A chatbot on Telegram is no longer just a geeky story but a full-fledged service. With numerous features, a ready audience, and ease of use, let's find out how chatbots outperform mobile apps, their core algorithm, and how to create them.
At our company, "Digital Technology Bureau," we develop various products from full-cycle development to creating mobile and web applications that help businesses. After studying the market, we found that in 2022, the number of people in Russia who downloaded Telegram reached 24 million. In comparison, in Europe, this figure hovers around 4 million—Zuckerberg maintains his defense and keeps Facebook Messenger's monopoly. Although, in terms of functionality, I would strongly argue otherwise. At the very least, chatbots there are significantly weaker.
What is a Basic Telegram Bot?
In essence, it's a virtual companion consisting of buttons and menus. Each button click triggers a predefined scenario, opening a separate menu or list. For example, we created a weather forecast bot. Buttons like "Saint Petersburg," "Moscow," and "Kazan" appear. When you click the "Saint Petersburg" button, it shows the weather forecast, which is fetched from "Yandex" once a week—you see the current temperature, the forecast for tomorrow, and the day after.
There are many algorithms of different orientations—from coin flipping to a library. Bots can:
- Answer questions — responses come from a pre-prepared knowledge base, and if the question is complex, the conversation is redirected to an operator.
- Send messages — they can send news, notifications, and promotions to a group or specific users.
- Sell products and services — they can select a product or service, place an order, reserve a spot, and help with payment directly within the messenger interface.
- Collect statistics — they remember all user responses, analyze them, and show statistics. All correspondence and contacts are under control in your database.
Essentially, a Telegram bot is an applied quick-action widget. It all boils down to the question, "What will happen if?"
Why Do Companies Turn to Agencies for Chatbot Development?
As always, it's a matter of expediency:
— I want a mobile app quickly and cheaply!
— Why? For your request, you can do without it.
— But how?
Look, chatbots can provide a list of requests that are automatically updated. The screenshot actually shows a web page, and you weren't mistaken. Telegram greatly supports its community. In April of this year, an update allowed embedding a web page within the application.
Immediately after the release, my company created a bot for a major Russian broker bank, offering services to clients for buying and selling stocks. And believe me, with this feature, businesses should think twice about whether they need a mobile app.
You might say—this is a web page. Yes, and this is one of many features available in the new SDK. Check out the chatbot @DurgerKingBot—you won't regret it.
Another bank had a similar question about buying and selling stocks, but they took a different path and created a mobile app. This is also a way, but a longer and harder one. Here you have iOS certificates and design for both platforms.
Our client spent significantly less money and time, achieving the same functionality and capabilities. We spent no more than a month on the entire development cycle: from gathering requirements and preparing design prototypes to testing the finished product.
They approached us because of the scale of the case when it comes to automating a large business process or creating an application pipeline. But everything can be much simpler and more accessible.
The Advantages of Chatbots Don't End There:
- It's a free, functional testing ground. Chatbots allow for a test launch before full-scale mobile app development. Often a chatbot is an MVP that confirms a hypothesis—that the project is viable, will take off, and can be invested in.
- A chatbot is a native application in Telegram, it doesn't need to be downloaded. Thus, more people are engaged during advertising. No extra effort is required to install the bot—installing an app on iOS or Android, waiting for updates, taking surveys, or giving ratings on third-party services. Our client significantly simplified life for their users because they used a scheme similar to a website where everything is in one place.
- The audience is already there. Telegram's user base reaches 700 million, so you don't even need to change the platform. Businesses can significantly boost sales by communicating with an always-online audience. Newsletters, warm-up letters like "Thank you for coming/choosing us," links to contacts, websites, exchanges, and virtually anything can be used.
- Simple scenarios allow automating processes. No need to worry about special skills or codes.
- Constant updates with many features. Essentially, all this is moving towards a marketplace for applications.
The advantage of chatbots for business is speed, low cost, quick testing of business hypotheses, user experience, and immediate feedback.
Trying, making mistakes, experimenting—is the natural path to a quality product, whether it's a website, application, or chatbot. We must always respond to market demands, which, as we know, change very quickly. We constantly have to find new ways of testing and launching. At our company, we are open to experiments and unconventional solutions. When fundamental development occurs in several stages, spontaneous "what if?" questions are much harder to entertain. And it's in these questions that cool solutions are born.