How businesses can use Instagram DMs to interact with customers

More than a billion people use Instagram every month. As of 2022, the majority of Instagram’s audience are Millennial or Gen Z users. The second most downloaded app in the world is attracting a younger crowd greater than any other competitive social network on the market, making it an important platform for businesses to connect with their audiences on.

Instagram Direct is an in-app messaging product that can be used by businesses to connect with consumers at every stage of the customer journey. The feature allows you to exchange text, photos, posts and stories securely and is a good starting point for creating a strong brand identity, delivering a better customer service and generating leads.

Here are key reasons why you should leverage Instagram DMs to connect with your customers.

Rich messaging features

DMs allow you to create rich messaging experiences. You can communicate by sending and receiving text messages from customers and prospects who have shown interest in your brand.

Images and videos drive interest like no other medium on social media. Instagram DMs allow you to post informative and visual content that helps engage your audience effectively. Short informative videos and infographics showing who you are as a business, what you stand for and what products and services you offer can be created and shared with your followers via DMs. You can also share in-feed video posts.

FAQs

You can now set up FAQs on Instagram which will be displayed when customers try to message your account. 

Help your customers start conversations with you by showing a series of questions they can tap at the beginning of the chat. This feature is particularly useful for businesses or people with a large following.

Support agent chat

A whopping 72% of customers say that they are more likely to buy online if they can ask questions in real-time, which is why customer support is a critical function of any business.

The customer support chatbot automation on Instagram DMs makes it possible to automate responses to queries via private, personalized replies in real-time. This reduces wait times and improves efficiency. Chatbots can be configured on comments, for stories and directly via DMs.

Brands can also leverage the pre-built NLP & AI capabilities that our CPaaS platform, Webex Connect, offers for an always-on experience, quickly solving common queries through self-service to reduce the number of calls into the contact center. More complex support queries can be seamlessly handed over to a customer service agent who can help solve the issue. To troubleshoot customer queries quickly, you can also create and save replies.

Seamless integration

Instagram DM API enables you to connect your Instagram Direct Messenger into a centralized customer communications system. This is where Webex Connect, our enterprise-grade Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) platform, can help reduce the time, cost, and complexity of delivering outstanding customer experiences. The platform’s programmable APIs and SDKs, visual flow builder, high-performance runtime engine, and low-code tools come together to enable the quick and effortless creation of end-to-end journeys that power customer communications.

Acting as a central orchestration layer between channels and enterprise systems, the platform leverages seamless integrations to power the automation of end-to-end customer journeys across Instagram and other channels. It’s future-proof, meaning businesses can start with Instagram and then easily add new channels and capabilities as they grow.

With seamless integration into contact center and other live systems, businesses can intelligently handover more complex queries to agents who can chat with users through the DM channel.

Ecommerce experience

Users can message your business to ask questions, browse products, build a cart, and then check out with ease. Instagram also helps supercharge influencer marketing. You can finally make influencer marketing actionable by equipping influencers with a link that brings customers to your DM channel. 

You can also enable users to easily go from seeing great products on Instagram through posts and stories to purchasing them. Conversational commerce can drive sales by enabling a seamless purchasing journey for new and existing customers helping you to unlock new revenue streams.

Conclusion

With more than 200 million business accounts on the platform, brands are increasingly seeing Instagram as the go-to channel to build exposure and increase sales through conversational inbound messaging.

Webex Connect enables you to engage with followers on Instagram like never before, by helping you to easily automate and orchestrate two-way interactions across every phase of the customer journey and deliver unique experiences.