In this era, conversational marketing is something that actually works for brands. Customers depend more on chat-based interaction than on sending an email, SMS, or call.

 Instagram is one of the most potent social media platforms that can transform customer experience and sales. 

It’s become essential for any brand to reach customers at their interesting platform and be available 24/7 across their customer journey.

Regarding shopping, Instagram is the most preferred social media platform by shoppers. 

Building customer experience is the utmost priority of every marketer. Applying conversational AI on Instagram chatbots will help the brands acquire customers, re-engage them, generate sales, and generate a loyal customer base over time.

Before going to know further about how Instagram can support your business, let’s learn about Instagram chatbot in detail:

Let’s start!

What is an Instagram Chatbot ?

A chatbot is an automated conversation partner using AI technology to interact with people.

An Instagram chatbot is a chatbot that works on Instagram to address human inquiries using automated responses. 

Instagram chatbots can reply to queries, make recommendations and even transfer the call to the human agent for complex queries. 

Instagram chatbots are not like false bots that are used primarily to increase followers, likes, and comments which are not real. That spam bots usually tag random accounts in comments, send irrelevant messages to Instagram users, or try to scam.

On the other hand, Instagram chatbots do not act like real people. Instead, they go between communicating from a brand to a customer in real-time.

Chatbots are integrated into a brand’s real Instagram account, and they’re not like fake accounts with some followers and posts.

Why Instagram Chatbots ?

Instagram has over 1 billion active users every month, and 500 million users use Instagram stories daily. 

71% of one billion users come under the age of 35. 

58% of users say they are more interested in a brand after seeing it in a story. 

90% of Instagrammers follow at least one Instagram business account.

Instagram stories create a quarter of the platform’s revenues. 

Instagram’s advertising reach has outpaced Facebook this past year(2022). (Source: Hootsuite)

But, the most important reason to deploy the Instagram chatbot is that- 80% of Instagram users decide to purchase a product or not after visiting an Instagram account.

So it became de rigueur for you to have your presence on Instagram to grab users’ attention.

The Instagram chatbot will allow you to deliver better customer support by timely answering customer queries and improving sales. 

10 Most effective customer support ways an Instagram chatbot can help

Customer support with instagram chatbot

1. Triggers Keywords-Driven Conversations

Instagram chatbot triggers conversations based on particular keywords so that it will be more relevant and interesting to build user engagement. 

Promote keywords within the caption of your Instagram post enabling customers to use them to chat with your business directly and have automated conversation flows to build customer engagement & conversions.

2. Responding to FAQ’s

An Instagram chatbot can be pre-programmed to answer basic to complex queries. 

The businesses need to jot down the frequently asked questions, and replies to them are trained to the chatbot.

Chatbots with AI capability can understand the context of the query and learn from the mistakes and respond even to complex queries as time passes. 

There is no rocket science behind creating a list of repetitive questions and answers. You can easily perform that.

3. Generate Quality Leads

Instagram chatbots can collect the basic details of the customer. And can- segment the audience based on their interest and behavior and send messages most relevant to them. For instance, if someone is searching for a particular product, when it gets available in stock, Instagram chatbots can send automatic notifications of the availability of the product. 

As Instagram chatbots handle repetitive queries and welcome messages, it saves lots of time for your sales representatives to work on complex questions and analyze and work to make a product or service more effective. Even chatbots can transfer the chat to human agents in respective departments if they don’t know the exact solution. 

4. Provide Fast and Accurate Responses 24/7

Unlike human agents, Instagram chatbots are always available to your customers to respond to their queries. Even when you have a shortage of customer agents, at times of festivals and holidays, the lack of staff can lead to unanswered questions for customers. With Instagram chatbots, you will not face this problem even in such situations. 

Instagram chatbots provide fast and accurate responses, even at peak hours. Whereas with human agents handling multiple queries with a quick and precise response is somewhat a daunting task to achieve. It won’t send repetitive replies, irrelevant notifications, or something that makes your Instagram account spam.

5. Replies Messages in Multiple Languages

It’s critical for global businesses to communicate with their customers in their comfortable language. Customers pay more attention and are most likely to buy products or services if you can communicate with them in their preferred language. 

Using a multilingual chatbot, you can set up multiple language support in various ways. 

Selecting a vendor with multi-language support built into their chatbot system is better. Otherwise, translating languages into various languages is a tough task for the customer support agents. To suggest you, Smatbot is one such vendor that can help.

6. A Guide to Your Customers

Customers encounter issues that need guidance through the brand throughout the customer journey. Such as product recommendations, tracking order status, dealing with refund issues, resetting passwords, checking the availability of products, etc.; 

The Instagram chatbots can easily handle all these tasks. It can help agents to skip repetitive tasks and work on tasks that need human attention. Humans can better understand the customers’ emotions and solve critical issues that chatbots are incapable of. 

Using a chatbot with a conversation builder makes it possible for you to replicate your current processes exactly. It’s seamless to convert every step you follow into a chatbot conversation. 

Many customer support departments have help sheets or guides to train new human agents on their general processes. Consider if those helpsheets talked to customers helping them directly. That’s an Instagram chatbot.

7. Building a Memorable and Exciting Brand

Instagram chatbots hold many more exciting features that trigger customers’ interest in the brand. 

You can use a variety of approaches to grab the attention of the customer via Instagram chat; for example, if you are a brand of beauty, you can suggest some posts on- 

  • Review of beauty products
  • Share some tips on beauty by focussing on particular beauty concerns
  • Create jokes or memes on beauty 
  • Take surveys 
  • Create a campaign and ask for participation.
  • Share the brand’s values, and core beliefs
  • Try to build trust in your Instagram users through informative posts and videos.

8. Break the Ice

Start interacting with your Instagram users about your offers, discounts, milestones, and other success stories. Ice breakers within Instagram are great for demonstrating your product catalog and providing quick replies to FAQs such as “can I use this product for babies?”.

9. Generate More Sales

80% of Instagram users go instead to check whether it’s worth buying a product or service. (Source: Facebook) It’s a good opportunity for the brand to make the most by utilizing this platform.

Instagram Chatbots are more effective than influencers in building customer engagement. Instagram chatbots can help the users throughout their customer journey as a guide and even generate excitement in them to purchase a product.

10. Automate Social Selling

Younger shoppers usually don’t want to switch from page to page to purchase a product. Instagram chatbots help them to buy the product right from their Instagram account. 

Chatbots guide the follower about the product, suggest alternatives and reply to queries. Simply it brings your offering to life.

Instagram stories can trigger the customers to purchase a product.

11. Bring in Leads That Actually Care

Instagram chatbots prequalify the lead before sharing it with the sales team. 10 leads with interest are better than 100 with no interest. 

Instagram chatbots collect the customers’ details, interests, preferences, and behavior through chat itself. And based on that, they segment the leads and share them with the sales team.

Conclusion :

Instagram chatbots are the most efficient social media platform that helps businesses to improve customer support and experience.

Instagram chatbots come with AI technology that can collect customer details, suggest a product to the customers, answer FAQs, collect feedback, take surveys, communicate in multiple languages, and many more. 

Deploying Instagram chatbots in business is the right decision you can make by considering its benefits to your business.

But where do you begin?

That’s where SmatBot comes in. Our team provides step-by-step guidance on how you can deploy and leverage its benefits. Moreover, we help you with how you can deploy this automation for your business’s unique needs to build great customer support and generate leads. 

And the best part is that no coding or experience is required to get started!

Get SmatBot a 14-day free trial to understand how Smatbot can help you.