Connect Telegram to your support
Five steps, about ten minutes, with nothing to install and not a single command to type. From then on, whatever your customers write to you on Telegram lands in your inbox as one more ticket.
Before you start
- Telegram installed, on your phone or on your computer.
- Your administrator account in CALADESK.
1. Talk to BotFather
In Telegram, look for @BotFather and open it. It is the official bot that creates all the others; it has a blue verified badge next to its name. Press Start and send it /newbot.
It will ask for two things. The name is what your customers see at the top of the chat: make it whatever you like, with spaces and accents. The username is its address, has to be unique across all of Telegram and end in bot. If it tells you the name is taken, try another one.
2. Copy the token it gives you
BotFather replies with a long message. What matters is a line with a colon in the middle, along the lines of 8123456789:AAH…. Copy it whole: the numbers at the start, the colon and everything after it, with no spaces.
That token is your bot's password. Anyone who has it can write to your customers pretending to be your support team. Do not send it by email, by chat or in a screenshot. If it ever gets out, go back to BotFather, send /revoke and pick your bot: it will give you a new one and the old one stops working right then.
3. Create the channel in CALADESK
Go into your platform and open Settings → Inbound channels. Under "Create a channel", pick Telegram and press Create channel.
4. Paste the bot token
On the card that just appeared, under Telegram credentials, paste the token from step 2 into the Bot token field and press Save credentials.
The field never shows you what you saved again, just like a password. If you later change something else on that screen and leave it blank, it is not deleted: the one you had stays. And the webhook secret you see there is generated by the platform on its own — you do not have to do anything with it.
5. Press "Connect to Telegram"
As soon as you save the token that button appears. Press it and that is it: the platform takes care of telling Telegram where to write.
You can press it as many times as you like: if it was already connected, it simply tells it again. It breaks nothing and duplicates nothing.
Try it yourself before anyone else
Find your bot in Telegram by its username, press Start and send it anything. Send it a photo too, to check both things at once.
Within a minute a new ticket should appear in your inbox, with the photo attached. Reply from the platform —attaching another image— and see whether it all reaches the chat. If that works, there is nothing else to configure.
The first message can take up to a minute: the platform answers Telegram instantly and processes separately, so as not to keep it waiting. That is on purpose.
If something does not work
| What you see | What happens |
|---|---|
| Connecting says "Unauthorized" | The token is mistyped. Copy it again from BotFather, whole and with no spaces. |
| The connect button is not there | The token is missing: the button appears as soon as you save it. |
| Tickets arrive but your replies do not go out | Same reason: the token is not saved. The screen warns you about it in amber. |
| No tickets arrive at all | Press "Connect to Telegram" again. You can do it as many times as you like. |
| The message arrives but not the photo | It may be too large. On the ticket you will see a note saying there was a file and it could not be fetched. |
Three things worth knowing
- Photos travel both ways. Whatever the customer sends shows up as an attachment on the ticket, and whatever you attach reaches their chat — images are shown right there, with nothing to download.
- There is no 24-hour window. Unlike WhatsApp, you can write to a customer whenever you want, even if their last message was a month ago, and with no approved templates in the way.
- One conversation is one case. While the ticket is open, everything the customer writes is added to it. If you closed it and they come back weeks later, a new one is opened.
Not using CALADESK yet?
Telegram is one of the channels. Emails, WhatsApp and a form on your website come in too, and it all ends up in the same inbox.
Let's talk