How many people did you have in your office last week? If you had to thumb through the pages of your log book or scroll through a lengthy Excel sheet and manually count the entries to check, it might be time to consider a visitor management system.
If your company is hesitant to change, take another look at that paper log book. Does it include the following information:
- Exact time of the visit?
- Sign out time of the visitor?
- Which employee each visitor saw?
- Which offices the visitor went to?
This information can be critical for a number of reasons — from facility management to safety to contact tracing. But this data is largely lacking from more traditional front-desk processes. Front desk associates get busy, log books can be misplaced, and Excel sheets can accidentally get deleted. These scenarios are just a few reasons why you should invest in a visitor management system for digital check-in needs.
What is a Visitor Management System
Let’s start by defining “visitor management.” Visitor management is the process of tracking everyone coming in and out of your office. Visitors include family or friends of employees, consultants, contractors, and UberEats deliver drivers.
A visitor management system, therefore, is a process to track those visitors. Before the digital era, this process was all paper-and-pen driven. A visitor would check in with the front desk and say who they were there to see. The front desk would call someone’s office to verify the visitor and have them sign a log book. That log book collected 10, 20, or 30 visitors per page, and likely got shredded or thrown away after a week.
In the age of the internet, however, companies started to move away from the clunky (and not eco-friendly) log books and swap out for visitor management software like BreezN. Now, whenever someone says “visitor management system,” they’re referring to a digitally driven process for taking, sorting, and storing visitor data.
Benefits of a Visitor Management System
Paper log books and Excel spreadsheets might feel comfortable to companies, especially to businesses who’ve used them for decades. Your company might hesitate to make the switch or wonder what the real benefits of a visitor management system are when compared to traditional methods.
Here are just some of the things a digital visitor management system can do that your log book or Excel spreadsheet can’t:
- Offer a cloud-based login system, boosting the security of your visitor’s data.
- Send a QR code to visitors upon check-in, reducing touchpoints at your front desk.
- Send an email alert to your employees whenever their visitor has checked in.
- Combine the check-in process with NDAs or other legal documents.
- Guarantee your visitors the same experience across multiple locations.
- Securely delete data once the data storage window has passed.
Transitioning from a traditional visitor management setup to a digital visitor management system can seem daunting at first. With the right software, you can get a system up and running quickly and efficiently. At Veristream, we’ve helped everyone from Fortune 100 companies to professional sport teams transition to a modern, secure system that works for them. Give our team a call at 1-888-718-0807 or schedule a demo to see how Veristream can transform your visitor management experience.
