AnyMind Group, an end-to-end commerce enablement company, has today announced that the company’s conversational commerce platform, AnyChat, is now linked with photo and video-sharing social networking platform, Instagram, enabling AnyChat users to engage with customers across Instagram and already-linked chat platform, LINE. With the Instagram linkage, businesses, online merchants and customer support teams using Instagram Live for the selling of goods or to communicate with their customers can now use AnyChat to automatically or manually respond to messages through Instagram Direct Messenger.
The move also enters AnyChat into customer engagement for the live commerce space, allowing for the automation of direct messages triggered by Instagram Live comments, including the sharing of URLs to view or purchase a product, coupon codes, and responses to frequently asked questions. This is activated whenever a viewer types in a predetermined keyword or code in the comments section of a livestream on Instagram, easing and simplifying workflows for both online sellers and customers for live commerce.
Kosuke Sogo, CEO and co-founder of AnyMind Group said: “We’re looking to push the boundaries of customer engagement, not just by opening up new channels for enterprises to engage with their customers, but also looking to drive customers towards greater means of commerce and purchases, and ultimately connecting customer engagement with the rest of the online commerce ecosystem.” At present, AnyChat enables online merchants to manage and track customer chat conversations and customer information across LINE and Instagram through a centralized platform. Merchants can also create quick response templates to ease customer support teams in answering frequently asked questions (FAQs), tag customer chats to create segments based on their queries or profiles. For merchants that have connected their Shopify stores, customer purchase and order data can be linked to chat contacts, ensuring key information and context is provided for customer support teams when managing queries. Apart from the new capabilities for Instagram, merchants that communicate with their customers on LINE have the ability to broadcast messages to their entire customer database or a targeted group of customers and create customizable rich menus to engage customers with specific call-to-actions. All this is done through a single dashboard without having to login to each messaging platform, and the company plans to integrate other popular messaging platforms in the near future.