EP Concierge

EP Concierge puts a floating AI chat bubble on the public side of a PageMotor site. It knows the business (services, prices, and FAQs from its settings, plus live booking data), answers visitor questions, points people to the booking page, and captures enquiries which are emailed to the owner. It is the only bot in the EP AI line-up that your site’s visitors actually talk to.

Published by ElmsPark Studio.

Overview

A visitor clicks the chat bubble, asks a question, and gets an answer grounded in what you have told the assistant about your business. Behind the scenes:

1. The visitor’s message (plus recent conversation history) goes to your configured LLM provider with a system prompt built from your persona, your knowledge text, and live booking data.
2. If the visitor wants to be contacted or to make a booking enquiry, the assistant collects a name, a way to reach them, and their message, then calls its one tool: capture enquiry. The enquiry is emailed to the owner.
3. The reply comes back to the chat bubble. Conversations can be logged for the owner to review, with automatic retention-based deletion.

Read-only by design. The assistant has no access to the site or its data beyond what you put in its knowledge. It cannot edit pages, run queries, or touch files. The one exception is live booking data: if EP Booking or EP Boarding is installed, current prices, services, and the weekly availability schedule are read into the system prompt automatically, so the assistant quotes real prices and real opening days rather than guessing.

Guardrails are built into the prompt: the assistant is instructed to answer only about this business, never to invent prices, dates, availability, or policies, and to state availability exactly as the live schedule gives it.

Supported providers

Provider	Models
OpenAI	GPT-4o mini (fast, economical), GPT-4o, GPT-4.1 mini
DeepSeek	DeepSeek Chat
Anthropic (Claude)	Claude Haiku 4.5 (fast, economical), Claude Sonnet 4.6

You bring your own API key, billed per message to your own provider account. The model list in settings narrows to the chosen provider, and the backend validates the pairing too, so a provider/model mismatch can never break the chat. Cheaper, faster models (mini, Haiku) are ideal for a website chat.

Requirements

• PageMotor 0.9 or later
• An API key from OpenAI, DeepSeek, or Anthropic
• EP Email (recommended). Enquiries are sent through EP Email when it is active, so they are deliverable and logged; without it the plugin falls back to PHP mail().
• EP Booking / EP Boarding (optional). When present, live prices and the weekly availability schedule are fed to the assistant automatically.

Installation

1. ep-concierge.zip comes with an EP Suite licence, and ElmsPark supplies it directly (see EP Suite plugins); after install it updates through your site’s Updates screen.
2. Upload via Plugins → Manage Plugins. Activate.
3. Open Plugin Settings → EP Concierge, set the provider and API key, tick Enable chat assistant, and fill in the knowledge box.

The chat bubble only appears once the plugin is enabled and an API key is saved.

Settings

• Enable chat assistant. Master switch. Shows or hides the bubble for visitors.
• AI provider. OpenAI, DeepSeek, or Anthropic (Claude). The Model list updates to match.
• API key. Your key for the chosen provider (OpenAI sk-..., DeepSeek, or Anthropic sk-ant-...).
• Model. Which model answers the chat. Only models for the selected provider are shown.
• Assistant name. The name shown in the chat header.
• Opening greeting. The first message a visitor sees when they open the chat.
• Input placeholder. The hint text in the message box.
• Accent colour. Optional hex colour so the bubble matches your brand.
• Send enquiries to. Where captured enquiries are emailed. Defaults to your booking admin email.
• Persona / role. Who the assistant is — its tone and manner. Five presets (friendly, warm and reassuring, professional, knowledgeable specialist, upbeat and playful) plus Custom, which uses the box below.
• Custom persona. Your own persona text, used only when Persona is set to Custom.
• Knowledge. Everything the assistant should know: services, FAQs, policies, prices. This is what it knows, as opposed to who it is. Live booking prices are added automatically.
• Privacy note. An optional short line shown beneath the chat input (for example “Chats may be saved so we can follow up”). Recommended whenever logging is on.
• Keep conversation logs for (days). Retention is the single logging control: 0 turns logging off entirely; any other number logs conversations and auto-deletes them after that many days. Default 90.

Below the settings, a Recent conversations panel shows the last 25 logged chats — expandable transcripts, each marked when it produced an enquiry, each with a Delete this conversation button.

Privacy and data protection

The plugin is built for data minimisation:

• No IP addresses are stored with conversation logs.
• Retention is automatic. Logged chats are purged after the configured number of days; setting retention to 0 disables logging entirely.
• Right to erasure. Any individual conversation can be deleted from the settings page, which removes it from the database immediately.
• Privacy note. The optional line under the chat input tells visitors their conversation may be stored. Mention chat logging in your privacy policy when logging is on.

Abuse protection

• Same-origin only. The chat endpoint rejects requests whose Origin or Referer does not match the site.
• CSRF protected. A frontend token is required on every chat request.
• Rate limited. 25 messages per 10 minutes per visitor IP, protecting your API key (and your bill) from spam. Rate-limited visitors are asked to wait rather than shown an error.

