How we're handling worldwide direct messaging
Social media platforms mostly attach themselves to one phone and one computer, which makes it very challenging for a company to participate. This system basically locks you into having a single “corporate mobile phone” that gets handed around each time someone's “shift” comes up. It also makes it impossible to escalate questions to the right person to answer it, if the question requires specialist knowledge, or if the message is not in English.
We've been using https://sproutsocial.com/ to give us a “single inbox” to Facebook/Instagram/Twitter as that was the best available tool five years ago. It allows several people to login, but has no concept of assignment, escalation, threading, and doesn't do Whatsapp, Wechat or Instagram DM (just Instagram comments).
We switched yesterday to https://respond.io/ as it supports Whatsapp, Wechat, Telegram and Instagram DM, and has threads and escalation. Within minutes, a message in Korean came in via Instagram, which previously we had no way of handling. Another one in Chinese via Whatsapp from Taiwan, and one in English from Norway. I really like having a manual “close this conversation” button, so that we make sure we don't lose track of conversations among all the daily noise.
Getting Whatsapp, Twitter and Telegram working is not so simple. Whatsapp and Telegram require dedicated (not available via mobile phone) accounts to work with respond.io so this week we'll set those up. And Twitter's API requires you to apply for permission. Hopefully that'll all be completed this week.
I'm not 100% in love with respond.io. Automation is the biggest lack. Most of the Instagram DMs we get are “emoticon responses” to our posts, or “Story mentions” and we don't want those creating conversations we have to manually close. I'd also like messages not in English to be auto assigned to my employee speaking that language: respond.io automatically determines the language, so it could do this.
Nonetheless, respond.io is a BIG step forward for us. We previously would frequently lose conversations inside Instagram, because 20 more messages would arrive an hour later, and there was no way for us to see which DMs we'd replied to, and which not. This solves that problem.
-john
#customersupport #transparency #philosophy
Updated 2021/09/12