Telegram Chat Bots: Guide for Business

What Can Chat Bots Do in Telegram?

Let’s start with simple things: they can give notices and notifications via email or SMS gateways. You can transfer all of this to Telegram with minimum effort. It will be cheaper, faster, and more user-friendly.

One of the most popular cases — automating routine processes. For instance, we already see some examples of bots that pull in the transaction card from AmoCRM (CRM system of contracts and sales management) using the telephone number or transaction name.

A programmer will need just a couple of hours to create such bot. This is convenient: if a manager is currently on his / her way, it makes it possible to retrieve transaction data without going to the website.

In a similar vein, but subject to certain other technical peculiarities, you can retrieve data from VoIP facilities, 1C, any database, or simply from another CRM system. The information you retrieve may be used to generate completed documents, forms, or statements that you need for work. For instance, to have a readymade agreement from the CRM or a completed form required for the HR office.

If you send the resulting documents via Telegram, you will first save space on the server and get rid of redundant middleware in the form of the website, and second, secure a free storage space for these files with an embedded user-friendly search engine. The limit of a file in Telegram is set at 1.5GB, which is more than enough for regular documents. All of them will be retained in the archive for an indefinite time and you will be able to refer to them whenever you chose to.

What Is a Telegram Chat Bot and How Can You Use It?

Chat bots in the Telegram messenger represent special accounts. Telegram bots receive text commands from people and execute them: provide information, execute the required action (e.g.: send the document), etc. The company delegates its routine monotonous functions to bots. For instance, responding to users’ standard questions.

Automatic execution of documents takes a routine process off the employees’ shoulders and minimizes errors. Even a partly executed document (when it is impossible to fully automate the entire process) accelerates employees’ work and reduces the amount of monotonous operations.

How to Create a Chat Bot in Telegram?

You can create bots in Telegram by using the official bot — @botfather. You will need to find it in Telegram, and it will immediately provide you with a set of necessary commands to continue.

Use /newbot to create a new bot. Thereafter, enter the bot name and address (whichever goes after “@”). You will immediately receive a special token to use for future work.

You’d better create your bot from your account or corporate sim card — this will ensure that you retain control in case of a contingency. You cannot transfer bots to other users. Similar to any other service, bot operation requires a server: an affordable VPS worth of ±$20 per month will work. No domain (website) is required, but you’d rather have one — you will then be able to use webhooks.

You can normally create a bot in a matter of hours — within 1–20 hours. This is a small project. Creation of a bot may not take a month or even two weeks. The only exception is a major project providing for automation of super-sophisticated in-house processes involving multiple intricacies or stages. Considering that the hourly rate of an average programmer in IT outsourcing starts from RUB 1,000, any company can afford such project.

The market can currently offer a number of Telegram bot constructors enabling to create whichever you need without designing it, but I would not recommend readymade solutions. First, the speed of constructors leaves much to be desired: a customized bot will invariably be much faster than any constructed bot.

Obviously, the designer’s competence is another significant factor in this case. Second, the functions offered by constructors are most primitive — oftentimes, you would just be unable to find the set of functions you need. Third, certain constructors are so much one-size-fits-all that their properties become apparent in the very first seconds of communication with the bot — this compromises confidence. Fourth, if you keep the token and bot on your server, you control the situation.

Oftentimes, constructors would not deliver the authorization tokens for your bots — therefore, if the constructor ceases to exist, your bot will die together with the constructor and will take all users and the entire database along.

Example

Last year, I was doing a business travel automation project for a power generation company.

How it works:

1. An employee will complete the form using the bot.

2. The secretary will receive this information in a user-friendly format and select the accommodation options.

3. The user will choose the tickets and hotel out of the options suggested by the secretary in Telegram.

4. The accounting department will receive the request accompanied by completed documents.

5. The documents will be checked and the employee will just have to come to the accounting department to receive the relevant per diem and sign the papers.

How many hours of walking from one office to another and paperwork trouble did we save? Quite a lot in this case: this company’s bot processes 2–10 requests per day saving the accounting department from the need to do the paperwork and calculate the per diem — the math and all calculations are done by the bot as well. In turn, the secretary handles the received requests and immediately sees all necessary information on the screen.

The only thing to do is to pick up the accommodation options, find tickets, and suggest them to the employee who will make his / her choice in Telegram. No need to make calls, go from one office to another, clarify the time. There are still instances requiring completion by hand, but they are rather exceptional — almost all requests have been processed automatically. 

Another case: sellers may be notified on changes in the status of the transaction they are responsible for. If the customer needs to make a call at two o’clock, let the bot notify the responsible officer 15 minutes in advance.

