1The challenge
An e-commerce brand receiving 1,500+ daily support messages on Telegram had a 3–4 hour average response time. Their two-person support team was overwhelmed with repetitive queries about order status, return policies, and shipping timelines — leaving no time for complex issues that actually needed human attention.
2What we built
We built a GPT-4 powered Telegram bot using n8n and the Telegram Bot API. The bot handles the full support lifecycle: answering FAQ queries from a trained knowledge base, checking order status via API, capturing new leads into Supabase, routing complex or upset customers to a live agent, and sending proactive order update notifications. Human escalation is triggered by sentiment detection.
3How it works
The brand was losing customers to slow response times. Telegram analytics showed most customers who didn't get a reply within an hour abandoned their purchase or left a negative review. The support team spent 80% of their time answering the same 20 questions repeatedly.
We built the bot in layers. Layer one is the FAQ engine: a GPT-4 model with a retrieval-augmented knowledge base covering the brand's 200+ most common questions — returns, refunds, sizing, shipping, payment issues. The model is prompted to match the brand's friendly, casual tone.
Layer two handles order lookups. Customers type their order number and the bot calls the e-commerce platform's API, retrieving real-time order status and shipping tracking data — delivered back in plain language within 3 seconds.
Layer three is smart escalation. The bot uses sentiment analysis on each message. If a customer appears frustrated or explicitly requests a human, the conversation is immediately handed off to a Telegram group where a human agent picks it up — with full context already available. Escalations account for under 8% of conversations.
Since launch, the bot resolves 92% of queries autonomously. The support team now handles only complex disputes and edge cases, reducing headcount costs by 65% while customer satisfaction scores improved.
Built with
- Telegram Bot API
- n8n
- OpenAI GPT-4
- Supabase
- Webhooks
