How virtual reception desks are shaping the welcome of tomorrow

Every company strives to create a seamless, welcoming experience for their visitors. After all, the first interactions a guest has with a company shapes their impression of the brand and impacts their overall experience. Yet, many organizations still rely on manual registration processes that not only fall short of providing a great first impression but also leave major gaps in security.

In today’s tech-advanced world, outdated, manual visitor registration methods are a thing of the past. People have come to expect a seamless, user-friendly experience that gives them confidence in the security of the workplace. The solution? Concierge that’s personalized and adaptable.

In this post, we’ll show you how a modern visitor management system (VMS) helps meet the expectations of today’s visitors and also share where we believe this technology is headed.

Provide a personalized, accessible experience

One way a VMS provides concierge-level service is by offering visitors personalized services, from self-serve sign-in to secure access to key areas based on the profile and role. These services ensure each visit is secure and personalized, providing guests a great experience.

Let’s start with the registration process. Guests can actually sign themselves into the workplace upon arrival—a quick and simple registration method that’s familiar to many. You can also easily grant temporary access to your facility to individuals who meet your entry requirements. This can all be done securely without reception staff. Guests simply scan a QR code outside your building and complete the required steps on their mobile device. If their information is valid, they’ll receive a virtual code via text or email granting them entry.

A VMS can also enable you to automatically notify the host when their guest completes the sign-in process. This ensures no one is ever left waiting around or unsure of where to go next.

Stay compliant with complex standards and regulations

On to another important topic: compliance. With online pre-registration, guests can complete required steps before arrival to ensure they’ve submitted important documents, non-disclosure agreements, and any necessary questionnaires. Unlike manual registration processes, a VMS makes sure that each guest completes all the necessary steps to enter the workplace, down to the very last detail.

With the data we mentioned earlier, you’ll always know who’s onsite, when, why, and which documents they’ve submitted. This precise record-keeping helps ensure compliance with audit requirements and is key to keeping the physical workplace security.

A VMS can also support your workplace or building’s compliance efforts with automatic badge printing for approved visitors. Badges ensure every visitor in your building wears visible proof of who they are and the reason for their visit. To enable automatic badge printing, all you need is a printer in the reception area so visitors can grab their badge upon sign-in.

Finally, stay on top of emergency management. Speed up evacuations with contextual data, reports, and tracking, and prevent potentially dangerous overcrowding in your lobby by empowering visitors to complete sign-in on their own mobile device.

Create a streamlined, data-driven workplace

With a VMS, you no longer have to spend hours piecing together information from disparate systems or handwritten visitor logs. Instead, by centralizing your visitor records in a single digital system, you can access occupancy data whenever you need it. You can even set up and share automated reports so all stakeholders can keep a pulse on workplace foot traffic trends.

A data-driven workplace also helps tighten your workplace or building security by allowing you to track who’s coming onsite, when, and for what purpose. Not only can you receive instant alerts if someone matches your block list or scans an invalid ID – you can also monitor security breaches across your organization.

Finally, you can achieve data accuracy by pairing employee presence data from badge swipes and WiFi connections to gain an accurate look at your occupancy and space usage data. This information helps you right-size your investments in staffing and amenities based on how people actually use your space.

Scale cost-effectively  

Shifting gears, let’s talk about how a VMS helps to monitor locations, deploy to new sites, and standardize your visitor management processes in a cost-efficient way. With access to insights on foot traffic, capacity, and space utilization, you can make smarter staffing and resourcing decisions. This prevents over-investment in less-busy locations or under-investment in locations that get a high volume of visitors on a regular basis.

With a scalable VMS in place, you can also deploy to new sites without compromising your workplace or building security. Integrate with your existing solutions for access control and WiFi, or build a custom integration to meet your unique security needs across locations.

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As security challenges grow increasingly complex and people’s expectations for the visitor experience grow, the future of workplaces and buildings will continue to evolve. Soon, there will be a push for even more personalized visitor experiences. In fact, the practices we discussed in this post will soon set the new standard, and as it often goes, workplaces and buildings will need to embrace emerging trends to keep up with growing expectations.

These QR codes empower both tenants and building management to extend a warm digital welcome to visitors. The beauty of it? No need for extra hardware or additional staff; it’s a seamless process. Guests can effortlessly register themselves into the workplace using these codes, enabling you to maintain precise records of everyone who accesses your premises. This is the first step in our larger effort to provide a completely virtual reception, one that doesn’t compromise on creating a welcoming and secure visitor experience.

Ready to take the first step towards virtual reception? Start a free trial of Envoy Visitors today.