This article has been updated since it was last published in 2020
In the era of the digital transformation virtual meeting rooms have become commonplace. Whether it’s a banking representative meeting with a client, a doctor consulting remotely with a patient, or a sales agent conducting a product demo for a potential buyer, more often than not, meetings occur online in a virtual office or meeting room via video consultation.
Although popularized by the exigencies of the COVID-19 pandemic which demanded social distancing, usage of virtual meeting room apps are showing no signs of slowing down. In the following we will take a brief look at the advantages of using virtual meeting rooms and then take you on a tour of the Q-Consultation virtual room application. As a white label solution built on the powerful QuickBlox platform, Q-Consultation provides everything you need to hold secure private meetings, including high quality communication features, administrative tools, and a real-time queue.
Read more about: Meet Q-Consultation: Virtual Meeting Room White-Label Solution
What is a Virtual Meeting Room?
A virtual meeting room is a digital on-line version of any meeting room in real life. Through the use of high-quality audio and video calling, the user can replicate an in-person appointment. First, an invitation can be sent with a link to join the meeting. While one participant can join a meeting with the provider, another participant can be held in a queue. Oftentimes there are other features such as file sharing, note taking, and the ability to record the session.
The difference between an ordinary messaging app and a virtual-room application is that in the latter, owners/interviewers are expected to stay in the room while more users can come in, chat for a while, and then leave. Or, put another way, a large number of users can come in at a similar time and be held in separate waiting rooms, and the owner/interviewer can join them when ready. In this scenario the virtual room operates as both a waiting room and a meeting room.
Contrast the ease of using virtual room apps with applications like Skype where you would have to do so much more work to add people, have a meeting, end the call, save information about them in a separate application, and then invite a new person to a new call all over again.
Moreover, virtual room applications have been designed with extra features that are important and specific to the nature of the meeting/interview involved, such as information and document saving, file-sharing, SMS registration, and much more.
Learn more about: How Virtual Waiting Rooms can Improve your Business Enterprise
Who needs a virtual meeting room App?
Virtual room apps can be used in a variety of use cases, such as a remote testing room for students in educational institutions, or a doctor-patient communication application where doctors can virtually communicate with patients rather than requiring them to attend hospitals in person. Company HR personnel can use virtual room apps for recruitment purposes, interviewing candidates remotely. The boom in e-commerce has made private video-calls with personal shoppers or for the purpose of product demos commonplace. The use cases are endless.
Learn more about: Doctor-Patient Communication with Q-Consultation
Create Virtual Rooms with Q-Consultation
Q-Consultation from QuickBlox offers an easy and cost-efficient solution to create a virtual room application for your company or organization. Q-Consultation is a white-label web-based solution that is adaptable to mobile web browsers so that it can work on iOS and Android. It enables users to conduct high-quality video calling and chat messaging. It can be customized, rebranded and integrated into your company domain.
The backend platform (QuickBlox) can be deployed either on a public cloud (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc) or on-premise, according to the customer’s needs. The application is built on top of the QuickBlox Communication-as-a-Service (CPaaS) backend, ensuring high-quality services and support when needed.
A tour of Q-Consultation
Q-Consultation offers a generic virtual meeting room UI and UX. There are two sets of UIs, one for the owner/provider (e.g. healthcare professional, HR recruiter, Banking representative) and another set for the end user/client (e.g. patient, candidate, customer). QuickBlox has also created several flavors of their UI to cater for distinct business use cases.
Let’s look at these two views of the Q-Consultation meeting room. The following descriptions and images are based on the desktop version and cover healthcare, HR, and finance use cases.
Provider View of the Meeting Room
When a provider logs into the Q-Consultation platform their initial view looks similar to the screen below.
Starting from the left hand side of the screen:
Live Queue/Waiting Room – they are able to view the “waiting room” to see who is the current queue and who was waiting previously, with wait times included. The colored circle indicates the level of priority assigned to each waiting client.
Schedule – By clicking on the “Schedule” tab the provider gets a view of their scheduled appointments for the day.
In the middle panel they can learn more about a specific client / patient.
