Three steps get Tephlo answering customers. A fourth — telling it what a good conversation looks like for your organization — is what makes the answers worth reading.
You need a workspace and one of the following. If you have none of them yet, skip to the sandbox link — it needs no external account at all.
A WhatsApp Business number registered with Meta, along with its phone number ID, WhatsApp Business Account ID and access token.
A Telegram bot token from BotFather.
A website you control, if you want the embeddable web chat widget.
No workspace yet? Create one — signup is email-verified, and the first person to sign up for an organization becomes its workspace admin. Plans and limits are on the pricing page.
Three steps to live
01
Connect a channel
Add your WhatsApp or Telegram credentials, or paste the web-widget snippet onto your site. Nothing goes live until the connection is verified end to end.
02
Add your knowledge
Upload the documents the assistant should answer from, or paste the text directly. Indexing takes minutes and you can watch it happen.
03
Turn it on
The assistant takes the front line. Your team watches the escalation queue and takes over in one tap whenever a conversation needs a person.
1. Connect a channel
In the console, open Settings → Owned channels and run the channel wizard. What each channel needs, and what happens next, is covered in full under channels. The rule that matters here is the same for all of them:
A channel cannot be enabled until it is verified. For WhatsApp that means completing the webhook handshake with Meta — challenge and signature — so the inbound path is proven before a single customer message can arrive. If verification later fails, the channel is disabled rather than silently dropping messages.
You do not have to start here. Every workspace can use the shared sandbox number instead, which is the fastest way to see your own assistant answer a real message — see below.
2. Add your knowledge
Open Knowledge base and upload your documents, or paste raw text for something short like a returns policy. Sources move through PENDING and PROCESSING while they are parsed and indexed; the page polls so you can watch a source become answerable.
Upload: .pdf .docx .xlsx .txt .md — up to 5 MB per file · or paste raw text
A scanned or image-only PDF has no text layer to extract, and the source will fail with a note saying so rather than indexing an empty document. Re-export it as a text PDF, or paste the content in directly.
Two sources are enough to test with. What separates a knowledge base that answers well from one that escalates constantly is covered in what makes a good knowledge base — read it before you upload fifty files.
3. Turn it on
Once a channel is verified and at least one source is indexed, the assistant answers. There is no publish step to forget: it works from whatever is indexed at the moment a customer writes.
From then on your team lives in the escalation queue. A conversation the assistant hands over arrives with its full history and the reason it escalated; an agent takes it in one tap and replies over the same channel, so the customer never repeats themselves.
Try it first: the sandbox link
You do not need a production number to see your own assistant work. Every workspace gets share links on the console’s Share page: WhatsApp click-to-chat links and Telegram deep links that open the shared sandbox bot with your routing command already typed. The customer — or you — just presses send.
Set a routing tag in Settings. It is the short handle that tells the shared bot which workspace a chat belongs to; the share links are built from it.
Open Share. Each published sandbox channel gets a link and a scannable QR code you can copy, download, or put in a slide.
Send the pre-filled command. The conversation routes to your workspace, answers from your knowledge base, and shows up in your queue if it escalates.
Share links are for trials and demos — they run on a number shared across workspaces. For production, connect your own WhatsApp number or Telegram bot. Two cases produce no links: a workspace with no routing tag set, and a workspace whose directory visibility is private, where customers must be invited rather than discovering you.
Before you go live
None of these are required to answer a message. Each one changes what your customers actually experience, and the first is the one people most often miss.
Add and confirm an escalation recipientSettings → Escalation alerts. Handing a conversation to a person is a capability like any other: it counts as available only when at least one confirmed recipient exists. Until then the assistant will not promise that someone will get back to you, because nobody would be alerted. Addresses must click the confirmation email before anything is sent to them.
Set your conversation goalsAssistant → Goals. Tell it what kind of organization you are and what a good outcome looks like, so it moves a conversation forward instead of only answering the sentence in front of it. See conversation goals.
List anything it must never sayAlso on the goals screen. Exact phrases on the Never say list are enforced in code: a reply containing one is withheld from the customer and the conversation goes to a person instead.
Set business hoursAssistant → Behavior, beside the hand-off message. With hours configured, a customer escalated outside them is told when your team is back rather than left waiting in silence.
Write the welcome messageSettings. The first thing a new customer sees when they reach you. Say what you can help with — it sets expectations better than any greeting.
Invite your teamTeam. Agents see the escalation queue and conversations; workspace admins additionally get knowledge, settings, the Assistant section, analytics and the Privacy Center.