The most common reason an Indian creator's comment-to-DM automation underperforms has nothing to do with the tool. It is that the keyword list was written in English and the comments arrive in Hinglish.
You set price. They typed kitne ka hai. Nothing fired, and you concluded
automation does not work for your audience.
What the comments actually look like
Read the last hundred comments on a Reel that travelled. The pattern is consistent across coaching, D2C, jewellery, coaching classes and preset packs:
- Price:
price,price?,kitne,kitne ka,kitne ka hai,kitna,rate,rate kya hai,kimat - The link:
link,link plz,link do,link dedo,bhejo,bhej do,send,send kro - Availability:
available,stock,hai kya,milega,milta hai - Delivery:
cod,cod hai,delivery,shipping,kitne din,deliver hoga - Interest:
interested,mujhe chahiye,i want,need this,dm me,dm kro
None of that is exotic. It is simply how people type, and a keyword list that contains only the first word of each group misses most of the group.
Transliteration is where the misses hide
Hindi typed in Roman letters has no fixed spelling. The same word arrives three ways and each one is a separate keyword as far as any matcher is concerned.
kitne and kitna. chahiye, chahie and chaiye. bhejo and bhej do.
dedo, de do and dedo na. nahi and nhi. kya and kia.
The practical fix is to write the two or three spellings you actually see in your own comments, not every theoretically possible one. Your audience has habits, and a week of reading their comments tells you what those are far better than a list copied from a blog post — including this one.
Negative keywords matter more in Hinglish
The reply that damages a brand is the one that arrives after somebody has
said no. In English that is not interested. In Hinglish it is nahi chahiye, nhi chahiye, rehne do, mat bhejo, already hai, already liya.
Add those as negative keywords before you go live, not after the first
complaint. A negative keyword holds the reply back even when a positive one
matched, which is exactly what you want when a comment says link mat bhejo already liya hai.
A missed reply costs you one sale. A reply sent to someone who just said no costs you the follower.
The list to start with
Copy this, then edit it down to what your own comments show.
- One automation per intent, not per word. Price, link, availability, delivery, interested. Five automations, each with its own keyword group, rather than one automation with forty keywords.
- Three to six keywords per group. The English word, the common Hinglish word, and the two spellings you have actually seen.
- Negative keywords on every automation.
nahi chahiye,nhi chahiye,not interested,already liya. Same list, reused. - Keep the replies short. People reading a DM on a phone in a queue do not read four lines. One line and a link outperforms a paragraph.
- Reply in the language of the comment. If they wrote
kitne ka hai,₹1,400 hai, link DM me bhej diyareads like a person. A formal English reply reads like a form.
What happens to the comment that still misses
Some comments will never match a keyword, because they are somebody's actual
situation rather than a category: mera skin oily hai ye chalega?, Guwahati COD hota hai kya?, June wala pack liya tha, isme naya kya hai?.
That is the group worth paying attention to, because it is the group closest to a sale. On a keyword-only tool the answer is nothing goes out. Here, a reply is written for that comment in your own voice, drafted against a profile built from replies you actually wrote, and when the model is unsure your own template goes out instead.
Check it with your own comments, not a test comment
The mistake is testing with the words you wrote down. Take ten real comments from an old post, type them into the tool's test panel one at a time, and see which ones fire.
Checklist
The full setup, screen by screen, is in the India setup guide. What Instagram's own windows allow is in is Instagram DM automation safe, and the cost comparison for Indian tools is in the cheapest way to automate Instagram DMs in India.