Picking out an office space, designing the interiors, furnishing, painting, and much more – These are all the very picky steps any business takes while choosing a place to establish their company’s operations. Picking out a visitor management system (VMS) for your business is just as essential, and should be done very carefully.
Since the GDPR compliance came out in 2018, businesses have taken up the opportunity to introduce smart visitor management solutions on their premises to ensure safety and optimum customer satisfaction. Here are some of the most important features you, as a business owner, should know about Visitor Management Solutions before choosing one.
1. Pre-Booking: As a business, it is common to host conferences or events regularly on-premises. A smart visitor management software should be able to accommodate for these events for the visitors and staff alike, and should have a pre-booking feature. This helps the visitors and staff to register themselves for the event, and even mark their attendance well in advance. The check-in process, thus, becomes hassle-free and lightning-fast and allows the visitors to save their valuable time.
2. Customizable Workflows for Check-Ins: After the introduction of GDPR, businesses faced a lot of trouble in capturing the data of their visitors. Storing the data obtained in the form of entries, and organizing the data to be stored in folders on-premises proved to be very costly and time-consuming.
Hence, modern visitor management solutions offer the option of customizable workflows, which helps businesses in segregating the entries and conveniently storing the data of various entities. For instance, different visitor types can be identified by customizable workflows for check-ins, like guests, normal visitors, couriers, etc.
3. Availability of Digital Forms: Making the visitors sign NDAs, or some other documents can be a time-consuming process for any business. Hence, a smart visitor management system should have the feature of offering digital forms for the visitors during their check-in itself. This helps in making the visitor aware of all the security and premise rules & regulations before entering the premises.
4. Ability to Print Badges: Any modern VMS should come equipped with the ability to print badges. Most of the time, it is the final stage of the check-in process, in which badges are issued to the visitors, which can be used to enter certain areas on-premises. This also helps the staff in tracking the visitors, and identifying them during any time, to offer visitors with optimum assistance.
Moreover, badges also help businesses in access management, in which they can use the VMS to block access of visitors in certain zones on their premises. This is a very prevalent feature and is leveraged by some of the biggest enterprises in the world like Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.
5. Host Notification: Automated notifications for the hosts for visitor activities, is a must-have feature for any visitor management software. This helps the hosts in communicating with the visitors seamlessly, and offering them assistance at any time via SMSs, push notifications, etc. This feature helps in significantly reducing the waiting time for visitors seeking any assistance, and also for hosts to create a good impression on their visitors.
6. Third-Party Integrations: Making your VMS future-ready is the only way to make a rock-solid decision in ensuring that you don’t have to jump ship and avail a new VMS every time something changes in the marketplace. The ability of a VMS to integrate with third-party tools can significantly boost its functionality, and prepare your business for any hurdles. Moreover, it also allows businesses to integrate their internal applications with the VMS, making their operations even more seamless.
7. Analytics and Reporting: Any software that captures any data does it for one purpose – analyzing and providing valuable insights. Visitor management software are no exception to this notion. A smart VMS should be able to comprehensively analyze all the data captured from the visitors and generate insightful reports for businesses using it. Valuable data points such as time of entry, time of exit, type of visitor, engagement, etc., can significantly help internal operations in improving their role functions.
8. Tracking Safety, Health & Legal Compliances: Nowadays, there are many rules, regulations, and compliances that businesses have to take care of to successfully carry their operations. A smart VMS can help businesses in tracking critical information from the visitors to ensure that safety, health, and legal compliances are being followed by visitors and staff alike. This helps businesses in standing their ground during compliance and regulatory audits, or internal or external investigations.
9. Scalability: The goal of any business is to grow. With growth, comes more visitors. Hence, before choosing any VMS, it is imperative that businesses assess if the VMS is compatible with scaled operations or not. Rapid capability for scaling to a global level and centralized database are the two most important elements in determining this aspect. A VMS that can take care of global, as well as regional policies and visitor management, is always the smart choice.
10. Smooth User Experience: You can have a VMS with all the aforementioned features, but it might still not work if the system has a poor or generic design. Offering visitors with a smooth and engaging user experience via visitor management software can determine how willing the visitors are to use the system. Smooth, efficient, and fast data entries with an attractive design can help your business in optimally capturing visitor data.
Conclusion
Now that you know what features to look out for choosing the right visitor management system, you can explore the marketplace for visitor management solutions, like offered by piLOBI, which has all the aforementioned features and more. All you need to do is check out the features, take the VMS on a test drive, and make the decision!
