Using a Telegram BOT to create Service Request tickets

Smartphone’s users have condensed their time into just a handful of favourite apps, social apps and maybe few games. Many developers are now looking to chat bots as another route to making mobile software that people might actually use, and one day even pay for.

There are thousands of chat bots on Telegram, the chat bots are free to use, and you can chat to them by simply sending them a message, as if they were a human user.

I have already done some experiments with Telegram BOT you can read my old post here .

Now I’m showing you as using a Telegram BOT to create a Service Request ticket using Bluemix, nodeRED, Maximo and good APIs for mashups. This approach could be the future of customer service 🙂

The idea is to build a Telegram BOT to allow the users to chat the command /OpenSR with the service request ticket description, the Telegram BOT can act as a smart agent for customer support service to open directly a service request against IBM Maximo, or IBM Control Desk, without the human interaction and without a trouble ticketing interaction.

According to me the best way to manage the Telegram BOT chat is node-RED. I produced a simple flow to connect a Telegram chat with IBM Maximo / Control Desk.

The scenario is very simple: user chat a BOT and type the /OpenSR command to open a service request ticket against a trouble ticket product, instead of calling with your phone. So, in the next-future if you have an issue with your iPhone you could to chat the issue to Apple Telegram BOT. The BOT will open a ticket to customer support, easy, fast and zero human contact.

First step the user chat with Telegram BOT, dear BOT “my iPhone 6 keeps saying no service”:

Here is my node-RED flow to address the scenario:

Every 30 seconds my long polling gives me the chat updates via the getUpdates rest-API. Then I elaborate the last chat and I check if the command is /OpenSR. A Maximo / Control desk service request is opened via another rest-API, the service request description is text in user’s chat. In debug windows you can see the Maximo XML response file.

Here is the Telegram chat fetched by my node:

and here is the service request created on Maximo / IBM Control Desk:

Of course this is just a proof of concept, you can enrich the service request ticket with much more information and send the ticket number back to the user in the same chat.

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