The day is nearing the end, and the officer responsible for the transaction has not completed the task? A relevant notice can be sent. Alternatively, you can notify the manager that the transaction has not been closed… And what if you send a list of transactions that have not been closed properly on a daily basis? There are multiple options.

You can adjust the setting of tasks right from the messenger in order to eliminate the need to go to the website, look up for the transaction, and set a new task. A lot of things may be automated via Telegram, but you don’t need to do that. You’d better use Telegram functions and optimize time with its help: it makes absolutely no sense to transfer your in-house CRM or analytics from the website to the bot.

There are certain outside solutions, readymade bots, that may be used in your business processes. But it is not advisable to focus on them: the majority of readymade solutions lack flexibility and fail to take the peculiarities of your business processes in account. Their existence is not supposed to mean that you do not need your own bot.

Business travel bot suggesting flight and accommodation options

What Can Telegram Chat Bots Do?

Let’s sum up. Telegram bots are good for the following things.

First: any notifications — sent fast, instantly, to the relevant recipient.

Second: completion of small (5–10 questions) forms to be sent to the server. More detailed forms should rather be kept on the website: you may have problems if you need to correct a field that has been sent.

Third: approvals and authorizations — for instance, approval of the budget, transaction status. It is easy to use Telegram to send messages using two, three, or more icons. Once you select one of them, a signal will be sent to the server. The responsible officer whose approval is required will receive a message from the bot and will just have to make a decision.

It is possible to make a decision on several tasks at once: Telegram makes it possible to attach icons to the message in order to declutter multiple tasks at once.

Fourth: any manipulations with files, documents, tables that can be completed automatically. Telegram has the fastest file storage — in communication with the bot, you can easily review the files that the bot has ever sent arranged chronologically in a dedicated tab.

Thanks to a simple API and lack of the need to install outside libraries and register at the designer portal, Telegram can be easily integrated into your current processes and business analytics — it will not take a lot of time. To design a bot, you can use any programming language that may be used to send http-requests.

Useful Readymade Chat Bots from Telegram

@gmailbot — receive and respond to messages from gmail directly in Telegram

@tweetitbot — use Twitter directly in Telegram

@amplifrbot — a bot from Amplifr — a platform to manage all SMM activities and relevant analytics in one place

@ya — contains virtually the entire set of Yandex functions

@vk_bot — integration with VKontakte communities

Some Helpful Tips

Tip 1. Do not send too many messages — otherwise, they will lose their value. In this case, the user may deactivate bot notifications and their efficiency will become equal to that of email messages. If you choose to send notifications via a bot, make sure they are as informative and valuable as reasonably possible.

Tip 2. Do not try to automate absolutely everything or make a single icon to make everything work.

Tip 3. Do not overload the bot with functions; instead, create several bots.

Any tool has strengths and weaknesses. Automation for the sake of automation will not help your company, but if you and your employees started thinking about getting rid of a certain portion of routine functions a long time ago — Telegram bots can definitely help you with that.

Telegram Chat Bot Tracing Any Mention of Chain Clubs in the Social Media

Ilya Konoplev, Director for World Gym Chain Development in Russia

In our chain, Telegram bots use clubs in Krasnogorsk, Sterlitamak, and Surgut. Technical chats with connected bots monitor any mention in the social media club communities. The bots would send the requests, questions to the chats to be reviewed by customer department employees and managers.

Thus, the management is able to see the situation with requests associated with the club communities promptly and work in concert in order to respond.

We have made our bots on our own. This is a simple task that does not require any special programming skills. There are guides and templates explaining how to set them that are very intuitive.

It is hard to digitalize the deliverables resulting from the use of bots, but they facilitate the monitoring of customer requests and make it possible for club managers to ensure real-time supervision over the sales and marketing specialists who are supposed to respond to the incoming questions and requests enthusiastically and — most importantly — expediently.

As a company operating in the service sector, we believe that prompt and comprehensive communication is our primary strength. Failure to monitor the quality of communication gives rise to risks. Telegram bots make it possible to mitigate these risks and boost the speed and quality of communication.

In multiple sectors, Telegram bots are used for automatic responses to the same questions asked by the users. Specifically, this option is used by banks and telecommunications companies. We have tested this function by classifying the most typical questions asked by the users and pegging them to the robotized responses by the bots.

I came to the conclusion that this technology is inefficient in terms of converting interest into sales, as the one-word answers given by the bot discourage people from continuing communication. This is the reason why we do not use bots for automatic responses, which is rather common in some other sectors.

