External channels
External channels bring customer inquiries from messengers, your website, and external forms straight into CRM. A Telegram message, a website chat, or a landing-page lead stops living on its own: it becomes an inquiry with an owner, a pipeline, and a history, just like any other customer work.
All channels are connected in the integrations hub (CRM → Integrations section) following the same workflow: add → configure → test the connection → enable. Channels are set up by an administrator.
Messenger bots: Telegram and MAX
Telegram and MAX bots work as a two-way conversational channel. An incoming message from the messenger is attached to a CRM inquiry and chat, and the employee's reply goes back out to the customer through the same channel — the conversation isn't lost inside a personal app.
To connect a bot you need its token and an intake address (webhook) where the portal receives messages. You can set the pipeline, the starting stage, and the owner right away, so a new inquiry doesn't sit there unhandled. Once connected, the channel has a working screen with delivery health and a retry queue — if a message didn't go out, you can send it again instead of losing it.
Use a bot when customers write to a messenger and the team needs to handle those conversations as inquiries: with an owner, a history, and the option to create a task from the chat.
Website chat widget
The chat widget is an embeddable chat window for your website. A visitor writes right from the page, the inquiry appears in the shared CRM flow, and an operator replies from the portal.
When you save the connection, the portal generates the code to embed on your website — you don't have to assemble it by hand. You can choose whether the visitor must introduce themselves (a name or contact details) before starting a conversation. This way, live chat from the website lands in the same pipeline as other inquiries, without a separate chat service.
Website form
The website form connector is a one-way intake of leads from an external form, with no conversation. A lead turns into an inquiry by the chosen scenario:
- Collect leads — the lead creates a CRM inquiry immediately;
- Screen first — the data goes through a screening scenario before reaching CRM;
- Local only — the event stays in the channel and does not create an inquiry automatically.
To connect the form you need an intake address, a source name, and an intake token. Set the source and the pipeline so you can later see where a lead came from. If the website form was already built by your marketing team or a contractor, this connector links it to CRM; if you need to build a form without a developer, use the built-in form builder.
Good practices
- For each channel, set a pipeline and an owner so no inquiry is left without one.
- Run the connection test after setup instead of enabling a channel "blind."
- Watch delivery health in messengers: stuck messages are unfinished customer conversations.
- Don't show bot tokens, embed code, or intake tokens with real values in screenshots, and don't forward them.
Common mistakes
- Connecting a channel with no pipeline and no owner — inquiries pile up without anyone responsible.
- Not clearing the retry queue — some replies to the customer never go out.
- Confusing the website form with built-in forms: the first connector links an already-built external form, the second is the form builder inside the portal.
- Leaving the chat widget with no rules for who answers messages from the website.