How to run customer support on Telegram with a bot

Why use a bot instead of your personal account

Plenty of small businesses start by putting the owner's username on their website. It works for the first few customers. Then the problems appear:

• Privacy. Every customer gets your personal account, your profile photo and a way to message you forever, including at 2 a.m. on a Sunday.
• No team. Only you can answer. When you're ill, on holiday or busy, nobody else can pick up the chats.
• No handover. If the person who runs support leaves, the conversation history leaves with their account.
• Mixed chats. Customer questions sit between messages from family and friends, and some get lost.

A support bot solves all four. Customers write to the bot. Their messages reach you or your team, and your replies go back through the bot. The customer only ever sees the bot, never the personal account of whoever answered.

If customers already write to your personal account and you'd rather keep it that way, there's another option: a bot connected through Telegram Business that replies on your account. It's covered in Telegram Business: let a bot answer chats on your own account. For a team, a separate support bot is usually the better choice.

Set up a support bot in a few minutes

The contact bot template is built for this job. With Echo Maker, setting it up looks like this:

1. Create a bot in @BotFather and copy its token. See how to get a bot token.
2. Open @mkfrbot, choose the contact bot template and paste the token.
3. Write the welcome text (what people see when they open the bot) and the "message received" text (what they see after writing).
4. Give the bot a clear name, photo and description, like "Shop Helper: questions about orders and sizes". See how to customize your bot.
5. Put the bot's link everywhere customers look for help: your channel, website, order emails and packaging.

At this point, every message arrives in your own chat with the bot. You reply to a message, and the bot delivers your answer. For one person, that's already enough.

Move to a team inbox

When more than one person answers, move the inbox into a Telegram group:

1. Create a private group for your support team and add the people who'll answer.
2. Add the bot to the group with the /add command. The guide to adding a bot to a group covers the basics.
3. Turn on topics in the group if you want each customer separated.

With topics on, each customer gets their own topic. That's the setting that makes a team inbox usable. Instead of one long stream where Lina's question about a refund is buried between three other conversations, each customer has a thread with their full history. Anyone on the team can open it and see what was already said.

Keep the support group private and small. Everyone in it can read customer messages, so only add people who need to answer them.

Share the work between admins

Sending every message to every admin works for two people. With more, it leads to two people answering the same customer, or everyone assuming someone else will. The contact bot can share messages between admins in three ways:

Whichever you pick, agree on one rule: the person who gets a conversation owns it until it's solved. If they hand it over, they say so in the customer's topic, so the next person doesn't have to ask the customer to repeat everything.

Quick replies for the questions you answer every day

Look at your last 50 support messages and you'll see the same handful of questions again and again. Write a good answer to each one once, and save it as a quick reply. In the contact bot, you send /r1, /r2 and so on, and the saved text goes to the customer.

Good candidates for quick replies:

• Delivery times and costs
• How to return or exchange an item
• How to check order status
• Payment options
• "Thanks, we've passed this to the team and will reply by tomorrow"

Write quick replies like a person, not a policy document. Short, friendly, and with the next step clear. Keep a shared list of what each number means, and review it every month. An outdated quick reply with an old price does more harm than no quick reply.

Quick replies speed you up, but they're a starting point. Add a line that answers the customer's actual question, so they don't feel they got a form letter.

Working hours and expectations

Customers don't expect an answer within a minute at midnight. They do expect to know when they'll get one. Most support frustration comes from silence, not from waiting.

Use the bot's texts to set expectations:

• Welcome text: say what the bot is for and when you answer. "Write your question about an order. We reply Monday to Saturday, 9:00 to 18:00."
• "Message received" text: confirm the message arrived and repeat when you'll reply. People who get this confirmation are less likely to send the same message three times.

If you use rotation by working hours, set each admin's hours so messages don't go to someone who's asleep. And if you'll be closed for a holiday, update the texts before you go, then change them back when you return.

For a few questions with fixed answers, like prices and opening hours, a button menu bot can answer instantly at any time, which leaves your team the questions that need a person. See how to write a bot welcome message for more on first impressions.

Response-time habits that keep customers happy

Tools help, but fast support is mostly habit. These are the ones that make the biggest difference:

1. Acknowledge quickly, solve properly. If a question needs checking, send "Checking this now, back within the hour" first. Then come back.
2. Clear the inbox at fixed times. For example, at opening, after lunch and before closing. Fixed times stop support from interrupting every other task.
3. Never leave a chat without a next step. End with what happens now: "Your replacement ships tomorrow" or "Reply here if it doesn't arrive by Friday."
4. Close the loop on promises. If you said you'd check back, do it, even if the news is bad.
5. Turn repeat questions into fixes. If ten people ask where the size chart is, the answer isn't a quick reply, it's a size chart that's easier to find.

Handling abusive or spammy users

Every public support channel attracts some trouble. The contact bot lets you ban or mute a user, limit how often someone can write (a slow mode for the inbox), and choose which kinds of media people can send. Blocking files you never need, such as voice messages or stickers, also cuts down on noise. If you ever suspect your bot has been tampered with, read how to keep your Telegram bot safe.