Tag: conversational commerce

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.

We’re excited to announce the launch of Quiq Translate, a new feature that translates multi-language exchanges between customers and agents. With Quiq’s language translation services Quiq Messaging is enhanced to support the automatic translation of incoming and outgoing messages in a conversation.

Quiq’s digital conversation platform drives operational excellence in digital customer support and service with features that teams can use to manage and measure cross-channel messaging in a single intuitive workspace. With Quiq Translate, companies can translate over 100 languages making messaging even more accessible and convenient.

Why Translation Matters To Your Business

For many companies, providing service and support In their customers’ preferred language can seem daunting. How do you communicate in multiple languages and provide excellent customer service without hiring a native customer support agent for every language out there? Let’s start with another question – why should you?

There are a lot of great reasons our clients use Quiq Translate, not the least of which is making support more accessible to the people they serve. Let’s discuss a few of the more common driving factors that make multilingual customer support key for businesses to provide positive customer experiences. The kind of experiences that build trust and loyalty.

• Your company’s growth

Customers become more linguistically diverse as businesses gain international buyers, or expand to new markets. As your company expands, you’ll need to remain sensitive to your customers’ needs. A global company with operations or offices in many different countries, has to communicate in multiple languages to provide excellent customer service. But the need to offer support in a customers’ native language isn’t just for big multinational companies. Even if you’re doing business in the US, the changing market requires multilingual customer service and support.

• Changing demographics 

Every year, the U.S. Census asks survey recipients if they speak a language other than English at home. If the respondent answers “yes”, they are then asked “How well does this person speak English?”. Any answer other than “Very well” defines the respondent as Limited English Proficient (LEP).

Of the total US population, LEP individuals now account for about 9%. The consumer buying power of Limited-English proficient populations will continue to show considerable growth. Hispanic and Asian-American populations alone represent 70% of LEP consumers in the United States, and providing excellent language services means not missing out on the opportunity to connect with and serve new markets.

• Security

Interacting with customers means highly sensitive data can be shared during the support interaction. When engaging with Limited-English speaking customers, companies may give agents the freedom to use free online translation tools, this can leave the door open to data leaks and not give the organization full view of the engagement.

<>If you think you need to hire agents with language specific skills, customer service interpreters, or professional translators, think again. It’s possible to enable fast, cost effective translation services with Quiq Translate to deliver superb customer service.

Translating Your Digital Conversations With Quiq

Agents specify which languages they can handle. The language of the conversation is detected based upon the customer’s message. If the agent doesn’t speak the customer’s language, incoming messages are automatically translated. The agent can still see the translated message and the original untranslated message.

Outgoing messages from the agent are automatically translated, so customers receive responses in their preferred language. Both the original and translated messages are stored as part of the saved message transcript.

Better Agent and Customer Experiences

Working as a customer service representative can be challenging, especially when managing multiple customer queries and claims. One of the most compelling reasons our clients choose to shift to digital channels is that asynchron

ous engagement makes it easy for agents to handle multiple conversations at one time.

A boost in productivity is just one advantage that messaging has over other methods like phone calls and emails. Add to that the absence of noisy environments that make it difficult to carry on a phone conversation, the ability for the customer to pick back up on a conversation when it’s convenient for them, and automation features like chatbots that make routing, queuing, and self service faster and more accurate and you see why messaging makes for good communication.

But language barriers can get in the way of good communication. Providing your teams with the right tools will enable them to better handle customer requests and keep them motivated. The benefits for support teams are both quantitative

, with less calls and substantial time saved, as they are qualitative: the dialogue with customers is also improved.

More Languages, One Workflow

Quiq Translate is a native feature of Quiq Messaging and available on all messaging channels. Messages are automatically translated in over 100 languages across the most popular digital messaging channels, including SMS/text, Apple Messages for Business, Google Business Messages, webchat, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Quiq Messaging Administrators have the ability to enable or disable the Quiq Translate feature with a quick toggle in the Admin UI. Once enabled, agents can set their preferred language, which is the language messages will be translated to. Quiq automatically detects the customers’ language or agents can manually select the customer’s preferred language, or the customer can select and set their preferred language from a list.

