Visitor Management Systems

When you arrive at an office or building for a meeting, appointment, or to visit a friend or family member, you usually speak with a front desk person. Depending on the nature of the business you are visiting, you may need to receive a badge or simply wait for someone to come get you from the reception area. However, as technology continues to advance, we are seeing less and less human interaction at the front desk. It is now common to be greeted with a tablet, or monitor to check yourself in. Generally, this process involves selecting who you are there to meet, which generates a notification to that employee to come to the front desk to meet you. We call this a Visitor Management System, and it can be customized to fit pretty much any business need or security level.

Visitor Management is a system that essentially allows you to track every single person who enters your building or space. This includes customers, partners, visitors, delivery people, job applicants, your CEO’s first cousin, or the plumber who is there to fix the overflowing breakroom sink. Basically, it tracks everyone who isn’t a full-time employee. The old school way of checking in by writing your name and the time you signed in/out is replaced by a formal system. In most cases people forget to check out and then you are sitting there wondering if that plumber is still in the building. With a formal visitor management system everything is tracked for you, and you can require full information on a person before the system prints out a badge for them.  

On of our partners, NEC, created a great video highlighting their front desk assistant solution. This solution focuses solely on the visitors check in and check out process. They also incorporate the use of facial recognition and security camera integration in this video.

The Pros of a Visitor Management System:

• Contact information capture of each person who enters your building or office
• Accurate check in and check out time for visitors
• Security camera and facial recognition integration capability to understand visitors’ movements throughout your space
• Cost reduction in the form of not needing to staff receptionists
• A deeper understanding of visitor volume, and who employees are meeting with
• Stronger security enforcement from the time the doors open in the morning, to the time they close at the end of the day.

The Cons of Visitor Management Systems:

• Less human to human contact
• A technology system that will need to be monitored and updated by your team or by a third party
• Visitor frustration if they struggle with using technology

As with anything you decide to implement into your business, there are pros and cons. If your business prides itself on having a human feel and you want to maintain a brand image where visitors are welcomed by a smiling front desk person, then this solution may not be for you. If you require a high level of security or see quite a bit of visitor traffic, you might benefit from having a more accurate and reliable system in place. All businesses are unique, and visitor management systems can largely be customized to fit any environment. If you are considering the implementation of front desk assistant or something similar, we are here to answer your questions. Contact us at any time to gather information or ideas on how this technology can fit into your workplace.

Contact us at any time to gather information or ideas on how this technology can fit into your workplace.