How to answer Instagram enquiries when you are on a job

The problem with being good at the work

The people who do the work are the people who cannot watch the phone. A message arrives at ten fifteen while you are under a sink or halfway through a quote, and it waits until the job is done at four.

By then the customer has messaged three other businesses and the conversation is over before it started.

What the customer expects

Messaging trained people to expect replies in minutes. They do not think of it as a channel that waits. They think of it as the phone call they chose instead of making a call.

Which is why a late reply does not read as busy. It reads as uninterested.

Why the answers are already written

Almost every DM is one of the same eight questions. What do you charge. Do you service my area. When could you come. Do you do this specific thing. The answers to all of them exist somewhere in your business already.

The work is having something know those answers instantly.

What proper answering looks like

The message gets a real answer within seconds, in the customer words, using your prices and your rules. If they want to book, they book. If it needs a person, it goes to a person with the message history attached.

The customer gets looked after and you find out about it later, with the outcome recorded rather than a red badge on an app.

The same knowledge as the phone line

The Instagram enquiry and the phone call are the same customer asking the same thing. It makes sense for both to be answered from the same understanding of your business, and it keeps the answers consistent when someone asks on both channels.

How we run it

Our message answering handles Instagram and Facebook enquiries in seconds, day or night, using the same knowledge as the phone line. Bookings land in your calendar and anything unusual reaches your team fast.

If your DMs are full of read messages, that is the pile of work going somewhere else.