When a Telegram bot is cheaper than a call centre — and when it isn’t

You hire a call centre when inbound is huge and the cost of error is high. You hire a bot when 60–80% of questions are the same: slot, status, price, papers.

Don’t compare bot cost to a salary. Compare it to a missed contact. Evening peak at a studio or clinic is not an operator shift — it is lost bookings.

Bots are weak at messy negotiation and complaints that need to be heard. That is a handoff, not “AI instead of support”.

The working shape: the bot closes repeats, a person closes exceptions, the API holds one truth. If the system has no truth, the bot will lie politely.

At art-bots we first write the lines a bot must never say. Cheaper than later turning off automatic discount promises.