumer demand gives eCommerce businesses a competitive advantage in their industries, helps deliver faster support from team members, makes customers feel more connected, and reinforces a consistent sense of satisfaction.

Here are a few ways to offer personalized service:

• Engage with consumers where they already are
• Transfer consumers smoothly across employee representatives
• Mention people by their name in every conversation
• Make recommendations when the requested product or services is unavailable
• Offer free demonstrations and training to educate customers

Shoppers look toward eCommerce providers to know their needs and provide what they want. Research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences while 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging.To win and keep business, eCommerce employees must treat consumers as people — not numbers in a sales report — with unique needs and expectations.

A conversational engagement platform can help employees provide highly personalized experiences. For example, Quiq clients, like Stio can send outbound messages to segmented customers and offer them targeted promotions. They can use Quiq’s intelligent routing feature to provide VIPs, who may spend at a certain level or who are part of their Pro Purchase Program with priority support.

3. Collect and Use Customer Feedback

Continually gathering feedback from shoppers on their experience can help eCommerce business leaders:

• Understand their consumers’ needs, challenges, and pain points
• Identify the positive and negative experiences shoppers have with their brand
• Locate the cracks in customer service
• Provide a more personalized experience for shoppers
• Build trust and make shoppers feel valued

To obtain comprehensive and useful customer feedback, company decision-makers need to implement intuitive ways for consumers to communicate with them and ensure the information provides actionable insight for improving customer service.

Here are seven ways to collect customer feedback:

• Send customer satisfaction surveys online
• Organize feedback focus groups
• Read reviews from third-party review sites
• Build an online community for customers

Gathering feedback is only the first step. Next, it’s important for managers to create an action plan on cumulative insights and train employees to leverage this information when responding to customer complaints.

Continually requesting consumer feedback will help identify any cracks in customer service and reduce the chances of a shopper feeling unsatisfied with their transaction.

4. Use KPIs to Gauge Customer Service Performance

It is not enough for eCommerce managers to train and equip their customer service teams. Measuring and tracking customer experience with the right KPIs can help the entire team understand how their consumer experience ties to overall business success, and how shoppers’ interactions with them change over time.

KPIs help eCommerce leaders appreciate their shoppers’ satisfaction level and readiness to continue doing business with them.

Here are four customer experience KPIs to track:

• Net promoter score
• Customer effort score
• Rate of returning visitors
• Revenue per customer

See the breakdown of each KPI below.

Net Promoter Score

Net promoter score (NPS) is a reflection of an eCommerce business’s customer experience. An eCommerce business’s net promoter score shows the likelihood of shoppers referring their family and friends to do business with that brand.

To calculate NPS, send a survey including the question, “How likely are you to recommend our product?” Customers provide their answers on a scale of 1 to 10.

After collecting this information, calculate NPS by subtracting the total number of entries below 5 from the total number of entries above 5.

An NPS below zero indicates a low customer satisfaction level. An NPS between zero and 30 shows more satisfied customers than unsatisfied customers. Above 30 implies that there are far more satisfied customers than unsatisfied customers. Above 70 means that customers are loyal and will be the source of a lot of word-of-mouth referrals.

Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score (CES) reveals how much work consumers must put into researching products and services or completing a particular task. For example, how long does it take the average shopper to get a refund, sign up, or get a request ticket answered?

Customer effort score reflects how accessible a business is to its consumers.

As with NPS, calculate CES using a survey with the question, “How much effort did you have to put in to complete this task?” Ask customers to respond on a scale of 1 to 7 or 1 to 5.

Here’s the breakdown for each scale.

On a scale of 1 to 5:

• 1 = Very high effort
• 2 = High effort
• 3 = Neutral
• 4 = Low effort
• 5 = Very low effort

On a scale of 1 to 7:

• 1 = Extremely difficult
• 2 = Very difficult
• 3 = Fairly difficult
• 4 = Neither
• 5 = Fairly easy
• 6 = Very easy
• 7 = Extremely easy

To calculate the cumulative CES, divide the sum of all consumer effort entries by the total number of entries.

