Back in February, Content Guru announced a new Instagram integration with storm®, its leading Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS) platform.
Like other social channels, Instagram presents a powerful commerce proposition, enabling brands to close the gap between consumer discovery and transactional engagement.
Underlining this potential, 2021 Forrester Research highlights that 61% of US online adults under 25 years old have completed a purchase on a social network without leaving the website or app.
Therefore, Instagram may well help businesses open up a significant additional revenue stream. The Content Guru integration builds upon this, enabling contact centres to understand, coordinate and track customer interactions through the emerging channel.
Instagram on storm forms an integral component of omnichannel customer engagement and takes its place alongside Content Guru’s integrations with other social media apps. These include Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter, among others. With storm, consumer-facing businesses can add Instagram to the customer service mix and meet customers on their own terms.
A New Way to Engage with Customers
According to McKinsey & Company: “Customers believe they can get whatever they want, whenever they want, within minutes.” By establishing a customer service presence on Instagram, contact centres can cater for this reality.
Of course, there are significant considerations when adding Instagram as a channel in the contact centre, particularly in terms of brand image and tone of voice in a public forum. Nevertheless, with an integrated solution to an omnichannel customer engagement platform – such as Content Guru’s storm – businesses can maximize their chances of success.
For starters, customer service agents using storm may respond to consumer comments or direct messages through a unified interface that connects seamlessly with every other customer engagement channel.
This means that agents can access the entire interaction history of a customer – across all channels of engagement – while also gaining insights about their Instagram activities – including number of followers. Such information is powerful in enhancing the quality of responses to customers.
It is also possible to use social insights to create a strategic approach to customer engagement. For example, brands can prioritise responses in accordance with how many followers a customer has, helping to protect and enhance brand image. Contact centres can also harness other filters, such as keywords, to respond to customer queries more systematically.
storm furthermore enables contact centres to harness the power of AI through social media. Social chatbots are an excellent example, rapidly automating responses to everyday customer queries and reducing the workload for human customer service agents. Social chatbots can also drive proactive communication with customers visiting the company page, helping drive sales engagements.
The Instagram Opportunity
Instagram boasts over one billion monthly users, causing Adobe to place the channel at the top of its list of the “top seven social media sites you need to care about in 2022”.
Yet, while Instagram often sits at the top of the priority list for marketeers, setting up posts is about as far as the engagement strategy usually goes. Businesses require customers to switch channels in order to follow up.
By taking a proactive approach to Instagram, in other words integrating it fully with customer service, brands can maximize their marketing engagement. For example, with the help of embedded analytics, businesses can engage with repeat visitors through chat and offer a built-in commerce function to drive transactions around the clock.
Contact centres can also harness ‘social listening’ tools across Instagram and other social channels to uncover every post referencing their business. Not only does social listening make for great customer feedback, but businesses can set up a workflow ensuring each post passes through their CRM, linking it to an individual customer.
In doing so, the workflow allows agents to access customer data, purchase and conversational history, alongside preference insights to deliver better service.
Discussing this functionality, Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO and Co-Founder of Content Guru, adds:
“Content Guru’s storm cloud customer engagement platform is omnichannel by design, and our new Instagram integration will further ensure that our customers maximize consumer satisfaction across all communication channels. With WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook and Viber all now well established on our platform, storm’s next addition will be TikTok.”
“Content Guru’s omnichannel vision, which delivers a 360-degree view of the consumer across all their interaction touchpoints, continues to drive competitive advantage for storm clients, in comparison with their rivals still operating siloed-by-channel engagement models.”
Such a competitive advantage, commerce opportunity, and ability to meet the expectations of today’s demanding consumers highlights the significant potential of Instagram in the contact centre.
So, Is It Time for Instagram?
For companies aiming to accelerate their digital transformation programmes and attract a younger customer base, Instagram may well become the new channel of choice.
Yet, every business offers a unique proposition. Some naturally lend themselves to Instagram; others do not. As such, it is critical for contact centre leaders to interact with specialists and explore whether Instagram is their next best customer engagement channel.
For all those eager to learn more, Content Guru’s friendly team of experts are on hand to answer any questions regarding how to maximize a social customer service strategy.
