Customer Support via Telegram [August 2023]
How do we support users via Telegram?
We’re running a membership bot platform for Telegram, and when we just launched five years ago, we asked ourselves — what is the best possible way to support our users via Telegram?
There’re many options to make it work. But we can group them all down to these three choices:
- Create a Telegram Bot (Recommended)
- Use a normal Telegram Account
- Use a public (or a private) Telegram Group
Why Telegram Bots For Customer Support?
There’s a number of reasons that make Telegram Bots a great choice for customer support:
- bots can reply with responses written by human on the other end;
- bots can reply automatically with prepared responses or even utilize GPT-integrations;
- bots can have buttons and commands for built-in knowledge bases;
- bots can be customized with your logo, company name, etc.
- bots are available 24/7/365.
Here’s how our own bot looks like:
Why not normal Telegram accounts or groups?
Using a normal Telegram account has the following cons to keep in mind:
- Telegram app isn’t built for customer support, you can’t easily share access to your conversations and manage them (mark as resolved/snooze them to get reminded later).
- Your work and life chats will likely be mixed together. You can try using Chat Folders, or even register a second Telegram account, but that sounds like extra work.
Telegram Groups are inefficient for customer support for the following reasons:
- You can’t share anything confidential in a group. Which means in some cases you’ll have to switch to a private chat anyway.
- Most people avoid using group history search, and they will ask the same things over and over again.
- All conversations are mixed in one thread which makes it difficult to follow them and keep tracking which ones are already replied and which are not.
Telegram Bots can help with all these issues.
But you have to do them the right way.
How To Create A Telegram Support Bot?
Unless you need something very specific, there’s no need to hire an expensive bot developer. There’re products on the market that allow creating support bots in minutes.
The entire process of creating and launching a support bot in Telegram can be simplified to these three steps:
- Bot registration in BotFather (you just pick a username for your bot and get a secret token)
- Bot set up (you put your secret token into a bot platform of your choice, set up a welcome message, add your support team, etc.)
- Sharing a link to your bot (in your Telegram channels and groups, social media, websites)
Choosing the right bot builder platform for this job is crucial.
First of all, you want to make sure it’s reliable. You don’t want to loose any messages (or message parts).
Second, but important too, you will need some professional support features like chats management and teamwork capabilities.
What We’ve Learned After Testing 20+ Existing Support Tools And Thousands Of Support Requests
Some omnichannel helpdesk/support products like Zendesk (or Intercom) have Telegram integrations. And it seemed great on the first sight! Like you could just have a single pefect app and everything from SMS to Telegram will be covered. But don’t get too excited.
We tested a lot of such products. Really. And each time, it felt like you need a pair of good scissors to cut a ton of paper, but all you have is a 20-in-1 multi-tool with a pair of nano-scissors. You know what I mean? You can do the job (theoretically), but will it be the most efficient way to do it that will also make you feel happy? Hell no!
It’s all about the quality of Telegram integration that most omni-channel solutions have to offer. Here are the most common problems we’ve seen over and over again:
- Many message types are completely or partially ignored (especially stickers and animated stickers, photos, videos, graphics, voice messages, video notes, locations, etc).
- Edited messages are often ignored too (think of a user that edited his message after sending it to fix something important — but you will never know that).
- Bot commands are rarely supported (in most tools, it’s not possible even to set an automated welcome message on bot start).
Not to mention, the stability issues that some of them have are detrimental.
Building an omni-channel support app is challenging, cause all messaging apps and communication channels are very unique in their own ways. It seems almost impossible to unify them all without .
If Not An Omnichannel Helpdesk, Then What?
We decided to build our own product for customer support in Telegram and released it to the public.
Meet SUCH!
Apart from many omnichannel tools out there, SUCH is focused on Telegram only. Such focus (or maybe SUCH focus? ;)) allows going way deeper in Telegram Bot API and just build a much better Telegram integration than any omnichannel helpdesk has to offer.
At the same time, it has the most important features to pave the way for a more efficient workflow: chats management, quick replies, teamwork, etc.
How SUCH Works?
SUCH is a support bot platform where you can get your own support bot with no coding. And btw, it’s 100% free!
Your support bot (created with SUCH) is the main contact point for your customers (users, followers — you name them).
When they send a message to your bot — you get a notification and you can either reply right in Telegram or in SUCH web app.
Create Your Support Bot Now!
Just launch @SUCH in Telegram! It takes less than 1 minute to create your own support bot.
If you need any help — you can reach us at @SuchSupportBot.