The best time to measure CES is immediately after a purchase or a concluded service interaction, or when an overall customer experience report is valuable.

On a 1-to-7 scale, aim for a CES of 5 or higher. A CES lower than 5 shows shoppers are struggling with a product or service and getting minimal satisfaction from it. Above 5 means consumers find it easy to use a product or service.

Rate of Returning Visitors

The rate of returning visitors (RVR) reflects the effectiveness of customer success strategies and user experience for an online service. If shoppers enjoy their experience on the site, they’ll be more likely to return.

For an online service, calculate RVR by dividing the number of returning visitors by the number of unique visitors. The higher the value, the better the customer experience on the site.

While RVR can vary for different industries, a good RVR is 30% or more.

Revenue Per Customer

Revenue per customer (RPC) ties the overall consumer experience to a company’s bottom line.

To calculate RPC, divide the total revenue by the total customer count.

A high RPC means consumers have a consistently positive experience with a business. They are loyal, repeat shoppers who recommend the brand to friends and family.

Combined, these four KPIs provide insight into the quality of customer service, the satisfaction consumers derive from a product or service, and areas for improvement.

For example, a CES below 5 for contacting support could mean one or more of the following:

• Customers don’t receive a timely response
• Consumers must try multiple channels to access the customer service team
• Customers must repeat themselves to every new call center agent they interact with
• It takes a long time for representatives to resolve their issues

Company executives should dig deep to uncover the factors producing the low KPIs and benchmark their KPIs with their competitors to know where they stand.

5. Provide a Consistent Cross Channel Experience

A cross-channel customer service strategy allows eCommerce employees to provide seamless and consistent customer support across different channels. Shoppers can switch between, SMS, webchat, and social media without any service interruptions or inconsistencies in quality.

Cross-channel customer service helps shoppers get quick responses to their needs, improves the brand’s reputation and trust, and boosts consumers’ positive experiences.

Here are seven strategies to implement a cross-channel experience:

• Ensure customers can reach employee representatives offline and online on the platform of their choice
• Implement seamless transition when moving customers from one call center agent to another
• Maintain comprehensive documentation on each customer to help call center agents continue conversations based on the last engagement
• Build mobile-friendly customer support pages to provide mobile consumers a smooth experience
• Respond on time to customer queries on all channels and present practical solutions to their needs
• Create a comprehensive self-service solution to help customers solve their problems by themselves
• Present a unified front and ensure every team and department collaborate and share information

Today, 95% of customers use three or more channels to connect with a company in a single service interaction and that 65% of customers expressed frustration over inconsistent experiences across channels. Establishing a presence on all available platforms might spread a company’s resources too thin and lead to inconsistent, negative experiences. Instead, focusing on meeting consumers where they are and establishing unified, consistent experiences on their most used channels will create a better overall customer experience.

With Quiq’s cross-channel digital messaging platform, employees can provide a consistent experience for consumers across different digital platforms.

Also, to implement the best customer service strategy, nothing beats working with the right conversational customer engagement platform. Ideally, interacting with consumers will be easy and fun for employees and provide frictionless support for shoppers, while increasing the brand’s competitive advantage, market share, and overall revenue.

Invest in a Quality Customer Engagement Platform

More than ever, consumers want to do business with brands that make it easy to browse, shop, complete transactions, and get support on the consumers’ terms. eCommerce businesses can gain a significant competitive advantage by providing these experiences through seamless engagement via digital channels.

Improving customer success and satisfaction is a long-term plan that requires buy-in and commitment from management, investment in training employee representatives, collecting feedback consistently, measuring the right things, and investing in a platform to manage everything.

Quiq is a conversational customer engagement platform that enables enterprises to unify SMS, email, chat, and social media interactions with their consumers all in one place. Request a demo to see how Quiq can help employee representatives provide a seamless customer service experience.

During their annual F8 Refresh conference, Facebook announced the Messenger API for Instagram has exited beta and is now available to all businesses looking to forge deeper relationships with their customers through scalable, 1:1 conversations.

The new API enables consumer brands to scale automated conversations within Instagram Direct Messages and presents a strategic opportunity to deliver premium customer experiences on one of today’s most popular social networks.

