(EN) How to make an online chat for clients on WordPress and get paid for it?

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4 min read

Disculpa, pero esta entrada está disponible sólo en Inglés Estadounidense y Ruso.

Our plugin Book an appointment online PRO is basically an appointment booking system. With it you can easily make an appointment with a doctor, lawyer, tutor, beauty salon, car repair shop, and so on. Currently, especially after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, some of these services have begun to be provided remotely.

For such services, we have added the possibility of video conferencing – a convenient way to communicate with clients remotely and directly on your website. In this post I would like to tell you a little more about one of the features of our video conferencing service – built-in online chat .

So, for example, you provide consultation. Here are a few examples that are most common now: telemedicine, tutoring, lawyer advice, clairvoyant services. You can provide them remotely and want to get paid for it.

To do this, you just need to have a site on WordPress and our plugin. You can read about plugin configuration in our documentation or see video (don’t forget to subscribe to our channel). After the plugin is configured, payment methods are enabled, a schedule of services has been drawn up, we just need to create a page with the booking form. For example, it might look like this .

Your client goes to this page, chooses a convenient date and time for a consultation, chooses services (if you have several of them), pays in a convenient way, and then receives a link to the online chat page.

At the appointed time, a video conference with a built-in online chat will be available via this link. Looking ahead, I will say that Book an appointment online PRO does not provide for displaying the conference page only with chat or vice versa only with video. We will add this feature in future versions, but for now you can use the following CSS style, which you need to place in Additional styles of your theme:


.oz_conference_page .sidebar {
width:100%;
}
#oz_conference .video-screen {
display:none;
}
.oz_appointment_info .swiper {
display:none;
}
@media (max-width: 767px) {
.sidebar {
position: relative;
top: 0;
}
}

If you did everything correctly, the chat page will look something like this

 

Main Chat Features

  • Time Limit
    The chat will be available for as long as the appointment lasts.
  • Real-time communication
    Instant messaging.
  • Interlocutor status
    You can see the interlocutor online or not. Whether he prints a message for you or not.
    status
  • File Sharing
    You can easily send different types of files: pictures, documents, tables
  • Emoji
    The ability to exchange the already familiar emoji

 

Additional benefits of using live chat in our plugin

In addition to online chat, you get a full-fledged appointment system. This means that you can not only exchange messages, but also monitor the statistics of dialogs, the number of upcoming and past conversations and use other useful functions of our plugin.
The plugin has the functionality of recurring appointments. This will allow your clients to pay for several dialogues at once (for example, take a distance course of treatment, training, etc.)

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