CRM City

4. Conversations

Modules: Conversations, Telegram

An activity records that something happened. A conversation records what was said. They are different things and you will use them differently: activities are the log, conversations are the transcript.

4.1 Threads

A conversation is a long-running thread with a channel and participants. Channels are WhatsApp, Telegram, face-to-face, phone, email or other — and yes, "face-to-face" is a channel, because a two-year discipleship relationship or a five-year account relationship is a conversation whether or not it went through a wire.

Participants are contacts, and they carry roles: participant, observer, or leader. Messages are typed — text, image, video, audio, link, verse, reaction — and timestamped.

There is one active thread per external channel per person. This is deliberate: the alternative is forty fragments of the same relationship, which is what your phone already gives you. Archive or close a thread when it genuinely ends.

New messages appear in real time in an open thread, so two people from your team looking at the same conversation see the same thing without refreshing.

4.2 Insights

Any thread can be analysed. Open its insights view and you get, computed live from the messages:

  • messages per day over time
  • who talks most
  • the mix of message types
  • an hour-of-day heatmap
  • silence gaps — where the conversation went quiet
  • a reply network: who answers whom

Nothing is precomputed, so it is always current.

This is more useful than it sounds, in two very different jobs. In pastoral care, it shows you the shape of a relationship — a group where one person speaks and nobody answers looks completely different from one where four people talk to each other. In account management, the silence gaps tell you when an account started cooling, usually weeks before anyone noticed.

4.3 Transcript export

Any conversation can be downloaded as a formatted, timestamped transcript. Use it for handover when someone leaves, for archiving, or for reviewing a relationship outside the product.

4.4 The Telegram inbox

Module: Telegram

Your organisation connects its own Telegram bot, and that bot becomes a two-way support and sales channel.

What happens when someone messages the bot:

  1. The contact is matched by their Telegram identity, or created from their Telegram profile if they are new — which fires contact.created and runs everything that normally runs for a new contact
  2. The message lands in the active thread for that chat, deduplicated so a Telegram retry never doubles a message
  3. Photos, documents, voice notes and video are downloaded and stored against the contact, up to 10 MB
  4. Your team gets an in-app notification

Replying happens from inside the thread; it goes back out through your bot. There is also a one-tap "share your number" request — if they share it, the phone number fills in, but only if the contact does not already have one. Existing data is never overwritten by an automated capture.

Setup is in Settings → Telegram: save your bot token, enable the inbox. Each organisation's webhook is registered with its own secret, verified on every incoming request.

The other Telegram thing

There is a second, unrelated use of Telegram: notifications to you. Save a bot token and a chat id and the product can ping your own phone about things that matter. That is a one-way channel for your benefit and has nothing to do with the customer inbox. Both live on the same settings page, which is the only reason they get confused.

4.5 When to use conversations instead of activities

Use an activity when the fact of contact is what matters: you called, you met, you sent something.

Use a conversation when the content matters and continues: an ongoing support case, a pastoral relationship, an account you have worked for years.

Both feed relationship health, with the asymmetry from chapter 3: a message you send in a one-to-one thread counts as a touch exactly like a logged call. A message they send you keeps the relationship alive without ever counting against you, and messages in group threads never count towards crowding.