If you have customers on Instagram, there is no question you need to improve customer service on this platform.
Why? Because responding to customer inquiries on Instagram isn’t just about good manners, but it’s also about building trust, strengthening relationships with your Instagram followers, increasing sales, and growing your business.
Look at these statistics:
- 80% of customer inquiries on social media go unanswered.
- 88% of consumers are less likely to purchase from a business that doesn’t respond to questions on social networks.
- 30% will go to a competitor if they don’t receive a response.
- 65% of consumers feel greater brand loyalty when they receive a response over social media.
- Consumers whose questions are answered on social media end up spending 20 to 40% more money with a business.
You get the point. Improving customer service on Instagram is a no-brainer decision. Whenever one of your followers leaves a comment on a post or asks you a question over direct messages, it’s in your best interest to engage.
Related: Our guide to social media and customer service.
8 tips to create better customer experiences on Instagram
- Monitor comments, mentions, and direct messages
- Add customer service contact info to your Instagram bio
- Create an Instagram highlight for FAQs
- Set up Instagram quick replies for direct messages
- Ask for customer feedback
- Use a customer support tool
- Respond quickly
- Match your customers’ tone
1) Monitor comments, mentions, and direct messages
If someone communicates with you on Instagram — whether by commenting, mentioning, or sending you a direct message (DM) — they want to start a conversation. They want to be heard, valued, and cared for.
If they don’t get a reply, they may lose interest in engaging with your posts and buying from you. Even worse, they may share negative reviews on Instagram, which can hurt your brand reputation and reduce your brand trust in other potential customers.
That’s why it’s crucial to manage customer inquiries on Instagram. To do that, you can turn on push notifications, use social media monitoring tools, or install a customer service help desk.
Another thing to keep in mind is never deleting negative comments and mentions on Instagram. Always say sorry first and show your understanding. You may also want to take the conversation to a private channel for further support, as Made.com did below:
In this Instagram post, Made.com apologized to a customer for a bad experience and encouraged her to share the order number via Instagram DM to receive an immediate response from their customer support team.
The more followers you have on Instagram, the more comments, mentions, and DMs you’ll receive. Monitor all of those inquiries, and your customers will be delighted.
2) Add customer service contact info to your Instagram bio
When it comes to customer service on Instagram, it’s important to make it easy for followers to reach out to you. One of the best ways to do that is to add customer service contact to your bio because your bio is the first thing people will see when visiting your Instagram profile.
An Instagram business profile allows you to add a contact button to your bio section. For example, J.Crew offers its followers three ways to contact them: DMs, emails, and phone calls.
3) Create an Instagram highlight for FAQs
Not all customers will reach out to you via DMs or phone calls when they have a question. Some prefer finding a solution themselves before contacting you.
Because of that, it’s a smart tactic to provide a self-service solution on your Instagram profile, like creating a dedicated Instagram highlight for frequently asked questions (FAQs).
500 million active users watch Instagram Stories daily, and stories grow 15x faster than account feeds. You can create Instagram Stories to answer followers’ common questions. Then, gather all of those stories into one FAQ highlights album, as Bali Body did below:
Notice Bali Body has several FAQ highlights, not just one. This is especially useful if you’re selling a variety of products.
4) Set up Instagram quick replies for direct messages
Do you often receive the same questions on Instagram? If yes, you may want to use the quick replies feature.
The quick replies feature allows marketers to create a list of canned responses and insert them into a direct message. It’s a great way to avoid typing the same answer to different people and help you solve inquiries faster while still providing the best answers to your customers.
Note that quick replies aren’t automated responses like a real-time chatbot on your website. You’ll still need to access and read the messages sent to you, then select quick replies from your list of responses to send.
Also, when creating quick replies, ensure their voice and tone align with your brand style. Format them to look and sound as if the same person wrote everything.
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5) Ask for customer feedback
Do you collect customer feedback on Instagram? If not, you should be!
Collecting customer feedback can increase engagement rates, help you learn more about your target audience, and increase brand loyalty. As you gather feedback, you can then use it to influence your Instagram marketing strategy.
To collect valuable feedback on Instagram, you can use Instagram Stories tools (like question stickers, quiz stickers), ask questions in your captions, or partner with influencers. Another tip is to follow brand mentions, and when you see someone post images of using your product, you can leave a comment asking for reposting, as Target did:
6) Use a customer support tool
If you’re getting hundreds of Instagram comments, mentions, DMs, and replies every day, it can be challenging to manage all of them. That doesn’t mention customer inquiries you may receive from other communication channels like Facebook, Twitter, email, and live chat.
How do you keep up with all customer and their questions? How do you concentrate and work effectively while you have to switch back and forth among different apps?
It’s a HUGE time and productivity suck.
If that’s the case, you should use a customer support tool like Gorgias.
One of the biggest benefits of using Gorgias for social media is that it’ll centralize all of your customer inquiries from all communication channels into a single dashboard. That means you:
- Never miss any conversation and always keep in touch with your customers
- Never have to sift through different apps
- Save more time and work faster and smarter
Apart from that, Gorgias also offers a bunch of other powerful features like:
- Track customers’ requests across every channel and display them in one place. Edit orders, modify subscriptions, and refund payments without leaving your help desk.
- Use macros and rules to automate repetitive tasks and streamline your workflow. Gorgias even detects customer intents (e.g., shipping/status or order/cancel) and triggers the rules you’ve set before.
- Keep track of tickets without losing your mind by labeling them. Easy to edit, delete, add a description, and merge tags together.
- Create public views, shared views, and private views to share with others. It’s great for giving your agents access to only the tickets you want them to see.
- Get insights into customer satisfaction and team productivity. Revenue statistics show converted tickets, conversion rates, and total sales from support.
Related: Our list of the best social media integrations for Shopify.
7) Respond quickly
As customer service becomes new marketing, and exceptional service experience can be your competitive advantage. You win customers’ hearts by showing your support immediately whenever they reach out to you, and that makes them loyal to you.
Another reason you should respond quickly is that your followers expect it. Gone are the day when customers were pleased to wait for days for an answer. Today they want answers fast — really fast, even within 30 minutes after commenting on your post.
To meet customers’ expectations, you can build a support agent team and assign tasks to them on a rotating basis. This way, you’ll be more efficient and quick with your responses.
8) Match your customers’ tone
Like other social media platforms, Instagram is a less formal channel for communication. The tone you use in your Instagram customer service should be different from your tone when writing a support email.
Depending on the tone of the individual customer you’re communicating with, you can include emojis or use humor in your response to their question. You can even reply to their comment with just a GIF, making customers feel like they’re interacting with a friend.
Don’t be afraid to talk with customers as if you know them. That said, you should be careful with words and punctuation. Non-standard spelling and grammar may come across as errors, and slang can be considered offenses in some cultures.
Time to improve your customer service on Instagram
If you already have an Instagram presence or plan to grow your business on this platform, creating incredible Instagram customer service should be your top priority.
It’s a perfect opportunity to show you care about your customers, enhance your relationships with them, increase customer loyalty, and drive more repeat purchases.
Remember: a little effort can go a long way. Take time to talk to your Instagram users, and you’ll get the results you want.
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Need a dedicated tool to handle customer inquiries on Instagram? Meet Gorgias. Sign up for an account and discover all the best features our customer service help desk offers.
