Meeting your customers where they are is essential in building a brand, building a community, and converting sales. Social platforms have become a prerequisite to building a brand in the digital age, but using these as one-way promotional channels is a miss. Taking the time to engage with every member as they engage or comment on your social content creates meaningful connection and community.

Instagram has become a mature channel for consumers to discover and engage with beauty and wellness brands. If your brand leverages Instagram to drive sales, you know how important it is to engage with every member of your community. There are only a handful of ways for customers to engage with brands on Instagram—direct messages, comments on your posts, mentions in Stories, or by tagging posts—but responding in a meaningful way is time consuming. Being able to reply quickly, personally, and on brand to every engagement is the sign of a well-oiled DTC marketing machine because cultivating a strong community that can be leveraged to drive sales when appropriate is a powerful growth lever.

This level of engagement while it might be the goal is often elusive because 24/7 moderation is often unattainable considering Instagram is only one channel especially when it comes to customer service. Today customers communicate with brands through email, phone, SMS, live chat, etc. Having an omnichannel helpdesk like Gorgias can be a game-changing solution, especially with its new ability to monitor Instagram easily alongside all other platforms, leveraging machine learning and automation to reply quickly and personally.

Here are three tips for using a helpdesk to level up your Instagram customer service:

Use macros (AKA prewritten responses) to increase efficiency. If you receive hundreds (or more) comments and mentions in a day, it can be difficult and time consuming to reply to each one. If you use a helpdesk like Gorgias, you can create a library of macros with responses for different scenarios. You can brainstorm 10 or more quick, on-brand replies that can be used in rotation, saving your team time to focus on engagements that need a human connection while also allowing them to engage with customers at scale.

Add tags to track Instagram Story mentions. Instagram Story mentions are an excellent way to gather UGC, as well as keep track of both positive and negative conversations happening about your brand. Since they're time sensitive (only staying up for 24 hours), your team must be notified and responding quickly when you're mentioned. If you want to track how often your brand is mentioned in Instagram Stories, through Gorgias, you can tag tickets that come in from the messages channel with "Mentioned you" in the message body. You can set that up in a Rule, meaning it will be 100% automated and not require any extra steps in your agent's workflow, but will nevertheless give you powerful insights.

Use automations to make sure you never miss a customer, even during off-hours. Sometimes brands can't provide 24/7 support for their customers. But there might be missed opportunities if you don't have the right tools in place to communicate with customers and potential customers when you're offline (especially if you have customers in different time zones).

With Gorgias, you can use machine learning to automate responses to commonly asked questions such as "Where is my order?" around the clock. You can also set up auto-responses that let the customer know your operating hours and that you'll get back to them soon. And you can encourage them to go somewhere else in the meantime for more information, such as a specific landing page or FAQ forum.