Handle Vietnamese SME customer care on Zalo Bot with Gemini and Google Sheets

AI customer care chatbot for Vietnamese SMEs with Zalo Bot, Gemini and Google Sheets CRM

A production ready Zalo Bot chatbot that handles the full customer journey for Vietnamese small and medium businesses: greeting new customers with a sticker, listening for their first reply, routing the message to the right handler, generating AI fallback answers in Vietnamese, escalating to a human agent when needed, and logging every conversation to Google Sheets as a lightweight CRM.

This template uses every operation of the n8n-nodes-zalo-platform community node (zaloBotTrigger, sendMessage, sendPhoto, sendSticker, getUpdates) combined with Google Gemini and Google Sheets to deliver a real conversational flow, not a one shot reply.

Who is this for

Vietnamese SMEs, e-commerce shops, restaurants, clinics, real estate brokers, training centers, and any business already using Zalo Bot Platform that wants to:

- Reply 24/7 in natural Vietnamese without hiring more staff - Track every customer in a free Google Sheets CRM - Showcase products and pricing on demand - Escalate complex requests to a human agent - Use AI to handle long tail questions

How it works

1. Receive Zalo Message triggers on every text message sent to your bot. 2. Set Configuration holds your business name, hotline, product photo URL, pricing, sheet ID, and admin Zalo ID (plug and play). 3. Extract Customer Info parses the Zalo payload (message.from.id, message.chat.id, message.from.displayname, message.text, message.messageid) into clean fields. 4. Lookup Customer in CRM reads the Google Sheets Customers tab and filters by senderId to detect new vs returning customers. 5. Is New Customer? branches the flow: - New customer: append a row to Customers, send a welcome sticker (sendSticker), send a Vietnamese welcome message (sendMessage), then Listen Welcome Reply uses getUpdates to wait for the user's first response. - Returning customer: route directly to intent detection. 6. Normalize After Listen and Normalize Returning unify both paths into a single messageText and messageOriginal field, so downstream nodes work regardless of source. 7. Detect Intent is a Switch node with 4 keyword rules plus an AI fallback. Each rule matches both Vietnamese with diacritics and unaccented variants: - menu (menu, dịch vụ) - products (sản phẩm, demo, giải pháp) - pricing (giá, báo giá, chi phí) - human (người thật, tư vấn, liên hệ, hỗ trợ) - default routes to Gemini AI reply 8. Send Menu, Send Product Photo, and Send Pricing handle the matched intents using sendMessage and sendPhoto. 9. Log Escalation writes a row to Conversations and Acknowledge Escalation confirms receipt to the customer. 10. Gemini AI Reply generates a friendly Vietnamese reply using Google Gemini 2.0 Flash with full business context. 11. Send AI Reply delivers the response back via Zalo Bot. 12. Log Conversation appends every message and reply to the Conversations sheet so you can review chats and improve the bot.