7 SuchChat Features For Effective Customer Support via Telegram

In the previous post, we described why we built SuchChat, and we outlined the various solutions that we tried to use for our own business.

In this post, we’ll share with you some of the coolest features that SuchChat has to offer, so you can decide whether it suits your needs or not.

First-Class Telegram Integration

The biggest issue with omnichannel support tools like Intercom is that Telegram integration can be quite poor at times. It comes from the fact that they support many different messaging channels, and it’s quite tricky to integrate all of them really well.

SuchChat is a Telegram-first customer support tool and it has what is likely the best Telegram integration in the market today:

• All message media types are supported: text, images, videos. voice & video notes, stickers, animated stickers, etc. (even dice!).
• Forwarded, edited messages are supported as well.
• Exceptions are handled gracefully (for example, if a common “Too many requests” error was received, SuchChat will respect that and retry later).

Chats Management: Open, Snoozed, Closed

If you’re handling a lot of chats daily, you really need a good way to manage them effectively.

In SuchChat, we follow the basic time management principle of breaking down everything to three groups:

• An action is required now.
• An action is required later; a reminder is set.
• No actions are required.

This principle can be applied well to conversation management:

• Open chats require an action from you (you need to either reply or change the status).
• Snoozed chats are hidden, but will be reopened automatically when the time comes (great for follow-ups in a few days, SuchChat will remind you).
• Closed chats are the ones you can forget about — nothing is required from your side.

On the left side, you can view the dropdown menu to switch between Open, Snoozed, and Closed chats. On the right side, you’ll find buttons to snooze and close the current chat.

The workflow with these three statuses is simple; every new chat becomes Open automatically. After replying, you can make it Closed. Alternatively, if you’d like to make a follow-up later, you can make it Snoozed.

If a new message from someone will come to a Closed chat — it will be reopened automatically. so you’ll never miss it.

This way, your Open chats tab is the main workspace and each time you start working your goal is to make all chats Closed or Snoozed. Zero open chats left? Time for a break!

Pro-tip: you can also hit Command+Enter after typing your message to send and close the chat together with a single keystroke.

Sent Indicator

Another thing we missed a lot in other tools is a clear sent/failed indicator for each of our own messages.

With Telegram API, message delivery can fail — either temporarily or permanently. It could be connectivity issues, throttling requests, or a ban from a user (when he/she clicks “Stop bot” in Telegram).

That’s why SuchChat shows a small indicator for each outgoing message. It shows whenever your message is uploading/uploaded to the SuchChat server, sent successfully via Telegram API, delayed, or failed permanently.

A double-tick in SuchChat means that the message was sent successfully via Telegram API.

Quick Replies

According to our “Customer Support via Telegram” survey results, ~50% of participants use prepared answer templates to reply faster and save time. We, ourselves, use message templates as well, and can’t imagine efficient customer support without them.

In SuchChat, you can create so called “Quick Replies” — message templates that can be added to the message really fast. To do this, type “#”, start typing the template name or a word that it includes, and select it from the pop-up list.

Typing “#plan” shows all quick replies that has word “plan”.

Welcome Message

With SuchChat, you communicate with your users via Telegram bot and it creates some really cool opportunities for you.

One of them is the ability to set an automated welcome message:

Welcome message example

When a user clicks START to launch the support bot , it replies with the pre-defined text that can include links, estimated reply waiting time, and anything else you want.

Besides informing the customer, it re-assures him/her that the bot is working fine and they can use it to chat with you.

Telegram-Only Mode

While the recommended way to use SuchChat is through the dedicated web application, it’s also possible to reply messages without leaving the Telegram app.

Just double-tap the message notification to enter “Reply” mode and type your answer.

This is a simple way to reply without leaving the Telegram at all!

Note that in Telegram-only mode, you can’t use quick replies and change chat statuses. But in some situations, you might want to use this simple mode instead.

Pro-tip: these Telegram notifications include a clickable link to user’s Telegram profile (to check out the photo and the bio), as well as a hashtag starting with “#id…” (to quickly jump to earlier notifications for this dialog).

Teamwork

As your business grows, you might want to hire support agents to help you. With SuchChat, it’s super-easy to add/remove them.

Just create a regular Telegram group for you and your agents and add your SuchChat-powered support bot to it. The bot will send notifications to the group (not to you directly) and anyone in the group can reply them (with both the web app and the Telegram-only mode).

When the time comes to remove an agent from the team — just remove them from the group. SuchChat will revoke their access automatically.

Want To Try SuchChat?

Just launch @SuchChatBot in Telegram! It takes less than 1 minute to create your own support bot like @InviteMemberSupportBot.

If you need any help — you can reach us at @SuchSupportBot.