Fitness club bot sends a notice of a new request

Telegram Chat Bot Giving a Reminder of Employees’ Remaining Leave Days

Alexey Marinenok, Head of Software Systems Development, BDO Unicon Outsourcing, Moscow

The list of services offered by our company includes payroll job outsourcing. We have designed a portal where we publish employees’ pay slips for our customers. This is a useful solution and we wanted to adapt this tool to corporate objectives. However, we soon realized that the setting of access rights to be used simultaneously both within the company and by the customer will require major investments.

In the past, our accounting department used to email pay slips. To safeguard the staff’s personal data, we generated individual passwords for each employee — access to information is impossible without these passwords. However, even this measure did not fully meet all non-disclosure requirements. Employees would lose their passwords, forget the number of leave days, and request this information repeatedly.

To optimize the process, we created a chat bot that can send, for instance, a pay slip to an employee. Telegram retrieves these data from the file generated by 1C system.

In addition, we protected sign-in against unauthorized access: the administrator collects a database containing all employees’ telephone numbers. Once a new user signs in, the software program would look for the subscriber in the database. Unless the telephone number is included in the list, the person will be unable to sign in.

Telegram Chat Bot Helps Optimize 10 Internal Processes

Andrey Vanichev, Managing Director, Telemarketing and Customer Service, Modulbank, Moscow

With a view to ensuring cooperation between the teams within the bank, we use the Pogranichnik bot (@ModulTeamClientBot). This Telegram bot registers the divisions’ requests and records them for further review. It makes it possible to enhance efficiency and analyze gaps in employees’ knowledge.

We were unable to figure out the issues that frustrate the divisions most from private chat communication. We chose to design and implement the bot on our own to record, tag, and work out such issues comprehensively.

In the past, the divisions working on a common task used group chats and personal messages to address the problems of their interaction. The downside of this process is the fact that nobody knew the problem encountered by the employees most times. We had neither the statistics nor cases to analyze it. Implementation of the bot has accelerated the problem-solving process. Now the employee knows for sure who is dealing with his / her task and how much time it will take to solve the problem. Besides, the bot contributes to surgical problem-solving. We can now learn for sure who exactly made an error in order not to re-design the entire system and train the entire team again.

We use the bot to optimize defective processes. We have reduced the number of requests by accelerating or simplifying about 10 processes, including opening an account and making appointments with customers.

Implementation of the Pogranichnik bot helped us save employees’ time, company’s money, and managers’ nerves. Currently, around 500 employees are using the bot — it has been contacted on 12,000 occasions over the course of four months.

Telegram Chat Bot Facilitates Customer Communication with the Company

Ragim Akhadov, Director, Expecto, Moscow

Our company is a digital tools aggregator. This business is new to some of our customers. Sometimes, they would have questions concerning adjustment of the promotional campaign, its optimization, or management of the facility. They can ask them in the social media, by email, or by telephone. Questions from most of these channels will be referred to the integrated CRM system. This is the place where one of our specialists will pick them up depending on the subject of the question.

Two and a half months ago, we designed our own Telegram bot. This was due to three reasons. First, considering the hype and ever-growing audience of this messenger, it made sense to presume that the number of requests to this tool will continuously rise. Second, Telegram provides an option to make an automated FAQ to free up some time for the technical support department. Third, over the time of our cooperation, the customer may have certain questions on different subjects. If the customer asks these questions by email (for instance), our CRM system will automatically create a separate dialogue for each of them.

Telegram has a simpler procedure: there is a single chat to discuss all issues with the same customer. It is more convenient for both sides. The bot has been fully integrated into the ecosystem. All communication between the user and our employees takes place in Telegram: the customer will ask a question to the bot that will be answered by a real person. From the perspective of our employees, Telegram-assisted communication with the customers is not different from the traditional methods. In a similar vein, the question will be automatically referred to Carrot Quest where they would respond. 

Telegram Chat Bot Facilitates Order Allocation

Ivan Mikhaylov, CEO, ChistoChisto, St. Petersburg

Starting from this January, our company has used a Telegram bot to allocate orders to cleaners. In the past, we used to do this by hand: we would distribute the information on the orders for the next day or for the next few hours once a day at a certain time.

Employees were unable to plan their load. Non-uniform allocation led to tensions: cleaners believed that the management had favorites who received a larger number of good orders. The bot has solved these problems.

Once we receive a request from a customer — whether by phone or website — it will be posted on Telegram. The posted version of the request specifies the size, time, and approximate address. This is how we mitigate the risk that the order will be stolen. Cleaners will see the “Take” icon under the request. All of them can see the updating of the channel. If they want to take the order, they will click the icon. The employee will receive full information about the order in a personal message in Telegram.

Cleaners’ load is monitored in the CRM system. If any of them takes too many orders and there is a risk that the employee will be unable to complete them in a timely manner, we will reallocate the load by posting the request in the channel.

Bot sends a new order to cleaners

Source: Director General