How do you handle DM volume across multiple client accounts without losing your mind?

Genuine question for other social media managers here.

I manage 6 Instagram accounts for clients (mix of e-commerce, coaches, small businesses).

Each account gets anywhere from 30-80 DMs daily. That's 200-400 messages I'm supposed to respond to.

Product questions, pricing inquiries, customer service stuff, partnership pitches, random spam.

It's drowning me.

I spend 3-4 hours daily just in DMs. That's time I should be spending on content strategy, analytics, actual creative work.

What I've tried:

– ManyChat: Too clunky, keyword-based, clients hate how robotic it feels

– Hiring a VA: Expensive, hard to train on 6 different brand voices

– Ignoring DMs: Clients complain, miss sales opportunities

What's working (sort of):

I recently started testing AI automation for the repetitive stuff. It reads the DM, understands what they're asking, responds in the client's voice, qualifies people before sending links.

It's been handling about 70% of conversations on its own. The other 30% (complex issues, complaints, weird edge cases) get flagged for me to handle manually.

Results so far:

– I'm down to ~1 hour daily in DMs (from 3-4 hours)

– Client satisfaction actually went UP (response times are faster)

– Sales from DMs increased (AI is better at qualifying than I was when rushing)