Once preferred languages are selected, Quiq Translate does the rest. For example, an agent has their preferred languages set to English. If they accept a conversation and the messages are in Spanish, Quiq Translate will automatically translate Spanish messages to English for the agent and any English responses will be translated to Spanish when the customer receives it.

The agent can view all messages as they were originally sent. The ability to toggle between the original message as it was written by the customer and the translated messages ensures that nothing, quite literally gets lost in translation.The conversation history can be viewed by agents, and managers within the systems they already use. Our platform integrates with the CS tools you already use such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Oracle Service Cloud, and Shopify, so you can get started quickly. Or simply use our APIs to build custom integrations for what you need.

The City Of Knoxville, Quiq Translate In Action

The City of Knoxville, which has been piloting the technology, said that Spanish speakers are one of the fastest growing groups in the Knoxville area. The City is eager that its services reach this population, many of whom prefer mobile devices and text and messaging as their preferred method of communication.

“We’re trying to reach people where they are and speak to them in the language they’re most comfortable with,” Russ Jensen, director of the 311 Center for Service Innovation, said. “We want them to feel safe asking for help.”

The City has been working closely with Quiq for nearly a year. In April 2020, they launched a Covid-19 chatbot to help residents get important information related to Covid-19, such as a symptom checker, or to access services such as food banks.

Knoxville’s 211 service now has a chatbot available in English and Spanish with more languages on the way. Carter Hall, with the City of Knoxville, says that Rundia, an East African language is next.

Ready For Multilingual Customer Service and Support?

The world is getting smaller and more connected, and businesses are growing on a global scale. Language can no longer be a barrier to this. You can easily deliver exceptional customer service regardless of your customers’ preferred language with the help of Quiq’s Messaging Platform and Quiq Translation.

Schedule some time to speak with one of our conversation experts to learn how you can serve more consumers in their preferred language using Quiq Translate.

Contactless payments, buy online pick up in store (BOPIS), and curbside pickup have become a big part of the acceleration of ecommerce brought about by COVID. Just because in-person interactions are becoming less of a thing doesn’t mean that personal service has to be. In fact, some might argue that consumers’ shift to online shopping should be more personal.

Take, for example, how consumers now behave and engage with brands on social media. Companies can not only sell directly on the social channels where consumers feel right at home, but consumers can share reviews and recommendations, consume multimedia content, and receive more personal recommendations based on previous purchase history.

Text messaging has come a long way from the character-limited days of SMS and retailers can use this channel to deliver jaw-dropping customer experiences. In this post, we’ll explore how retailers can use messaging to deliver a more personal experience.

Why Business Messaging for Retailers is Relevant

There’s been a sharp reduction in the number in-store interactions that consumers have with brands. Even before the pandemic, consumers were migrating online to save-time and expand their options.

According to McKinsey, high-income earners and millennials are leading the way in online spending across both essential and nonessential items. Gen X has experienced a similar online shift, although not at the same scale as millennials. Meanwhile, Gen Z has concentrated its shift online in particular categories: apparel and footwear, at-home entertainment, and food takeout/delivery. But the shift has been across every generational cohort.

According to the National Retail Federation Pre-COVID boomers “typically made less than half of their purchases online.”  Since this population has been more at risk during the pandemic they have accelerated adoption of technology like BOPIS and curbside pickup. Two thirds of this population say these services help improve their buying experience.

With more people working from home, online shopping has soared and consumers expect the store to come to them. “The crisis has prompted a surge of new activities, with an astonishing 75 percent of US consumers trying a new shopping behavior in response to economic pressures, store closings, and changing priorities” according to research.

The surge of online shopping means that companies have had to quickly adjust to digital engagement channels to help consumers through new buying behaviors. Now brands must invest quickly and aggressively to create enjoyable, memorable, and personalized experiences on these channels.