Common Uses

• Send and receive text, media, stories, etc.
• Retrieve conversation history from the IG business inbox.
• Respond to public comments with private messages.

The API is open to all businesses. Prior to this release, brands handled customer conversations in one of two ways: either by  interacting with consumers on Instagram directly or using Facebook’s unified business inbox. Not surprisingly, these options were limited by how they can be used and what a business can do with them. 

The Messenger API can be integrated into any third-party application used to manage customer communications including social media management platforms like Hootsuite or Sprinklr, CRM applications like Salesforce or Oracle, and messaging platforms like Quiq.

According to Techcrunch the Messenger API will be available in a phased approach. Phase 1 will allow business accounts with 10,000 to 100,000 followers to connect to the API first. In July (Phase 2) Facebook will connect accounts with 100,000 – 1 million followers. Future updates will include all other accounts by the end of the year.

Before getting started with the new Messenger API, a brand must have access to the following:

• An Instagram Business Account or Instagram Creator Account
• A Facebook page connected to that account
• A Facebook developer account that can perform tasks on that page
• A registered Facebook app with basic settings configured

Generally, brands that work with Quiq have an Instagram account and Facebook page set up. Our team of knowledgeable conversation experts will handle the developer page and Facebook app setup for you.

How Businesses Use Instagram’s New Messenger API

Facebook reports that 500 million accounts visit Instagram’s stories daily and 130 million Instagram accounts tap on a shopping post to learn more about products every month. Given the widespread adoption of Instagram and more specifically, the engagement with shopping and product-specific posts, brands must develop a messaging strategy that includes Instagram in order to compete.

Here are four ways to get started with the new Messenger API: 

1. Engagement: How To Start Conversations on Instagram

Perhaps one of the most important new features of Messenger’s API support for Instagram is the ability for  customers and brands to initiate automated conversations through various entry points on the platform.

Customers can start conversations with businesses through the brand’s Instagram profile page.

Instagram Stories have also been enhanced to provide an additional opportunity for brands to initiate automated 1:1 conversations with customers.

Customers browsing Instagram Shops can also start conversations with brands when they have product or shopping-related inquiries.

Consumer brands can now initiate 1:1 conversations with shoppers who leave questions and comments on brands’ posts.

By integrating Messenger’s API Support for Instagram with highly-intelligent conversational automation, businesses can initiate conversations at each of these entry points and deliver highly-personalized messaging experiences — entirely at scale.

2. Consideration: Addressing Product Questions and Concerns

After driving shoppers to 1:1 conversations on Instagram, brands can leverage conversational automation to provide answers and responses to customers’ frequently asked questions. 

By addressing customer inquiries directly within Instagram, brands can further ensure a comprehensive online shopping experience without ever leaving the platform

3. Purchase: Helping Shoppers Find the Right Products 

Consumer businesses can also use automated conversations within Instagram to help drive shoppers to purchase. 

By leveraging Messenger’s API support for Instagram, brands can provide shoppers with guided shopping experiences that deliver highly-personalized product suggestions based on their conversational inputs.

4. Care: Seamless Order Management and Support

Lastly, after making a purchase, customers can leverage conversations within Instagram to get post-purchase order updates and more. 

Through this experience, shoppers can receive immediate responses to their current order status and more.

Try Instagram’s New Messaging API Yourself

Before you dive into deploying Instagram Messaging, you may want to experience it for yourself. Original Coast Clothing (OC) is a fictional clothing brand created for the purposes of showcasing Instagram’s features.

Try it now by searching for Original Coast Clothing on Instagram. You can initiate a conversation by tapping the “message” button. This demo should serve as inspiration for brands looking to deliver a great customer experience using both automation and live agents.

Getting Started with the New Messenger API for Instagram

As the new API exits beta and becomes widely available to consumer brands, many businesses are eager to get started using it to provide highly-personalized and scalable customer experiences on Instagram.

To get started, download our latest guide for Getting Started with The New API for Instagram DMs and learn how to deliver scalable customer experiences on one of today’s most popular channels.