Top 9 challenges of Visitor Management to overcome
Updated: May 27
In today's blog we introduce 9 common challenges of visitor management in the corporate workspace, why it has become more important, and how you can overcome these challenges with digital visitor management.
What is visitor management?
Visitor management is an approach of tracking the usage of a public building or site, including the processing of managing visitors' arrival and ensuring they have a great experience in the building.
Why is visitor management more challenging in 2021?
With the foreseeable trend of returning to the office, we listed three mains things that will change in the workplace:
The new purpose of your workplace
Employees are the new visitors
Psychological safety for your workplace
Visitor management comes in the first place to think of to welcome your visitors back and bring the employees back to the office. Here are the drivers and problems you will face in your reception area:
Government guidelines on safe distancing for visitors that must be complied with.
The staff behind reception need to be kept safe.
Employees want to see a visibly improved workplace or why should they return?
A varied traffic flow of people coming into reception.
Legal teams would like employees to declare or self certify that they have no illnesses.
HR would prefer that the reception area does not look like a hazard area with tape, screens and signs.
The Finance Director would like costs cut to a minimum.
Research has shown that organisations are adopting technologies to adapt to these changes more quickly. Therefore, your visitor management approach needs to be more productive and efficient, and safer! Here are 10 challenges most people are not aware of in terms of visitor management that is putting their organisations at potential risks.
1. Very few visitors are pre-registered
Microsoft Outlook 365 meeting invites and Room and Desk booking systems do not auto-populate visitor management systems.
What it means for visitor management
Visitors arrives at your building without maps, directions, and host details.
Self health surveys, NDA's, and watching HSE video's are being processed at your reception after they arrived, the waiting time is longer
Visitors will have to sign in with visitor signing in book
Reception staff have to adopt a reactive process to inbound visitors on arrival.
Queues can form in reception in peak traffic periods.
An unnecessary contamination risk in reception areas can be created.
Watch video of visitor pre-registration process
2. Reception Teams are reactive to inbound visitors
Without fully integrated visitor management, any electronic log created by a room or desk booking system only partially populates the visitor log.
Moreover, manual "notify reception of all visitors" instructions are rarely followed
What it means for visitor management
Reception staff have to adopt a defensive, react to inbound visitors on arrival.
An unnecessary contamination risk in reception areas can be created.
Watch the video of us explaining the traffic paradigm
3. Facilities Managers have labour intensive reception teams
They have partial notice of inbound visitors and manual processes and staff costs are high.
The systems they use, the phone, room system visitor logs, visitor management systems are not linked. Therefore the reception teams spend a lot of time keying information from one system to another.
What it means for visitor management
Reception teams can only process 1 visitor every 2 minutes (unlike digital visitor management where a visitor can be checked-in in only 3 seconds).
Staff levels have to be defensively high, catering for unexpected peaks of visitors
The solution: Combine people and technology
The elastic reception comes in place to help removing the manual task while still delivering the first class customer service by people. We recommend not just taking the efficiencies as cost savings but redeploying staff and retraining them.
Upgrading your staff to provide a full meet and greet service, out from behind the desk. And complimenting them with an elastic people resource available through Vgreet visitor management system and Moneypenny digital exec PA's
4. Siloed systems lead to more manual work
Outlook and Room Booking Systems contain the bulk of visitor and host details, but neither populate a visitor management system!
What it means for visitor management
Reception teams needs to go back to re-key the visitor details into the visitor management system
Reception staff are not usually aware of up-to-date the meeting changes and expecting visitor lists
The Solution: The Condeco exchange sync feed visitor log Api into visitor management systems
Few Room and Desk scheduling systems have APi's* that provide visitor, host and Meeting Room details to visitor management systems.
*Electronic conversations between two systems exchanging vital data.
Condeco Software has the APi although few of its customers realise.
The APi feed to visitor management systems is available.
If you have "User Pricing" from Condeco there is no APi access charge to visitors from Condeco.
Condeco Software Sync's the visitor, host and room details with Condeco which in turn populates its Visitor Api.The combination of Microsoft Outlook and Condeco meeting booking enables Condeco customers to pre-registers the bulk of all expected visitors.
Few visitor management companies have integrated to Condeco.
Most Condeco clients do not realise the significance of the Condeco sync functionality and its impact on visitor management.
5. Facilities Managers do not realise the power of Condeco Software with its Microsoft Outlook sync and APi feed and its impact on visitor management systems
You can pre-register visitors sending them unique branded invites
These invites can carry maps, directions and host details to get you to the building and recognise the host.
The invites can bespoke to include pre-registration requirements like self health surveys, NDA's, HSE video's, Or QR codes to enable rapid, express check-in.
6. Very few Visitor Management solutions enable Touchless express check-in
Your visitor management approach should be able to improve your workplace productivity and efficiency, but does it provide a safe and touches check in without actually touching the screen like iPad?
The solutions: Add motion sensors, voice activation and QR code scanning
An integrated visitor management system with features such as QR code check in, motion sensors, voice activation, and