Now that mobile and online shopping is permanently ingrained into consumer’s shopping habits, retailers must consider digital experiences to be just as important as in-store experiences. Consumers’ ability to message a brand for pre-sales service or post-sales support is the equivalent of having friendly, knowledgeable associates on the floor and ready to serve the customer.

Messaging has helped brands like Overstock and lululemon keep up with the spike in online sales. Here are a few key ways retailers can use text messaging to deliver more personal service:

• Ensure delivery of order status updates

Proactivity sending your customers updates on their order status is expected but sending these types of notifications through email misses the mark. With Quiq messaging you can push these time sensitive messages directly to your customers mobile devices. Messages can be sent individually or sent out to thousands of customers in no time from short or long codes. If customers have follow-up questions or want to place an order, they can simply reply and be connected to a bot or one of your employees.

• Send trusted messages

Sending spammy messages from unknown phone numbers is something something brands should stop doing immediately. Quiq can provision your existing landline to send and receive messages. No random numbers here. Just the same 10 digit number that your customers use to call you.

Verified SMS, Apple Messages for Business, and Google’s Business Messages all provide the kind of next level branding that plain SMS doesn’t. Companies can send messages, loaded with logos, colors, and verification badges that signal to the consumer that the message is legit. If you want to make the experience more personal for your customer, make sure every touchpoint is trusted and secure, with your familiar branding.

• Offering mobile personal styling services

Mobile engagement gives retailers room to really flex their creative muscles especially when it comes to providing personal styling and shopping services. To some, this concept might seem intimidating. How could you possibly offer customers the same attention and selection that they’d receive in store? The answer is – it’s not the same, but it can be better.

Imagine how much easier a digital personal shopping experience is when the consumer can quickly exchange product pictures back and forth. Overstock did exactly that and enabled their Customer Service Associates to help customers 24//7. Instead of a customer describing a style verbally, they could just send a screenshot of the space they are trying to fill. The two-way, conversational nature of texting allows designers to easily go back and forth with a customer, ask clarifying questions, add a personal touch and ultimately make a sale.

• Share timely, targeted offers

Sharing information in a timely manner is what text messaging was made for. Text messaging allows you to quickly and easily send out alerts and promos to all opted-in shoppers.

Outbound notifications can be more than the transactional “your order has shipped” messages we’ve all come to know and love. Sending trusted, timely and relevant information to customers creates a stronger connection to your brand and a more personal experience for the customer.

Use messaging to target certain segments with info and promos that are specific to them. Want to send a special offer on cat litter to your feline loving customers – done. Need to notify everyone that ordered the new velvet throw that the matching accent pillows are back in stock – done. Unlike email, which has at best a 20%-ish open rate, text messaging has a 98% open rate, so you know your customers will get the message.

How To Use Business Messaging for Retail

There are so many different ways people can use smartphones today, including apps, email, music and social media. When it’s all said and done, text messaging is ubiquitous with 97% of smartphone owners using text messaging regularly, according to Pew Research’s most recent analysis of smartphone use. This remarkably high figure illustrates that basic communication remains a key driver of behavior even as the number and complexity of potential distractions increase.

This basic ability to connect with others is a driver as to why businesses of every size should look to leverage text messaging to communicate with their customers. For retailers, messaging has proven to be a highly reliable and personalized medium.

What’s more, messaging is ubiquitous across all platforms and mobile devices, allowing businesses to reach their customers. Even if your customer doesn’t have the latest device or if they’re using a basic prepaid handset they can still receive simple, timely SMS messages. These days, most customers are capable of receiving rich messages like Apple Messages for Business, and Google’s Business Messages—which deliver the kind of modern messaging experience that consumers have come to expect. Combine this with the fact that everyone carries their mobile device with them at all times (even to the point of sleeping with them), and you’ve got a recipe for success.

The market is ready for new brands to introduce messaging into their channel mix, but are you? If you need help with getting started Quiq is here to help. Contact us so that we can learn more about your business and how text messaging can help you provide more personal service.