Database tables

• {prefix}ep_concierge_chats — logged conversations: session id, timestamps, message count, enquiry flag, transcript JSON. Created on first use; only exists when logging is on.

Troubleshooting

“The chat bubble doesn’t appear”

Check both conditions: Enable chat assistant is ticked and an API key is saved. The bubble is hidden unless both are true.

“The assistant says it is not available right now”

Same two conditions checked server-side. If both are set, the API key may be rejected by the provider — check it matches the selected provider (Anthropic keys start sk-ant-, OpenAI keys start sk-).

“Visitors get ‘Please reload the page and try again’”

The CSRF token has expired or the page was cached without one. A reload fixes it. If it persists behind an aggressive page cache, exclude the page from caching cookies.

“Enquiries are not arriving”

Check Send enquiries to holds a valid address (or that your booking admin email is set). If EP Email is installed, check its delivery log; if not, delivery depends on your host’s PHP mail(), which is unreliable — install EP Email.

“The assistant quotes wrong opening days or prices”

Live schedule and prices come from EP Booking / EP Boarding when installed. If those plugins are not present, the assistant only knows what is in the Knowledge box — keep it current.

“No conversations are being logged”

Retention is set to 0, which is the off switch. Set a number of days to start logging.

Feedback and corrections

For a quick question about this plugin, EP Support inside your admin is the fastest option. The chat widget sits on every EP plugin settings page and knows which one you’re on, with starter questions and links preloaded for that exact screen.

For anything bigger — a bug report, a feature request, or a “how do I…” that needs a real reply — open a ticket at help.elmspark.com. A real person, helped by AI, writes the reply. Usually within a few hours. Tickets don’t disappear into the void.

Changelog

1.3.9

• The chat copes better when the AI service is busy. When OpenAI, Claude, DeepSeek or Kimi says it is overloaded or limiting requests, the assistant now tries up to three times instead of two, and waits as long as the service asks (a few seconds at most, since a visitor is waiting) instead of a fixed two seconds.
• No more pointless second try when your AI account is out of credit. The assistant now gives up at once, so the visitor sees your contact details straight away.
• Nothing to do after updating. What visitors see when the assistant cannot answer is unchanged.

1.3.8

• Safer links in chat replies. A reply can no longer smuggle extra code into a link in the chat window.
• Each conversation’s id now comes from your site, signed so a visitor cannot pick one and overwrite someone else’s saved conversation.
• A limit on enquiry emails. The assistant emails you at most 3 enquiries an hour from any one visitor, and 20 a day in total (adjustable under “Most enquiry emails per day”).
• New setting for sites behind Cloudflare or a proxy: “Visitor address comes from” lets the per-visitor limits see each visitor’s own address, so one busy visitor cannot pause the chat for everyone.
• Lighter public pages. The status cards and saved conversations are only loaded when an admin opens the EP Concierge screen.
• Nothing to do after updating. Conversations already in progress when you update simply start a new saved conversation.

1.3.7

• Security fix: your AI provider key is now stored encrypted and shown as a password field. A key saved earlier keeps working and is moved across automatically.
• New: a daily limit for the whole site. Set “Most chat messages per day” (500 if left blank) so the chat can never run up more than you expect. When it is reached, visitors are pointed to your contact details until the next day.
• Fairer, firmer limits per visitor. The 25-messages-in-10-minutes limit is now counted exactly, even when lots of people chat at once, and people on modern (IPv6) connections can no longer get round it by changing address.

1.3.6

• Settings language menu. The language menu in this plugin’s settings now lists only the languages it is actually translated into, plus English, so you can no longer pick a language that changes nothing.
• Section status. Each settings section shows whether that feature is switched on. On a site that also runs an older EP plugin, the section shows its plain title instead.
• Removes a function call that PHP 8.5 reports as deprecated, so it no longer fills your error log.

1.3.5

• Fixes a doubled cache-busting tag on its stylesheet and scripts. On PageMotor 0.11 and later the page asked for each file with two version tags on the end of its address (?v=…?v=…), because the core had started adding its own tag and the plugin was still adding one too. The files loaded correctly, so nothing was visibly broken; the addresses were just malformed and every cache saw a longer key than it needed. The plugin now leaves the tag to the core on 0.11 and later, and still adds its own on older cores, where nothing else would.
• No change to what these files do.

1.3.4

• Fixes “Your session has expired. Please reload to ensure your security.” on PageMotor 0.11. The message appeared on this plugin’s admin screens even though you were signed in perfectly normally, and whatever you were doing failed to save.
• Nothing was wrong with your session. PageMotor 0.11 started handling part of the security check that this plugin was already handling itself, and the two together made every save look invalid. The plugin now checks whether PageMotor has already done it.
• Visitors who were not signed in were never affected, on any version.
• There is nothing to reconfigure, and nothing else changed.
• Also fixes the plugin never appearing on your Updates screen. PageMotor only offers updates for a plugin that tells it where to look, and this one never did, so it has been invisible to the update check since release. That is corrected here, but the fix cannot deliver itself: to get onto this version you need to upload it once by hand. After that, updates arrive normally.