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Max for Business: connecting Russia's new messenger to your CRM

Max opened a business section. What it offers, where the limits are, and how to move to a new channel without losing customer history.

Published: 2026-04-07

At the end of March, Max, the national messenger VK launched in Russia in 2025, added a "Max for Business" section: a company signs up from a smartphone, passes verification and gets bots, mini apps and CRM integrations. Signing up is easy. The harder part is switching messengers without losing customers and conversation history. The short answer: conversations belong in your CRM, and a messenger is just one channel to reach a customer.

What opened on March 31

The section sits in the profile of the mobile app. The steps are:

  • update the app and open "Max for Business" in your profile;
  • create a company profile following the step-by-step guide;
  • pass mandatory verification — the owner or an official representative does it via Gosuslugi (Russia's government services portal) or a partner bank;
  • connect the tools you need: chatbots, mini apps, a channel, ready-made integrations with CRMs and bot platforms, and "Digital ID" for checking a customer's age or eligibility for discounts.

The partner platform itself has been running since October 23, 2025, but access was opened in stages. First came companies with apps in RuStore (a Russian app store), then from November 12 companies registered on the SME.RF portal. More than 5,000 organizations joined in the first two weeks, and over 220,000 by the end of March. Now the path for small businesses is shorter: everything happens inside the messenger.

Why this matters now

In February, Russian businesses lost a familiar channel. On February 11, Izvestia, citing Kommersant, reported that whatsapp.com and web.whatsapp.com had disappeared from Russia's National Domain Name System, and WhatsApp effectively stopped working in the country. WhatsApp itself said Russia had tried to fully block the app. In the same days, the regulator Roskomnadzor announced new restrictions on Telegram.

Max kept growing: according to VK, by March 2026 more than 107 million people had registered, and daily active users exceeded 77 million. These are the company's own figures with no independent audit, but the takeaway is clear: some of your customers are already there, and more will follow.

The real risk is customer history, not the channel

In small businesses, customer conversations often live on managers' phones: in personal WhatsApp, a work Telegram account, in notes. While the channel works, nobody notices. When customers move to another messenger, the old channel takes agreements, order history, contacts and context with it — none of that will move to Max on its own.

The rule that fixes this: a customer is a record in the CRM, and messengers are ways to reach them. Then moving from WhatsApp to Max or Telegram means a new channel on the same record, not a new customer from scratch.

What belongs in the CRM record, not in the messenger:

DataWhy
Phone number and contactsMatch a customer in Max with the same person from WhatsApp or SMS
Request and order historyManagers see context even when a customer writes in a new channel
Agreements and statusesNot lost when an employee leaves or the channel changes
Preferred channelMessage customers where they actually reply
Marketing opt-outsDon't message people in a new channel who already asked you not to

The key to matching is the phone number. If the bot or a manager confirms the number in the first conversation, the CRM finds the existing record and pulls up the history. Skip this step and the same customer ends up in your database three times.

We solved this in our own product, DialIQ: messages from Max, Telegram, WhatsApp, SMS and website chat arrive in one inbox instead of on employees' phones. An AI operator answers from the company's knowledge base and hands complex conversations to a person, and REST API and webhooks pass conversations to your CRM; the service works without a VPN. It is not the only option: a ready-made CRM integration with Max or custom development can do the same.

Bot, mini app or channel

Max offers three tools, and they solve different problems.

TaskToolWhy
FAQs, order statusChatbotConversational, quick to launch, easy to connect to a CRM
Booking a service at a chosen timeBot or mini appA bot for a simple schedule, a mini app for a slot grid and multiple branches
Catalog, cart, checkoutMini appNeeds a full interface; chat is awkward for this
News, promotions, useful contentChannelOne-way broadcast to subscribers

Start with a bot: it is the shortest way to let customers reach you in Max while requests land in your CRM. A mini app makes sense when you have a catalog or complex booking and are ready to maintain it.

A bot doesn't have to be a button menu. In our practice, an AI booking bot for a salon chain chats with customers on the website and in a messenger, picks a service and time from the live schedule, creates the booking in the CRM and hands tricky cases to an administrator. First-line costs dropped by about 30%. The same approach carries over to Max: the channel changes, the logic and CRM integration stay.

Limitations to keep in mind

  • Not every customer will move. Some will stay in Telegram, some will keep using WhatsApp while they can, some only answer SMS. Betting on a single messenger repeats February's mistake.
  • History doesn't transfer. WhatsApp conversations stay in WhatsApp. If they were never in the CRM, you'll restore them by hand or lose them.
  • Verification is required. You can't create a company profile without it, and the owner or an official representative must do it — plan time for that.
  • The platform is young. Access rules changed several times in six months. Build the integration so the channel can be swapped without rebuilding the CRM.
  • Audience figures come from the platform owner. Only your own request statistics will show how many of your customers are actually in Max.

What this means for your business

For companies that sold and booked through WhatsApp, Max is an obvious replacement for the main channel, and now you can connect without intermediaries. But the winner is not whoever launches a bot first — it's the business whose customer base doesn't depend on any single messenger.

If you already have a CRM, the job is to plug Max in as one more channel. If conversations still live on managers' phones, start there: a messenger switch is a good reason to get your CRM and customer operations in order.

A 1–2 week launch checklist

  1. Days 1–2. Profile and verification. Update the app, create the company profile, pass verification. Decide who owns the channel.
  2. Days 3–5. Scenarios and CRM link. Pick the 3–5 most common requests: booking, order status, prices, addresses. Connect the bot to the CRM through a ready-made integration or API so every request creates or finds a record by phone number.
  3. Days 6–8. Testing and human handoff. Test the scenarios on employees. Check separately how a conversation moves from the bot to a manager and where the manager sees the customer's history.
  4. Days 9–10. Tell your customers. Announce the new channel where customers already know you: newsletter, website, SMS, at the checkout. Don't shut down the old channels.
  5. Days 11–14. Metrics. Track how many requests came from Max, how many became orders, and how many the bot closed without a person. Use these numbers to decide whether you need a mini app and an AI agent on the first line.

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