How to make a Telegram bot

Written byLiselot Hofman

In 2021, Telegram has more than 500 million monthly active users around the world. The messaging app is becoming big competition for huge players like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. And that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Telegram thanks much of its popularity to its secure privacy policy which is getting more important to customers than ever. And where customers sign up, companies will soon follow.

With a Telegram bot, you can improve accessibility, increase your response time, and boost customer satisfaction. Trengo’s chatbot takes over simple support queries, routes customers to the right colleague, and answers frequently asked questions.

What is a chatbot?

The chatbot is an automated conversation partner you can use on communication channels such as WhatsApp, live chat, Facebook Messenger, and also Telegram. This scripted AI tool is programmed to help your team handling simple support queries and collecting customer information.

The benefits of using a chatbot

Using a chatbot has the following benefits:

Increases customer satisfaction: you can assure your customer of a fast answer. They don’t have to switch channels or be forwarded to another department to receive the support they need.

Improves response time: chatbots are always available — day and night. They reply faster than the speed of light.

Saves time and costs: chatbots take over time-consuming tasks, so your team can focus on more complicated issues.

How to make a Telegram bot

You first need to connect your Telegram account to Trengo’s platform. This gives you the opportunity to create your own no-code chatbot, and collect Telegram messages together with other channels in one view.

At Trengo, you can pick between two different kinds of chatbots:

1. The regular chatbot

A conversation with a regular chatbot looks just the same as a conversation between you and your customer. When the customer asks a question, the chatbot recognizes keywords and sends pre-filled answers. In the conversation below, the chatbot recognizes the keyword ‘shipping costs’ and provides the customers with the right answer within seconds.

Learn how to set up a chatbot with Trengo

2. The flowbot

The flowbot simulates conversations with your customers and prospects in a slightly different way. Instead of replying to open questions, the flowbot asks multiple-choice questions. Based on the customer’s answer, he will be forwarded to the right team or information.

Learn how to set up a flowbot with Trengo

Read more about the differences between a chatbot and a flowbot

3 ways to use a Telegram bot

With about 55.2 million active Telegram users a day, your Telegram messages will soon pile up. Time to expand your team with a chatbot to take over the busy work. Here are three examples of how to use a chatbot for Telegram:

1. Answer frequently asked questions

No matter how many questions you get every day, I bet a lot of them are quite repetitive. Most of these questions include:

Return policies
Available products
Opening hours
Shipping costs

It takes your team a lot of time to answer these questions over and over again. Instead, you can safely use a chatbot to answer them for you. The bot recognizes the question and answers with relevant information.

Tip: learn more about your customer’s behavior before you start creating a bot. Which types of questions do they ask? You can do this by adding labels to conversations. After that, you can set up questions for your chatbot based on the most frequently used labels.

2. Handle support queries by using dynamic content

By using dynamic content, your chatbot can retrieve customer information and answer personal questions.

If you receive a newsletter from your favorite brand, you might recognize the following headline: “Hi [your name]”. Dynamic content is the content between [ … ] that changes based on customer information.

Trengo’s chatbot can retrieve dynamic content through integrations with, for example, software like Shopify and Picqer.

This makes it possible for a chatbot to support your customers with:

Order status and information
Product issues
Product information

3. Gather leads by asking for customer information

The chatbot collects customer information and saves it under a customer contact profile in Trengo. After gathering the information, the chatbot routes the conversation back to your team. This leaves your sales team with a nice list of leads to get in touch with.

Build your Telegram bot with Trengo

It’s time to make full use of Telegram’s potential. In Trengo, you can create your own no-code chatbot and start offering even faster service than before.