When visitors come to your office, is your organization putting its best foot forward? Do visitors know where to go and what procedures to follow in order to secure parking, check in, find their contact, and locate their meetings?
Every organization should have a well-refined set of processes and technologies that define interactions with guests who come to the office. However, in many cases, visitor experience management has been left out of corporate digital transformation. If your organization is managing visitors with a paper guest logbook and the telephone, it may be time for a visitor management system.
Recently, FM:Systems presented a panel discussion about visitor experience and visitor management. The panel included our top experts in visitor management, who shared insights about the current challenges with visitor experience in this new era of hybrid workplaces. They also explained how a visitor management solution can help overcome those challenges. In this article, we will present some of the highlights and key takeaways from the session, but if you want more detail, please view the on-demand webinar in full.
Challenges to Good Visitor Experience
People who visit your building(s) probably include customers and clients, business partners, visiting employees from different locations, contractors, prospective job candidates, vendors and suppliers. You want to impress these people, so they will buy your products, become your partners, or join your team. The visitor experience should reflect your brand and organizational values.
Ideally, their visit would progress with efficiency, ease and convenience. Unfortunately, many companies have disorganized, inefficient check-in procedures. Beyond first-line door security, these organizations do not know where visitors go within the building, and they don’t have good ways to connect visitors with the people and places they need to see. And in the new COVID-19 reality, paper-based logbooks lack secure, compliant data privacy for visitor data that pertains to health and safety.
How Does Visitor Management Technology Improve Experience?
A visitor management system welcomes guests to the building and provides the tools, information, and data management to ensure they have a good experience on campus. There are six primary ways a visitor management solution supports and strengthens the visitor experience:
- Building security
- Health and safety
- Compliance with data privacy
- Superior visitor experience
- Statistics and analytics
- Overall efficiency of the visitor experience
Manage Your Visitor Experience from Check-In to Check-Out
When a guest moves through your building, it should feel like a smooth journey and not a series of clunky, disjointed steps. A visitor management system helps ensure a positive, safe, and convenient visitor experience from check-in to check-out.
Before they arrive onsite, do your visitors know where they can park? Where to go to check-in? A visitor management system can empower guests—or the employees sponsoring guests—to pre-register for arrival and receive instructions that will make their experience easier and eliminate visitor uncertainty and anxiety.
Once visitors have checked in, verified health information such as vaccination status, and been given a badge, where should they go next? They’re either in the office for a meeting or coming in to work onsite and collaborate with employees. A sponsoring employee can come collect them or they can be given directions to the meeting room or desk reserved for their use. A visitor management app provides real-time information about meeting room location or workspace reservations.
As an example, here’s how FMS:Visitor handles the visitor experience. Pre-registration features enable you to pre-book visitors. Then those visitors have the opportunity to pre-register and watch any induction or safety videos, plus provide proof of vaccination if required, and book parking if possible. When visitors arrive onsite, check-in is streamlined, touchless, and very quick. The host employee gets notified automatically. Visitor badges are printed automatically.
Increase Safety and Security While Reducing Compliance Risk
Visitor management helps organizations increase security, strengthen health and safety, and reduce compliance risk while providing a superior visitor journey. With a full visitor management system in place, organizations can:
- Close physical security gaps in buildings and ensure visitors know safety protocols such as where the emergency exit points are located.
- Protect health and comply with vaccination mandates by tracking whether visitors and contractors are fully vaccinated.
- Ensure compliance with data privacy regulations by collecting consent from visitors for the use of workplace data such as badge swipes, vaccination status, and reservation system data.
- Learn more about how facilities are used with analytics that examine the number of visitors, how long they stay, and where they go within the building, as well as meeting room bookings, and more.
FMS:Visitor can be tailored to an organization’s specific needs, because different industries have different safety and security and compliance concerns.
Streamline the Visitor Experience and Reinforce Your Brand
When people visit your offices, they should come away impressed. That won’t happen if your visitor management processes waste their time or fail to efficiently connect them with the people they are visiting. A visitor management system will streamline and simplify every step of the visitor experience while reinforcing your organization’s positive brand image.
At every point in the day, visitors know where to go and how to find people they need to meet. They aren’t forced to wait in line to check in, or wait for a receptionist to get off a phone call before contacting their host, or sit in the lobby waiting to be collected. Through automation, your organization streamlines the visitor’s day and demonstrates respect for their time.
Visitor management also saves your organization time. And as the saying goes, ‘time is money.’ In fact, an organization that hosts 100 visitors per day through a full visitor management system can save up to $30,000 each month through time savings alone.
As you can see, managing visitor experience can be just as important as managing the visitors themselves. How you treat guests says a lot about your organization. A visitor management system can help make sure visitor experience stays in alignment with brand values.
