How can businesses benefit from a visitor management system? In today’s blog, we will introduce 8 powerful visitor management system benefits that you need to know.
With so many market offerings, we will look into details about why we call ourselves ‘revolutionary’ visitor management and how we stand out from the competition. The topics cover:
- What are the benefits of the visitor management system?
- How can you choose the most suitable software supplier?
- Summary & free resources and tools to help you build a business case
There are multiple market offerings for visitor management, but the purpose of implementing the right solution is not only to provide a great first impression to visitors and employees but also to have the right tools for the Facilities Manager and your reception staff to manage visitors without putting in the extra effort.
Virtual reception systems combine technology, security, communication and analytics. Without changing your workflow, or adding more processes and headaches to your daily tasks at work. It is designed to be flexible, customisable, and easily integrated into your existing software.
Click to download our free visitor management guides tailored for your persona
8 Benefits of Visitor Management Systems
Most visitor management starts with one simple task: to improve the all-important first impression. However, in this era, combing people and technology is more powerful than you think and delivers the following benefits:
- Cut out manual processes and improve digital efficiency
- Support your front desk staff to deliver a more personalised customer service
- Fully customisable workflow and the system is designed to be customised
- Enhance workplace safety
- Employee well-being
- A WOW first impression for visitors
- Cost reduction
- Help you stay compliant and handle your visitor’s data properly
Let us explain it in detail.
1. Cut out manual processes and improve digital efficiency
Have you ever faced the problem that your reception is not aware of meeting changes and the updated visitor list?
Thousands of meetings change in size, date and time yet tasks can sometimes be overlooked; changing details with caterers or cleaners. Any change in meeting times might lead to your front desk being unable to identify visitors.
The concept of digital efficiency is based on removing manual processes and parts of workflows that require multiple touches. Amongst visitor management challenges, most facilities managers aren’t aware of this visitor management system’s benefits – every meeting’s update in Microsoft Outlook can automatically update visitor management systems.
What does that mean? You don’t need to re-key the visitor details or manually update the visitor management system.
2. Support your front desk staff to deliver a more personalised customer service
We recently published a blog about whether self-service kiosks are supplementing or substituting receptionists. Although visitor management systems deliver cost benefits by removing the reception staff, we believe a combination of people and technology is the way forward to deliver the best customer service and reception management. Let us explain why.
The image above showcases the unpredictable and fluctuating visitor traffic to the office throughout the day. If you have staff on standby for the peaks of traffic, this could lead to:
- Queues at peak times
- Staff won’t be utilised effectively during slow periods
- High-frequency staff turnover with bored, unengaged staff moving to more fulfilling jobs.
You can also add additional remote receptionists that are charged by calls to support peak traffic periods. With digital reception software, you no longer need much staff to handle deliveries and visitors, and finally, focus on delivering the meet-and-greet service and other complicated reception tasks.
3. Fully customisable workflow and the system is designed to be customised
Another crucial benefit of the modern vms is its ability to integrate with your building’s systems, making your workplace more efficient and connected. For example, Vgreet by Vpod can:
- Integrate with the meeting room booking system, building access control, wayfinding solution, smart lockers, and more.
- Decide which information you want to put on the screen: live traffic, an official map, a survey, and much more.
- Customise the user interface completely based on your own branding
4. Increase the building’s security level
Visitor Authentication with a visitor management system is designed to monitor visitor blacklist, capture visitor photos, and verify their ID.
With a visitor management system, you will have real-time insight into the building’s safety. Options tailor or accommodate any company security policy, from the pass being upgraded to also allowing visitor access control through any global or national barrier system. The Facilities Manager now knows who has checked in and controls the visitor entry.
The reason we suggest your visitor management system should integrate with your access control is as organisations need to give different permission to different levels of visitor entry:
- Employees entering the building with their employee ID
- Contractors you might restrict to certain floors
- Suppliers have access to floors like Catering to one floor
- Cleaners to all floors but only out of hours
- Visitors only have access to the meeting room
- Access the camera technology to monitor reception areas
5. Employee well-being
Technologies like visitor management systems could benefit your employee’s well-being by delivering a safer workplace.
Ricoh Denmark sees the benefits of increased employee and visitor safety. This challenge is even more relevant now than ever. Ricoh introduced workplace safety technology in their Denmark office. Michael Nielsen, a leader at Ricoh in Denmark introduced a workplace scheduling system that managed safe distancing, workplace booking, and cleaning vendor management in a simple APP (Desk, Mobile and Web-enabled). The impact of this introduction was welcomed by employees.
“The impact of this introduction has been adopted well by employees because they are re-assured, plus we are keeping their elder relatives safe by ensuring their safety when they are in the office”. – Michael Niesen, Ricoh Denmark
The right visitor management system for your office benefits employees’ well-being by protecting them. Upgrade your workplace so it’s safer and convinces employees to return to it.
Based on Microsoft’s annual work trend report, we’ve written a very insightful blog about employee well-being as a new smart workplace trend,
6. A WOW first impression for visitors
The first impression counts! Are your visitors impressed by visiting your office? Do you want them to think ”Wow, this company really is different”? The other visitor management system benefit is to impress your visitors, leaving an outstanding company image. But how?
- Branded invited
Visitor management systems send out a branded invite that tells your visitor where to go, showcases your logo and branding for a professional look, and a QR code to scan on arrival in an invite. Visitors can add the details to their calendar with a click, and host contact details are in hand.
- Express check-in with pre-registration
Visitor management systems can pre-register visitors, communicating with visitors before they have entered your office using automatic emails with directions to the office and a QR code that will check in your visitor in three seconds.
7. Cost reduction
Every business is different in the balance they want to achieve between a better experience, more efficient visitor management and cost reduction. However, as with many things, the pandemic is switching the focus, accelerating the demand for virtual reception services.
- Whether it’s cost, safety or the fact that most of the tasks can be automated, the savings are substantial with a typical return on the investment that can be achieved in under 1 year.
- This catches the eye of most financial directors as they swiftly see the advantages of taking £45k per Full-Time Employee (FTE), fully cost with holidays, and sick cover, to the bottom line. Or as is increasingly popular, move to a single concierge that compliments the automation, still achieving a return on investment.
You can read more in our blog about how visitor management software can benefit your bottom line, we presented a more comprehensive ROI evaluation that takes both quantity and quality into account.
8. Compliance
The manual process of collecting, managing, and erasing the data require techniques and experience which might lead to a single point of failure. Adopting a simple visitor management system is a wiser option to manage visitor data legally and stay compliant easily.
Read more about how visitor management systems can keep you stay GDPR Compliance
Interested already? Let’s start from here, or contact us directly at the bottom of this page
- The Ultimate Guide to visitor management systems
- Download free visitor management guides for your persona
Summary
Flexibility is key: being able to adapt is the key to long-term success.
In short, visitor management systems can benefit businesses by improving efficiency, security, and experience, supporting front of house staff to focus on the meet and greet, while reducing the overall operational cost.
We specifically highlighted that the adaptability of visitor management systems can benefit the business in the long term – Being tailored to any environment and being catered to every enterprise-grade consideration.
The right systems have flexibility built-in, in from their own solution and their ecosystem, exploring this in the workshops, is key.
The right suppliers almost offer too much flexibility, do not let this confuse you, just take comfort in the fact, that these features will future-proof your solution.
More Resources
- The Ultimate Guide – What is a visitor management system
- Download free visitor management guides for your persona
