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

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Created by: THE NEXOVA || thenexova
THE NEXOVA

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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.display_name, message.text, message.message_id) 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.

What makes this template different

  • Full conversational flow, not just a one shot auto reply
  • Two path normalization: the welcome reply path and the returning customer path converge into a single intent router
  • Vietnamese first: keyword matching, AI prompts, and replies all handle Vietnamese with diacritics natively
  • Free CRM: ready to copy Google Sheets template included, no database setup required
  • Uses every operation of the Zalo Bot community node
  • Production patterns: customer state tracking, conversation logging, human escalation, and AI fallback, all in one workflow

Requirements

  • Self hosted n8n (community nodes are not available on n8n Cloud)
  • Community node: n8n-nodes-zalo-platform
  • A Zalo Bot created via Zalo Bot Manager inside the Zalo app (gives you a Bot Token in the format bot_id:secret_key). This is not Zalo Official Account.
  • Google account with access to Google Sheets and Google Gemini (free tier from Google AI Studio)

How to set up

  1. Install the community node via Settings > Community Nodes: n8n-nodes-zalo-platform
  2. Create credentials for Zalo Bot, Google Sheets OAuth2, and Google Gemini
  3. Get the Google Sheets CRM template (ready to copy):
    • Open: Google Sheets CRM template
    • File > Make a copy
    • The template already contains both tabs:
      • Customers: senderId | name | firstSeen | lastSeen | messageCount
      • Conversations: timestamp | senderId | name | messageId | message | intent | reply
  4. Copy your new Sheet ID from the URL (between /d/ and /edit) and paste it into the Set Configuration node googleSheetId field
  5. Edit Set Configuration with your business name, hotline, product photo URL, and pricing text
  6. Activate the workflow. The webhook is auto registered with Zalo Bot Platform.
  7. Send a message to your bot to test. Try keywords: menu, sản phẩm, giá, người thật, or any free form question.

How to customize

  • Add more intents to the Switch node (booking, refund, shipping, address lookup)
  • Replace Google Sheets with Airtable, Notion, Postgres, or Supabase for a real database
  • Send order confirmations with sendPhoto (QR code, invoice image)
  • Send promotional stickers on Tet, Black Friday, or seasonal events
  • Add a Schedule Trigger to broadcast daily promotions to all customers in the CRM
  • Plug in your website knowledge base via Retrieval Augmented Generation
  • Switch Gemini for OpenAI, Claude, or a self hosted local model
  • Add an Hours Of Operation check to send a different reply outside business hours

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