You are considering a visitor management system for your organization. Or, you’re still wondering what is a visitor management system? This is most likely how you arrived at this website. This is what I’m going to explain in this article, and I will also explain:What are the benefits of having a visitor management system?How does a visitor assistant work?What to consider when purchasing a visitor management system?
What are the resources required when implementing a visitor management system? Let’s start with the basics, have you ever wondered why people have been sign-in to office guest logbook at office reception? There are a variety of reasons:
Evacuation: occupational health and safety required to log all the visitors in the event of an evacuation. It’s one of the first things that the fire department will ask to ensure all visitors have been accounted for.
Security: capturing all the details of a visitor as to when they arrived and who they visited along with time and date is necessary to ensure the legitimacy of the visitor and in the event of an incident they could contact that visitor in the event any security issues arise during their visit or afterward.
Organization compliance: each organization is responsible for its health and safety protocols. One way to ensure each visitor or guest is familiar with the health and safety procedures is getting a signature from each visitor stating that they’ve read and are familiar with Health and safety procedures in the facility there visiting. This minimizes organizations’ liability.
Confidentiality compliance: many companies are quite private and do not want to expose their intellectual property or assets from being seen from the public. Therefore, they need to ensure each guest can abide and agree to their strict privacy and confidentiality statement. Now that we are a little bit more familiar with why organizations need a visitor guest book, let’s examine some of the challenges and present the visitor and organization.
Breaching privacy laws An open exposed handwritten and visitor logbook could potentially be violating privacy laws. New privacy laws such as GDPR requires some guest books require to write down your phone number and email so that they can contact you in the event of an emergency. However, that is a clear breach of the GDPR.
Corporate Intelligence: Seeing a list of your competitors that came in for previous meetings Ken potentially influences the company’s ability to negotiate. Or if they wish to keep that information private and confidential, they’ve lost that ability right from the starting gate. Conversely, if you have clients visiting you and see a known manufacturer that makes similar products that you’re selling to them it may give your clients the idea to contact them directly. Once again, this is information, but most companies would want to keep it private and not expose this sort of intelligence to each visitor that enters their facility.
Visitor logbook is difficult to read: in the event of a facility evacuation, as the fire marshal is trying to take attendance of all personnel and visitors and yet they are unable to read messy handwriting they will not be able to effectively do their job which is an account for all the visitors in the facility.
What are the Visitor Management System benefits?
So to combat these challenges mentioned we going to provide a couple of real-world examples of some of the benefits:
Breaching privacy laws: each visitor’s data is entered and stored on the visitor management system following the GDPR guidelines.
Corporate intelligence: previous visitors’ entries are not exposed to the visitor management sign and tablet.
Visitor logbook difficult to read: says everything is taped on the visitor management System on the client-facing tablet, all of those entries are stored on a secure website for easy roll call in the event of an evacuation or fire drill.
Security: In real-time, the main lobby visitor management system captures a head and shoulder picture of a visitor and timestamps their entry and exit. In the event, the visitor forgets to sign out, MyLobby has a feature that sends a reminder to each visitor to sign out. It also enables them to sign out directly from their mobile device.
Corporate compliance: MyLobby can attach a compliance document so that each visitor can read the document upon entry and captures their signature that they agree.
Automation: the best part of the visitor management system is the ability to automate the whole process from when visitor signs in notifying each host of the email, text message and most recently voice notification letting you know you’re your visitor has arrived.
At this point, you’re a little bit more acquainted with the necessities of capturing visitor information and also understand some of the challenges that present themselves when using a traditional paper and pen visitor sign-in sheet. In addition, you’ve seen how we can remedy some of these challenges.
How does a visitor management system work?
We placed the visitor sign-in book with a tablet that gives you a variety of options asks the visitor what type of visitor they are. Such as a visitor, a contractor, a member, an employee from another site, Courier/ Delivery The information of each visit gets stored in a central database that gets populated in real-time. This allows the organization to keep a log of visitors and also capture a very clear head and shoulder picture of the visitor. In addition, you will be able to see the answers to the compliance questions of each visitor.
As a result, you’ll be able to determine in real-time if your visitor meets the compliance standards of your organization. These questions can be customized they could be open field questions, yes or no answers, and checkmark questions? In short, the MyLobby your visitor management system is highly customizable to fit the requirements Organization?
What to consider when purchasing a visitor management system?
Things to take into account when purchasing a visitor management system
- Easy to use intuitive interface for visitors
- Quick and easy
Location of tablet needs to be an office location for visitors - Easy to reach and accessible
- 10-inch tablet or 24-inch tablet
- Picture or no picture
Configurable to company requirements
Many of us have experienced implementing new technology. I was simply underutilized because not everything was considered when purchasing a visitor management system. An example of this was a client in North Toronto that needed a visitor management system to automate the process for their very busy front security desk. The challenge they had after the installation was counter it was too tall and not capturing pictures of guess that were under 5 feet tall. Something like this was easily overlooked.
Fortunately, it was quickly corrected by installing a different style mount that was more 90° instead of a 45° mount.The best way to address these challenges is by taking pictures of your front lobby and front counter. Measurements of the front desk would also be helpful. Taking a proper assessment of the site before delivery and installation will increase the adoption of your new visitor management system
What are the resources required when implementing a visitor management system?
The good news is you don’t need a lot of resources to get your visitor management system up and running.
Let’s start with the hardware of the tablet and perhaps an enclosure with a printer can range from $600-$997. This is a one-time cost.
Setting up your visitor management sign-in system is also pretty quick if you need the following:
- A list of all the compliance questions.
- PNG file of your logo
- List of your hosts on an excel sheet. This may contain the following data in any order: Name (required), Division, Title, Email
We also have the ability to sync your host with an active directory. If this is something you would like to consider you would need your IT resources to meet conference with our team for successful synchronization.
Bottom line visitor management system platform like MyLobby require a lot of resources and yet deliver a huge amount of benefits stemming from:
- Front Office automation
Saving valuable time for meetings - Ensuring compliance
Confidentiality - Effective evacuation
- Greater security
Get started today with your visitor management system by contacting us.