Conversocial integrates with Instagram to give customers some love

Brands using Instagram can get thousands of likes and hundreds of adoring comments, but sometimes they leave customers hanging on important questions.

For example, yesterday Bergdorf Goodman posted a beautiful picture of a diamond encrusted gold Sydney Evans “breathe” bracelet on its Instagram account. Among the 73 comments listed, one asked, “Do you ship internationally?” A scroll through the comments revealed that Berdorf Goodman hadn’t yet responded to the query.

It’s incredibly difficult to manage customer service questions on Instagram, especially because most brand accounts are run by marketing teams, not customer support. And Instagram can be choosey about the services it works with.

Enter Conversocial. The company is announcing today that it will integrate its customer relationship management software with Instagram, so customer support teams can answer questions about brand products directly on Instagram.

Conversocial has spent the last four years delivering cloud based software that helps customer service representatives respond to consumer problems on social media outlets, like Twitter and Facebook. “If you tweet at Hertz, ‘hey we’re having a problem,’ we pick those tweets up,” says Conversocial founder and CEO Josh March.

What Conversocial does is find tweets and posts that are relevant to customer service reps, so marketing teams don’t have to monitor social feeds all day and relay the right messages to the appropriate person. The company’s signature prioritization tool brings the most important queries to the top of the list of the customer service queue. The prioritization function is ‘smart,’ which means it analyzes a wide variety of information (from type of request, to customer response time) to better prioritize queries over time.

Customer service agents can respond directly to questions posted on social media via the Conversocial platform.

The other interesting feature the company offers is consumer profiles. Built from aggregated data across Conversocial and other channels (like a direct email to customer support), the customer profile allows support reps to view all data pertaining to a single customer in one location.

Conversocial isn’t the only CRM company focused on social. A couple of years ago CRM software company Lithium bought up Social Dynamx — a direct competitor to Conversocial. Lithium integrated Social Dynamx’ functions into its larger software to better compete with other socially charged CRM companies. But Conversocial is the first CRM company to integrate with Instagram; a pretty key win considering how much product promotion happens there.

Last week the company raised another $5 million, bringing its total funding to $11.9 million.

Customers include Hertz, Jackthreads, Net-A-Porter, Tesco, and Coach.