This week's edition of Let's Talk tackles a problem every small team knows well: customers messaging on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and your website all at once, and nobody able to keep up. We asked our panel of SME owners and operators how they actually manage instant messaging without a dedicated support team. Here's what they said.
Let’s Talk!
Christopher Connolly, Director Solutions Engineering, APJ, Twilio
“The only answer to this question is with technology – AI specifically – but there’s a big caveat: when implementing AI, you should start with the problem instead of using it for the sake of it.
When it comes to customer engagement, small businesses can’t always compete with larger organisations on headcount or marketing spend, but they can still compete on how quickly and personally they respond to customers. AI helps to level that playing field – automating repetitive interactions, responding around the clock and ensuring customers can be met on their channel or app of choice.
But – another caveat – AI is only as good as the customer data and communications infrastructure behind it. Bolting an AI chatbot onto disconnected systems won’t magically create a better customer experience. It will probably just make a bad experience worse. Context is needed to fuel better, more personalised, conversations.
For Australian SMEs, the best way to tackle this is to start small and focus on outcomes. Use AI to remove friction, and ensure customer data and communications are connected. For customers this means each interaction builds on the last, and they don’t have to keep repeating themselves. The ultimate goal is to make customer engagement more intelligent, personal and scalable, not just more automated.”
Ronan Harnett, Director of Multi Product (AI CRM Service) APJ, monday.com
“Start by connecting the two or three channels your customers use most into one shared workflow, where every request carries its history, priority, owner and response deadline. If a customer emails about a delayed order after already messaging on chat, whoever responds should see that history, not ask the customer to repeat themselves.
AI can handle the first layer of triage: acknowledging and categorising messages, summarising prior interactions, flagging sentiment and urgency, and routing each request to the right person. It can also kick off practical next steps, like starting a refund approval or alerting an account manager.
Complaints and anything needing real judgement should still go to a person, with the context already attached, so they’re not starting cold.
For a small team, speed doesn’t come from being everywhere at once. It comes from making every message part of one process.”
Elise Balsillie, Head of Thryv Australia and New Zealand, Thryv
“What happens when customer messages arrive faster than a small team can move between inboxes, apps and competing priorities?
The answer is rarely to work faster or remain constantly available. It is to create one clear system for deciding what deserves attention, who will respond and what happens next.
The real challenge often lies in fragmentation. An enquiry arrives through Instagram, a booking question lands by text and an existing customer follows up by email. When each channel operates as a separate inbox, valuable time disappears into checking apps, transferring information and working out whether someone else has already responded.
I recommend bringing those conversations into one shared view, then creating rules around customer intent. A new enquiry may need an immediate acknowledgement and a clear next step, while a routine question can receive an automated answer and a complaint should be directed to the right person. Customers receive a timely response without every notification disrupting the team’s work.
Automation can manage the opening move, however people should remain responsible for moments requiring judgement, empathy or expertise. The goal is to make responsiveness sustainable while preserving the human quality customers value.
Platforms such as Thryv can bring customer communications together, automate routine responses and retain the conversation history, helping a small team respond with greater context, confidence and consistency.”
Billy Loizou, Area Vice President and General Manager, APAC, Amperity
“For a small team, the answer isn’t trying to be everywhere at once. It’s making sure every channel has the same customer context, so the team can quickly decide what matters and what to do next.
A customer might browse the website, start a chat, reply to an email and then send a message on social. They don’t see four separate channels. They see one relationship with the business. The challenge for a small team is that the context behind those interactions often sits across different systems, leaving people to piece the story together while the customer waits.
This is where AI can genuinely help. When it has access to trusted, current context, including what the customer has bought, asked about, preferred and recently experienced, it can handle routine enquiries, prioritise what needs attention and surface a useful next action. The team can then focus on the conversations that need judgement, creativity or empathy.
Speed matters, but a fast response without context can still feel irrelevant. The real opportunity is to remove the manual work behind each interaction, giving a small team the confidence to respond in a way that feels informed, consistent and genuinely useful.”
Jessica Attwood, General Manager, APAC, Leap Event Technology
“Events teams are a prime example of feeling the pressure to operate across so many systems. A lean team can be responsible for thousands of customers, with interactions spanning ticket purchase, email, marketing, event apps, admissions and onsite engagement. Every disconnected platform creates another place to check, another source of data and another manual task. For a small team, the challenge isn’t just the volume of messages, it is having to constantly move between systems and piece together the context behind each customer interaction.
The solution starts with architecture. When ticketing, marketing, attendee engagement and analytics are connected, data can flow across the customer journey and technology can start doing much more of the heavy lifting. It reduces the amount of information teams need to manually find, understand and act on before they respond to a customer.
At Leap, that means enabling organisers to automate everyday marketing tasks, schedule reporting, segment audiences using purchase and attendance behaviour, and communicate with customers using a much richer view of who they are and how they’re engaging. Automations can also help reduce the number of interactions in the first place, allowing teams to focus their time on the questions and situations that genuinely need a human response.
AI will make this even more powerful by being able to understand the context, identify what needs attention, and help teams respond more efficiently, rather than just adding another tool to manage.
