How we built a support assistant for food orders
A Telegram bot that tells customers where their order is, cancels and refunds within set limits, and hands the chat to the support team whenever it should.
Published:
- support assistant
- Telegram
- AI
Most messages that reach a food-ordering support team are the same few questions: "Where is my order?", "I want to cancel it", "An item is missing". Each has a clear answer, yet each takes a few minutes of someone's time. We built an assistant that handles exactly these in Telegram, and passes the conversation to a person whenever it should.
What the bot does
- Finds the customer's orders and explains their status: delayed, being prepared, delivered or cancelled.
- Cancels orders, issues discount codes and refunds missing items.
- Confirms the customer's identity with their phone number before showing any order.
Limits live in code, not in the prompt
The language model decides which tool to call, but it does not enforce the limits. The refund amount, the number of discount codes and which orders can be cancelled are checked inside each tool. If the model asks for more than the limit, the tool refuses and the bot tells the customer so. That way the business rules do not depend on the model behaving well.
Handing off to the team
When the bot can't or shouldn't do something, or the customer asks for a person, a ticket opens in the team's Telegram group. Replies in the group go straight to the customer, and closing the ticket hands the conversation back to the bot. The team doesn't learn a new tool; everything happens in the Telegram they already use every day.
What we learned
A good support bot isn't one that answers everything; it's one that knows when to step aside.
If your business gets a lot of repeat messages too, write to us and we'll look at which part an assistant could take over.