Your mobile inbox — answer customers from your own phone

When a customer on your website asks for a person, that message has to travel somewhere. A mobile inbox is where it goes. It is an ordinary Telegram chat with your own bot, bound to your account, so:

• Every handed-over conversation arrives in that chat as a normal Telegram message.
• You reply in the same chat. Your reply appears in the customer's chat window on your website.
• Each waiting customer gets a short code. The message header looks like [.3] priya @ yourshop.com — the site they are on, and .3 is how you pick them.
• There is nothing to install. If Telegram is already on your phone, you are done.

This is separate from connecting Telegram as a channel. Connecting the channel gives your business a bot. Linking a mobile inbox tells us which Telegram chat is you. The channel has to exist first — see connect Telegram.

By default your typed messages go to the customer whose chat arrived most recently. When two or three people are waiting, use the codes:

• .list — show everyone waiting, with their numbers.
• .3 — switch to customer #3. Everything you type after that goes to them.
• .3 your message here — switch and send in one go.
• .current — who am I replying to right now?
• .close — finish with this customer. It asks you to confirm with .close yes.
• /help — the same list, inside Telegram.
• ..3 — send a message that literally begins with .3, rather than switching.

Slash versions work too: /list, /3, /current. On Telegram you can also long-press a message and use Reply to answer one customer without switching.

This is the failure this product has fallen into before, so here is precisely what occurs when a customer asks for a person and no mobile inbox is linked anywhere on your account.

• The customer is told a person is coming. The moment they press Team in the chat widget, the chat posts "You're now chatting with the team — they'll reply here shortly." That line is written before we know whether anyone was reachable. For a short window, the customer has been promised something that is not true.
• Their next message gets the truth. When they type again and we find there is nowhere to deliver it, they are shown "Our team isn't available right now. Leave your email and we'll get back to you within 24 hours," together with a box to leave that email. Their question is not thrown away — it is kept on the conversation, and the email request is recorded — but no person has seen it yet.
• You are told, four ways. An alert appears in your dashboard; an email goes to the address on your account; a notice goes to any teammate who does have a channel bound; and an operator record is written on our side naming who was reached. If nothing at all could reach you, that record says so explicitly, so we can call you.
• You are told once an hour, not once per customer. These alerts are grouped: one per account, per cause, per hour. Three lost customers in the same hour produce one alert. Do not read a single alert as a single missed chat.
• If the customer asked for a person, the assistant stays quiet. It will not answer over a request for a human — that is deliberate. If instead the assistant handed over on its own because it was unsure, and nobody is online, it keeps answering rather than dead-ending the customer.
• After 30 minutes of silence the assistant picks the chat back up. That happens on the customer's next message, not on a timer, so a customer who has already left the page is simply gone.

The summary: without a mobile inbox, the assistant is still working, but "talk to a person" becomes "leave your email". Linking one takes three taps.

• The card still says "No mobile inbox linked yet". The Start tap did not land. Click Link mobile inbox again and use the /start agent_… command instead of the button. Watch for the bot's reply — if the bot answers with an error, that error is the actual reason.
• "This mobile inbox link is invalid." The one-hour window closed, or the link was generated for a different account. Generate a fresh one.
• You clicked "Open bot chat" and expected that to be enough. It is not. Open bot chat only opens the bot so you can look at it. Only Link mobile inbox binds anything.
• Linked, green, still nothing arriving. Check the other health line on the same card. If it reads "Webhook not installed at upstream" or "Last delivery failed", inbound is broken and no alert can reach you — click Re-verify under Maintenance.
• Alerts arrive on Telegram but not on WhatsApp. Expected. WhatsApp only permits a free-form message within 24 hours of that number's last incoming message, so a teammate's personal WhatsApp goes quiet overnight and we fall back to their Telegram. Telegram has no such window, which is why we recommend it for team alerts.
• Your reply did not reach the customer. Check .current first — you may have been typing to a different person. If it was right, the failure is reported to you as a delivery alert with the reason.
• Still stuck. Send us the exact text of the red or amber line on the Telegram card at support@orcalinq.com. That line names the cause; a screenshot of the whole card is better than a description.