Telegram: answer customers from your bot or your own account

AI Assistant uses Telegram in three ways. Your own bot answers customers who message it or mention it in a group. With Telegram Business, your mate can also answer the people who write to your own Telegram account. And each teammate can link their personal account to get an alert when a conversation needs a person. To see a customer chat first, message @BusymateAI — our own business account, answered by your mate.

1. Create a bot

Open Telegram, message @BotFather, and run /newbot. Choose a name and a username, and BotFather hands back a bot token — a long string that authenticates as your bot. Keep it private; anyone holding it can send messages as your bot.

2. Give the platform its credentials

In Console → Telegram, paste the bot token and set a webhook secret — a second string only you and the platform know, checked on every incoming update so a forged request is rejected before it reaches your workspace. Neither value is shown again once saved; rotate the token with BotFather and update it here if it ever leaks.

3. What your customers get

A direct message to your bot, or a mention of it in a group you allow, reaches your mate and is answered right there, from the same content and rules as your website chat. A customer can sign in inside the chat with one tap — no website, no typed code — and your mate recognises them on every later message. Each conversation appears in your Inbox under Telegram.

Handing a bot conversation to a person on your team is still being finished. Until it is, step in from your own account (below) or reply from the Inbox.

4. Telegram Business: replies in your name

In Telegram, open Settings › Chat Automation and add your own bot, or ours, with permission to reply to messages. Using ours? Create a one-time code under Console → Telegram Business and send it to that bot. From then on your mate replies, in your name, to the people who write to your account in private chats.

Reply in a chat yourself and your mate goes quiet there for 30 minutes by default — a window you can change in the Console, where you can also pause answers for the whole account. These chats land in your Inbox with the customer's name and @username, and a reply typed there is sent from your account.

5. Link your account for alerts

Each teammate links their own account from their profile: request a one-time code, then send it to your bot from the Telegram account they want alerts on. The link is personal — one Telegram account per teammate, no shared login — and can be removed from the same page at any time.

6. What a linked teammate gets

Once linked, a teammate receives a message the moment a conversation is marked for hand-off, with enough of the thread to decide whether to step in. They can reply from Telegram — it lands in the same conversation the customer sees on their own channel — or open the Inbox instead. Nothing about the customer's channel changes: a customer on the web chat still sees a web chat; Telegram is where your team is told, not where the customer wrote from.

7. Turning it off

Remove the bot token from Connections to stop your bot answering and to stop new alerts workspace-wide, or ask a teammate to unlink their own account to stop just their alerts. To stop answering from your own account, remove the bot under Chat Automation in Telegram or pause it in the Console. Each takes effect immediately; conversation history is unaffected.

Verify

1. Confirm the bot token and webhook secret are both saved in Connections.
2. Message your bot from a personal account and confirm the answer arrives and the conversation shows in the Inbox under Telegram.
3. Link your own account with a one-time code and confirm the linked status shows in your profile.
4. Mark a test conversation for hand-off and confirm the alert arrives in Telegram within a few seconds.
5. Reply from Telegram and confirm the reply appears in the same conversation in the Inbox.
6. Unlink your account and confirm alerts stop.