Your Telegram bot and WhatsApp in one team inbox

Messages people send to your Telegram bot in a private chat arrive in the same shared inbox as WhatsApp, with a Telegram label you can filter by. Telegram conversations can be assigned, given internal notes, marked solved and answered with saved quick replies, as WhatsApp ones are.

Each Telegram contact is saved with their Telegram name, their @username when they have one, and their profile photo when Telegram provides one. Telegram gives a bot no phone number, so these contacts have none.

You connect your own Telegram bot by creating it in @BotFather and pasting its token into RelayPlus. An org owner or workspace admin can do this. RelayPlus connects a bot, not your personal Telegram account.

The bot token is stored encrypted and is never shown again after you paste it. A bot can be live in only one RelayPlus workspace at a time.

The Telegram setup steps and the Telegram labels in the inbox are in English and Arabic, with a right-to-left layout in Arabic.

Telegram conversations have no 24-hour reply window, so agents can reply at any time without needing a template. The customer must have messaged your bot first.

Customers can send text, photos, videos, voice messages, audio, files, stickers, locations and shared contacts, and each shows in the conversation. A file over 20 MB is not fetched, as that is Telegram's download limit, and the conversation says so instead.

Agents can reply with text, photos, videos, audio, voice recordings and files, up to 10 MB for a photo and 25 MB otherwise.

Keyword replies, default replies such as a welcome message, rules and flows also answer Telegram messages, through the same bot. When a customer presses Start, it reaches RelayPlus as a message, which keyword replies and flows can answer.

A flow's buttons and lists appear in Telegram as tappable buttons, and the customer's tap continues down that answer's path. A list shows as a column of buttons, and a keyword reply that sends a template is skipped on Telegram.

A Telegram bot cannot start a conversation: a customer has to message your bot first, for example from its t.me link. Broadcasts go to WhatsApp contacts only, so Telegram contacts in a segment are left out.

Messages you send on Telegram show as sent; RelayPlus does not show delivered or read for them. If a customer blocks your bot, a note in the conversation says so, and a reply that fails shows the reason.

Only private chats with your bot arrive in the inbox, not group chats. Comments under your Telegram channel's posts can appear in Engage, a page of its own beside the Inbox, where your team can reply publicly, like or delete them.

This needs your bot to be an admin of the channel and of its linked discussion group, and Engage is part of the Business and Enterprise plans.