Open Channels are a single entry point for customer conversations: Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, the live chat widget on your website, and email all flow into one Bitrix24 (Alaio) chat, while the CRM creates a lead on its own and writes the dialog into the card. On paper it's simple; in practice the questions start right away: how to build the queue, why a repeat inquiry created a second lead, where the conversation went after conversion. Let's walk through how Open Channels work and how to bring order to conversation linking — including the one case that stock tools don't solve at all.
How to create and set up an Open Channel
The Contact Center section → pick a connector (Telegram, Facebook Messenger, the website widget, and others) → create an Open Channel and attach the connector to it. One Open Channel can collect several connectors, and the reverse works too: separate channels are created for different brands or departments. The key settings are the queue and distribution: the list of operators, the order (evenly, strictly in turn, everyone at once), the wait time before passing the chat to the next person, and what happens outside business hours. A hygiene rule: the operators in the queue must be real people with portal access — a dismissed employee in the queue means "nobody answered the customer".
How a chat turns into a lead or a deal
In the channel settings this is the CRM block's job: the channel looks the customer up by the data coming from the messenger and creates a lead if nothing is found. For a recognized customer, the conversation is written into the existing card. Two consequences follow. First: recognition quality depends on the data — Telegram sends a username and a profile name, a phone number may be missing, so a repeat inquiry from another channel will create a duplicate. Second: the creation mode (a lead, or a deal right away) must match your sales scheme — "we have no leads, we work from deals" is configured exactly here. Merging duplicates later is harder than setting up recognition properly from the start; how to clean the database is covered in the article on data cleanup in the CRM, and the Find contact by phone/email robot helps the process find an existing customer by a normalized number on its own.
Where to find the conversation in the card
An Open Channel dialog lives in the entity's timeline as an activity of the "chat" type: you can see the channel, the operator, the dialog status, and the full text. Until the dialog is closed, it keeps the activity open — convenient for control ("the deal has an unfinished chat — the rep hasn't closed the question"), but annoying for those used to driving their activities down to zero. The dialog is closed by the operator with a button in the chat, or by the channel itself after a silence timeout — also a channel setting.
The conversation is linked to the wrong card: moving a dialog
A typical mess: a chat created a lead, the lead was converted into a deal with a contact — and the conversation stayed in the closed lead, so the rep sees no history in the deal. Or the other way around: the dialog attached itself to an old deal while the customer is writing about a new one. There is no stock "move the chat" tool. The Link an Open Channel conversation robot closes this gap: it finds Open Channel dialogs on the source entity (lead, deal, contact, company) and links them to the target one — the conversation appears in its timeline. You choose the scope: all dialogs, only the latest, or only unfinished ones; and the mode: "link" keeps the dialog visible in both cards, "move" makes it disappear from the source. The robot returns the number of dialogs found, linked, and already linked. The classic use: in the lead conversion process, move unfinished chats to the newly created deal as the last step — the rep continues the conversation from the card they actually work in.
Automation around dialogs
Open Channels give processes events and data to hang logic on. The "Open Channel message" trigger moves a deal when an incoming chat arrives — for example, it brings a "dormant" deal back from the waiting stage into work; how to build such combinations is covered in the article on triggers. From there it's the usual process mechanics: notify the responsible person about a new dialog in their deal, or create a "reply to the customer" task if a chat has been hanging unfinished for over an hour. Conversation transfer belongs here too: automation that links the dialog to the current entity spares operators the manual "so where is the conversation?".
How to delete or disable an Open Channel
A connector is disconnected in the settings of the connector itself (for example, unlinking a Telegram bot); the Open Channel stays, along with the dialog history. An Open Channel is deleted from the Open Channels list; the conversation history in CRM cards is kept, but new messages from that channel's connectors stop arriving. In practice, channels are renamed and their connectors switched off rather than deleted — the queue history and operator statistics will still come in handy.
Frequently asked questions
Can one Telegram bot be attached to two Open Channels? No, a connector is tied to a single channel; for a second department you create a second bot. Does a conversation land in the deal automatically? Yes, if the customer is recognized and the deal is active — otherwise a lead is created according to the channel settings. How do I hand a dialog to another operator? With a button in the Open Channel chat; the queue and permissions are configured in the channel. Does the customer see that the operator changed? Depends on the channel; in most messengers the switch is invisible to the customer.
In summary
Open Channels bring all sources into one chat and keep the CRM updated on their own — as long as the queue, customer recognition, and the entity creation mode are set up. The remaining gap — a conversation linked to the wrong card — is closed by the Link an Open Channel conversation robot from the Roboteka catalog: free to install from Bitrix24 Market, it works in business processes and robots. If the scenario you need isn't there, describe the task and we'll build the robot for free.