Answer customer chats from Telegram

Most small business owners already have too many apps. A live chat tool usually adds another one: a dashboard to keep open, a separate inbox, another set of notifications. When customers message you on your Keepp page, the replies come from somewhere you already are.

Why Telegram

Telegram is a messaging app like WhatsApp or iMessage. It runs on your phone, your laptop and in a browser, and it’s reliable enough that plenty of businesses already talk to customers on it.

It’s also the one of those apps that lets a business run an automated account, called a bot, for free. WhatsApp charges businesses for each conversation, and iMessage has no open way for a business to run one. So Keepp runs one bot on Telegram, the Keepp bot, and every owner adds it to a group of their own. If you already use Telegram, you answer customers in the same app you message friends in.

Every customer is a new chat

The part that makes this work is Telegram’s topics. Your group has Topics switched on, and each visitor who starts a chat on your page gets a topic of their own, named after their email.

Each topic starts with the visitor’s answers to your pre-chat questions and the conversation so far, so you know who you’re talking to before you read the first message. Ten customers chatting at once are ten separate threads in your group, and a reply inside a topic reaches only that customer.

When a customer writes again, their message lands in the same topic, so a conversation stays in one place however long it runs.

Connecting your group

You connect a group once, from Connectors or from Chat → Settings in your dashboard:

1. Create a group in Telegram, named after your page so it’s easy to find, and add the Keepp bot.
2. Switch Topics on in the group’s settings.
3. Make the Keepp bot an admin with Manage Topics on.
4. Send the code your dashboard shows, like /link ABCD2345, in the group.

The bot answers in the group once it’s linked, and your dashboard shows it as connected. The group stays connected until you disconnect it. A group used only for Keepp chats keeps customer conversations apart from everything else.

Replying day to day

Reply in a topic the way you’d reply to any message. Your reply appears in the chat on your page, and if the visitor has closed the page, they get it by email with a link back into the conversation.

You can also reply from Chat → Conversations in your dashboard. Replies sent there are copied into the Telegram topic too, so the thread in Telegram always has the whole conversation.

Where the AI fits

You don’t have to answer every chat yourself. With AI, then hand over to me, the AI answers routine questions from your page and a note you write, and the chat moves to your Telegram when the visitor asks for a person. When a chatbot should hand over covers that setup.

For the full set-up, see Set up chat, and for what visitors see, the chat page.