Telegram groups instead of a shared inbox
Website requests arrive where the team already sits all day. Handling them in a group beats handling them in private chats.
With two operators, private chats with the bot are enough. At five the scheme breaks: someone is on holiday, someone did not notice, two people answer the same customer at once. Telegram already has the right construct for this — a group — and Webchatix works with it directly.
Connecting it
Add the bot to the group and run /addgroup there. The group shows up in the dashboard as an ordinary team member: you can assign it to a whole site or to specific pages. The command /bindsite site_key inside the group does the same in one step — the entire site goes to that group.
Who answers first
The customer card arrives in the group with a “Claim” button. Whoever presses it takes the conversation, and the card is dismissed for everyone else — that is the protection against two answers to one question. If nobody claims it, the message stays visible to the whole group and any member can answer with a plain reply.
A signature instead of a nickname
Customers should not see internal Telegram names. A group, like a person, has a “name in chat”: set “Sales” or “Webchatix support” and the widget shows exactly that. It is changed in the bot (Panel → Groups → card → ✏️) or in the Operators section of the dashboard.
Different groups for different questions
Routes split the flow: cart and checkout pages to the sales group, the rest of the site to support. The customer lands directly on people who can answer instead of people who will “ask a colleague”. It is configured under Routes: site plus a page pattern, and the recipient.
The group’s language
The /lang command inside a group sets the language of its cards. That helps when support works in Polish while the account owner reads English: everyone gets requests in their own language, while the conversation with the customer stays in the language they wrote in.
What stays in the dashboard
Even when all the work happens in Telegram, conversation history, notes and ratings live in the web dashboard. That matters at shift handover: the next operator opens the conversation and sees what has already been discussed instead of starting with “could you explain that again, please”.
When a group is not needed
If the flow is small and one person answers, a group only adds a layer: a private chat with the bot is faster and quieter. Groups start paying off where there are shifts, holidays or a second language — that is, when it matters that a request is seen by whoever is free rather than by one specific person.
The usual mistake
The group is created, the bot is added, and /addgroup is forgotten — so no cards arrive. The second most common story: the bot was added without permission to read messages, and replies in the thread never reach the customer. Both take a minute to check: write a test message from the site chat and answer the card from the group.