Hey @andreibarabas 

I’ve tried several times to connect a customer support/live agent app (such as Gorgias, Freshdesk, Salesforce, etc) with Manychat, and I’ll be honest, it just doesn’t work well.

This is because the handover protocol, which in theory should handle these situations, has never worked well.

In all cases, we either:

• Had the CX team working on Manychat’s live chat system for IG conversations. It’s not as powerful as Gorgias, but with some manual tasks/syncing you can make it workable and have a decent experience for users (you need to train your agents though)
• Decide that human CX is more important than automation, and disconnect Manychat.

I’d love to hear if someone has been able to solve this. I’ve tried several times and given up… :S

Thanks @Gustavo Boregio , but there needs to be a way to do both, right? Let’s see if someone has been able to solve this.

Hey @andreibarabas and @Gustavo Boregio! I have been able to solve this! 

Okay, so the thing is that you cannot connect two applications to Instagram to handle messages. The reason for this, is that both applications need to be the ‘Primary receiver’ for Instagram messages, otherwise it doesn’t work well. If Manychat is the primary receiver Gorgias will not work well (as seen above). Vice versa, Manychat will not work well if Gorgias is the primary receiver. Basically, the handover protocol does not work, you can only have one application to handle your Instagram messages.

So that leaves us with only one other solution: Create an integration between Manychat and Gorgias. Basically, every time a message comes in that need to be handled by customer support, Manychat needs to send that message to Gorgias. Then, if someone replies in Gorgias, the message needs to be sent back to Manychat. 

I haven’t created such an integration between Manychat and Gorgias in the past, but I have done it for Manychat and Livechat.com. 

Does this help?

Hey @Joren Wouters ,

I've tried something similar before, not with Gorgias, but with other systems. In my opinion, it's tough to get a solution that makes everyone completely happy. There are a few issues with this kind of setup, like getting too many tickets in the help desk system, missing some important information because not everything is shared (like needing all messages from Manychat for the full picture), finding it hard to match contact profiles with their Manychat users, and the cost of using Zapier adding up quickly.

You're right, you can make it work with an integration, but in my experience, there's always something that doesn't quite fit or feels a bit awkward. It's always about making the best of it.

In cases I've worked on, we had to choose one approach. If Instagram marketing was going great, we trained the customer service team to use Manychat Live Chat, while using other tools for different channels. In other situations, when Instagram wasn't doing too well, we went back to our usual system and turned off Manychat. This way, we could focus more on keeping our customer service solid.

Anyways, as Joren mentions, there are workarounds - and maybe I’m just too picky! The cool thing with Manychat is that it’s super flexible, so there are a million ways to solve things.

Thanks @Joren Wouters & @Gustavo Boregio