Run Your CRM from Telegram with the AI Assistant
A CRM is only useful when it is at hand. In real work the owner is often away from the desk: on site with a client, in the car, in the warehouse. Installing a mobile app is one way; using the messenger that is already open on the phone is another. Firmspace gives the AI assistant its own bot in Telegram, so a short message is enough to get work moving in the CRM.
One distinction matters from the start. The bot your team connects for client messages is not the Iris bot. The company bot receives messages from customers and sends notifications to the team, and the correspondence lands in Chat and Calls. The Iris bot is a personal control channel for the assistant. The platform checks that these are two different bots, so a notification channel never quietly turns into a control channel.
Connecting takes a few minutes. Create a bot with @BotFather in Telegram and give it an avatar, then open Settings → Integration → «Iris bot in Telegram» in the CRM, paste the token, send /start to the bot and press «Find chat» and «Connect Iris». After that the server collects messages from the saved chat itself and Iris answers there.
You write in ordinary words, as you would to a colleague: open the last invoice, confirm all orders, e-mail me the stock report, put Anna down as the responsible person on that client card. The assistant works on the same data as the cabinet — contacts, deals, tasks, invoices, expenses, stock — and replies in the chat.
Voice works as well: send a voice message instead of typing. It is transcribed into text and handled like a normal request, which is convenient when your hands are busy.
Several errands can go into one message. Such a message is broken into a queue: the assistant works through the tasks one after another and answers each in a separate message with its number — one, two, three — so nothing is lost on the way.
The invoice is the classic reason to open a laptop: a client is on the phone and wants the document now. In Telegram the PDF of the invoice arrives in the chat as a file. Other documents are not sent as attachments: the assistant replies that the PDF should be opened in the CRM, in the accounting section.
Rights work the same way as in the cabinet. Actions are performed with the rights of the person who connected the bot, and the assistant will not show or change anything that person cannot see. Only the saved chat is served: a message from another chat gets a short note that the bot is bound to a different chat, and nothing is executed. Requests that arrived while the server was off and are older than ten minutes are not executed either — a command from yesterday evening should not fire in the morning.
Two cases ask first. Deleting, and any action that follows reading someone else's letter or document, is confirmed: the assistant lists what it is about to do and waits for «yes» or «no» — in Telegram there are no confirmation cards as in the web app, so one word is the confirmation. Everything the assistant read, proposed and executed goes into the journal that the owner and the administrator can review.
The inner wiring matters less than the behaviour, but one detail is worth knowing: the server collects messages itself instead of waiting for Telegram to call it. That is why the bot also works where there is no public address — for example on a server standing in the office. The token is stored encrypted, the assistant has no direct access to the database and works only through the tools allowed to that user, and the whole channel can be switched off with a button in the integration card or with the TELEGRAM_CONTROL=0 setting on the server.
The assistant is part of the top plan, and the number of conversations with it per day is limited by the plan — the same limit as for the assistant inside the web app. What it changes in daily work is simple: tasks, deals and invoices stop waiting for the moment you sit down at a computer. The CRM fills up while you are on the move, and the colleague who does sit down later sees the same records, not a parallel copy of them in a messenger.