The real opportunity is creating a connected technology ecosystem where automation handles the repetitive work and surfaces what requires human attention. For small event teams, that means less time managing technology, jumping between platforms and managing repetitive interactions, and more time creating exceptional live experiences.”
Tori Starkey, Director, Kudosity
“Small teams have always had to do more with less, but customer expectations have changed. People now expect quick answers whether they contact a business through web chat, social, SMS, WhatsApp or another messaging app. For small and scale-up businesses keeping up can quickly become a full-time job.
The first step is bringing those conversations together, rather than giving the team another inbox to manage. From there, automation can take care of simple, repetitive enquiries. AI agents can take that further by understanding what a customer is trying to do, responding in context, taking action and knowing when to bring a person into the conversation.
Working closely as Kudosity does with retailers and ecommerce businesses, we know that a customer question can also often be a buying signal. A question about stock, delivery or returns might be the thing standing between consideration and purchase.
AI agents might sound like something only larger businesses can take advantage of, but that is changing quickly. Small businesses don’t need to automate everything at once. Start with the repetitive conversations taking up your team’s time and build from there. For a lean team, the real opportunity is more capacity, while keeping people focused on the conversations where judgement, empathy and commercial skill really matter.”
Morgan Wilson, Founder and Director, creditte accountants and advisors
“Most small teams try to fix this by buying another app. It rarely works.
Ask whether this is a people issue or a process issue. Nine times out of ten it is process. Nobody has decided what instant actually means, so every channel becomes an open promise the team cannot keep.
Write down your response standard first. Two hours in business hours. Next morning if it lands after five. Whatever is honest. Then publish it everywhere you can be reached.
Then cut channels. You do not train customers with a polite request. You train them by closing doors. A team of three cannot hold five inboxes. Pick two, turn the rest off, and point every signature, invoice and auto reply at the two that remain.
Give one person the triage. Not everyone. One person, one window, every day.
Tools help once the standard exists. They cannot invent one.
I see the same pattern in client work. The owners drowning in messages are the ones who never set a rule. The ones who did answer fewer messages, faster.”
David Caruso, Founder & CEO, BuyFactory.direct
“We run 60+ brands across 700+ websites with 15 staff, so messages land from everywhere at once: site chat, email, social, marketplace questions.
What saved us wasn’t another app. It was refusing to answer inside each app.
Everything funnels into one inbox we built ourselves, and that’s the only place anyone replies from. Before that, messages went missing in the gaps between platforms, and a customer waiting two days doesn’t care which tab their question landed in.
AI does the sorting, then drafts the first reply against the real product page and the right currency for whichever store the customer wrote from. A person approves anything that goes out.
My rule for a small team: one queue, one place to reply, and a human on the last step before send.
Adding a fifth app to manage four apps is how small teams end up slower than they started.”
Christopher Zahn, Founder and Managing Director, Pearscroft Communications
“The key is to stop thinking of and treating every app as a separate inbox. For a tiny team, customer messages should feed into one central hub, giving everyone visibility of the full conversation history, regardless of where the customer started. From there, messages can be automatically tagged by topic or urgency and assigned to the right person, so nothing falls through the cracks. Collaboration and email management platforms bring email, WhatsApp, SMS and other channels together, allowing teams to assign conversations and create tasks. In practice, if a message arrives somewhere you can’t easily manage, screenshot it, create a task, or ask the customer to continue by email.”
Michael Russell, Managing Director, Finwave Finance
“The problem with managing customer messages across multiple platforms is not volume. It is context switching. Every time someone moves between an inbox, a social DM, a missed call, and a live chat, they lose track of where things are up to and who has responded to what. That is where things fall through.
The fix is not to be everywhere faster. It is to stop treating each platform as a separate workflow.
A unified inbox tool is the starting point. Platforms like Tidio, Intercom, or a well-configured HubSpot free tier pull messages from email, live chat, Facebook, and Instagram into a single feed. One person can manage conversations across all channels without switching tabs or losing context. For most small teams this is the highest return change available and setup is measured in hours, not weeks.
The second move is triage by urgency, not by platform. A message on Instagram is not automatically less important than an email. Build a simple internal rule about what gets a same-hour response, what gets end-of-day, and what gets a template reply. Without that rule, response time is determined by whoever happens to check which app first.
Automation handles the gap between a message arriving and a human responding. A simple acknowledgement that sets an expectation is enough. Customers tolerate wait times far better when they know they have been heard.
The goal is not instant. It is consistent.”
Jimmy Hyde, Head of Customer Success, Quickli
“I honestly believe answering customer questions is the easiest job in the world. Not because the queries are easy (trust me, they’re not), but because my team and I have a genuine desire to help people. And because of that, we’ll go wherever the user needs us.
We use Intercom to handle the majority of the queries we receive, but if a user needs a quick phone call, Google Meet or Zoom to sort something out (or to prove we’re not automated AI bots), we’ll happily go that route as well.
Speed matters, definitely, but so do GIFs and the quality of the reply. We’ve maintained a 90-second average response time with real life humans responding with humour and warmth, not automated nonsense.
Remember to close the loop. Every customer message contains helpful feedback which we can then funnel straight to our Product team. Features sometimes ship days after requests are made. Customers notice that, and it proves our loyalty.
Tiny teams win when leadership stays connected and you treat support like the product it actually is.”