Telegram

Customers message a Telegram bot; the messages become conversations in your inbox; your replies go back to the same chat. They never leave Telegram, and you never leave your inbox. The bot is yours, not ours. You create it in Telegram, and you can take it back at any time.

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What you need

A Telegram account, and two minutes. There is nothing to host and nothing to install.

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Set it up

That is the whole setup. Send your bot a message to confirm it works: it should appear in your inbox within a second or two.

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Making a bot

If you do not have one yet:

1. Open Telegram and message @BotFather.
2. Send /newbot. It asks for a display name, then a username ending in bot.
3. It replies with your token.

The username is what customers type to find you, so pick something they will recognise. It cannot be changed later without making a new bot.

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Using a bot you already have

1. Message @BotFather.
2. Send /mybots and choose the bot.
3. Tap API Token and copy it.

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What we do with your token

We store it encrypted, and we never show it back to you. The dashboard displays the last four characters so you can tell two bots apart, and nothing more. There is no API that returns it. With it we do exactly one thing you did not do yourself: we ask Telegram to deliver your bot’s messages to us, and we send your replies back. Disconnecting undoes that. If you ever want to be certain, revoke the token in @BotFather. That invalidates our copy along with every other.

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Direct messages only

One-to-one chats become conversations. Group chats are ignored. A group has one chat id and many people in it, so there is no single customer to attach the conversation to, and everyone in the room would share one record. Telegram also hides most group messages from bots by default.

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What arrives

Text, and photos, files, voice notes, audio and video. Attachments are stored alongside the message with the same 10MB limit as everywhere else in the product. Anything larger, or a type we do not accept, is named in an internal note so your agent knows something was sent. A message with no words, like a photo on its own, still becomes a conversation. It gets a short placeholder line so the thread is not blank.

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Which conversation a message joins

Telegram has no threads. A chat is one continuous stream, so a new message joins your most recent conversation with that person unless it is already resolved or closed, in which case it starts a new one. That means a customer coming back a month later opens a fresh conversation rather than reviving a finished one.

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The Start button

Every new Telegram chat begins with the customer pressing Start, which sends the text /start to your bot. That does not become a conversation. The bot replies with a short line inviting them to ask their question, and waits. A ticket whose entire content is /start is one your team would have to close on every first contact.

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Customising the Start reply

By default the bot answers Start with a short line inviting them to ask their question, in the customer’s language. To say something else, open Channels → Telegram and fill in Reply to Start. Up to 300 characters.

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Their profile picture

Where a customer has a Telegram profile photo, we fetch it once when their record is created and show it beside their name in the conversation. People with no photo keep the initials circle. The image is stored privately and shown through a short-lived signed link, not a public URL. Erasing a customer deletes the file along with the record.

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Automated replies

If you have AI auto-reply switched on, Telegram follows it like any other channel. There is a per-channel toggle under AI, so you can leave it on for email and off for Telegram, or the reverse.

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The states

The Channels screen shows which one you are in: Reconnect needed is the one worth understanding. Because a bot has only one webhook, connecting the same bot to another tool silently takes it away from us. Telegram reports no error and neither does the other tool; your messages just stop arriving. We check on every load of the Channels screen so the row can tell you. Paste the token again to point it back here.

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Pausing and disconnecting

Pausing unhooks the bot at Telegram and keeps your setup. Nothing is queued while it is off. Switching it back on hooks it up again. Disconnecting unhooks the bot and forgets the token entirely. The bot itself is untouched and stays yours, so you can connect it here again or point it at something else. Conversations that already arrived stay in your inbox either way. They are your support history, not part of the connection.