About – The fields in this section can be customized. By default, the provider can review background details about the client, add new notes before, during and after the video call and review a list of video recordings.
Chat – the provider can view their chat history with a client. They can also chat in real-time with any clients currently waiting in the queue, for example, requesting additional information or a document before the actual video appointment begins.
History – They can see a history of recorded video sessions.
Once they’re ready, the provider can begin a call by pressing the phone icon, which takes them to a screen like this.
Now the virtual meeting has begun. The provider has the option to record the session, mute the sound, turn off the camera, share their screen, enlarge the screen, or end the call.
All the while they are in this virtual meeting they can keep an eye on the Live Queue/Waiting Room to see if their next client has joined the queue and is waiting, as well as check their Schedule for the day.
They also have the option to Chat while in the video meeting, for example, messaging their next client waiting in the live queue that they are running 5 minutes late, or sending the person they are having a video call with a chat message or attachment. They can also take notes throughout the call.
Once the consultation is over the provider can end the video call which will remove the client from the meeting room, holding them in a “waiting room” area, while they prepare notes, which they can then share with the waiting client. Then without leaving the app, the provider can select the next client in the queue to begin the next video consultation.
Client’s view of the Virtual Meeting Room
A provider can invite a user to a meeting by sending a SMS code to their mobile phone, or a link via email. Q-Consultation provides a variety of ways to implement login and authentication methods.
Once they enter the code, the user will join a queue in the virtual waiting room until the provider is ready for them.
The waiting room can be customized to meet the needs of the use case.
This is an example Q-Consultation virtual waiting room for healthcare:
The patient is informed they are waiting in a queue.
They have the option to add further details to the “Consultation Topic” they wish to discuss.
Alternatively, a provider might choose to show a video, or advertise a particular product or service in their virtual waiting room.
To the left of the screen is a chat panel that supports file-sharing. Before the video call begins, in-app chat can be used for collecting additional data and, in the medical use case, for conducting triage.
The look and text of the waiting room can be modified. You can also rebrand with your own company logo.
Once the provider starts the call, the user enters a meeting room, where they have a full view of the provider.
They can also continue to chat and send and receive documents throughout the call.
Once the video call ends the user will return to the waiting room. At this point they can end the call completely, or wait to receive further communication from the provider.
In addition to the virtual room, Q-Consultation offers a variety of additional features, including appointment scheduling, creating client and provider profiles, sending appointment invites and more. Everything is recorded and used in the system itself and no 3rd-party tools are needed.
Why use Q-Consultation for Virtual Rooms?
In additional to its many great features, Q-Consultation comes with a level of security unavailable when you rely on mainstream communication apps like Skype and Zoom and others. Neither your data nor your client’s is encrypted or under your control and the companies behind these messaging applications can terminate you at any time.
Q-Consultation is built on the QuickBlox backend, which you can control and even install onto your own public/private cloud, which means added security for your data. Furthermore, Q-Consultation includes significant security features including encryption and GDPR and HIPAA compliance software. This means you can share and store sensitive information with full confidence that it is secure.
Some people may consider developing their own virtual room applications from scratch rather than using a white-label solution like Q-Consultation, but the money, time, and effort needed to do this would be far greater.
Q-Consultation is a high-quality communication application powered by a QuickBlox backend and is ready to use now.
Find our more about: Is Zoom for Healthcare HIPAA Compliant?
How to get Q-Consultation?
Simply contact our team to get you started with a live demo.
Customers wishing to use Q-Consultation can run the source code for free or pay for a managed Premium version. The Q-Consultation team is also capable of implementing additional customizations and add-ons for enterprise users who require more features.
Conclusion
Virtual rooms apps are a flexible practical tool for facilitating remote communication. Rather than depending on non-customized messaging apps to do the task or building an app from scratch, Q-Consultation is a great option. Customizable, with an abundance of relevant features, secure and safe, HIPAA and GDPR compliant, and built on a tried and trusted QuickBlox backend, Q-Consultation is a solid choice for a pre-made Virtual Room app.
If you have any further questions or comments, you can contact us.
