Would you like to make a great first-time impression with your visitors? Improve your pre-registration process.
Pre-registration may not sound very exciting, but it can make a huge impact on your visitor experience. What you do now to prepare your visitors and your staff for an upcoming visit will set the tone.
In this guide, we’ll give you tips on how to construct a pre-registration process that improves your efficiency and earns the respect and appreciation of your visitors.
What are the Benefits of Pre-Registering Your Visitors?
If you’re not already doing it, pre-registration is yet another process to add to your already-growing list of public-facing tasks and processes. Why should you bother with pre-registration?
Here are the major benefits you’ll gain from pre-registering your visitors:
Verify Information Ahead of the Appointment
One of the biggest reasons to pre-register your visitors is so that you can collect their information ahead of time. You can use this information in a lot of ways.
First and foremost, the data that you collect from pre-registration can be used to verify your visitor’s details before their appointment or upon the day of arrival. For example, if you send an invoice to insurance, you can start the process of verifying insurance coverage via the pre-registration information. Or, in another example, you can use pre-registration details to verify a visitor’s security clearance status. This is of particular importance for organizations that may house sensitive data and restrict access to the public.
Verifying information allows you to spot and clear up any speedbumps ahead of a visitor.
Eliminate Inaccuracies
when patients have a chance to verify their information ahead of their visit, they can correct any outdated information or typos. Incorrect information can lead to a host of problems, ranging from duplicate records (annoying) to billing issues (show-stopping). A misspelled street address or an accidentally transposed credit card number can wreak havoc. But accidents happen. Pre-registration is like another checkpoint to catch those accidents before they put into motion a huge problem.
Reduce Paperwork
Modern pre-registration is done electronically. Instead of asking your patient to fill out their information on paper once they arrive, you can collect this information via a portal or a form that exists on your website. Or a member of your staff can fill out this information for your visitor and ask them to verify.
Save Time
When you pre-register your visitors, they won’t need to waste time waiting in line at your reception desk. They also won’t need to fill out registration information as they wait in the lobby. Both of those options are outdated and can frustrate your visitors, making for a negative first impression of your business.
When you pre-register your visitor, you reduce the amount of time your visitor will spend filling out this information on their own.
Reduce Stress
From your first-time visitor’s perspective, everything is new. They’ve never been to your office before. They don’t know what to expect. They’re not sure what they need to bring if anything. With pre-registration, you can relax a lot of the uncertainty because you’re asking for all of the information upfront.
Instead of trying to remember everything on the day of the appointment, the visitor will be able to add their information during the pre-registration process, at their leisure. You can also give them a list of what they need to bring with them on the day of their visit, such as their photo ID. This welcoming process can reduce their low-level fear of being unprepared.
What Types of Visitors Should Pre-Register?
Pre-registration isn’t beneficial for every type of visitor or organization. But you may be surprised to find out that many organizations can reap the above-mentioned benefits by adding a simple pre-registration process.
We typically think that pre-registration is only applicable to the health industry, but the pre-registration process can improve visitor management for organizations in any industry, including manufacturing, engineering, and education.
The question isn’t about the type of industry you work in, but rather the type of information you need to gather from your visitors to create a successful visit. If you ask your incoming visitors to fill out their information as they wait, you’re a great candidate for pre-registration. Everything you’ve asked upon arrival can be asked during pre-registration.
How Do You Optimize Your Pre-Registration Process?
There are multiple practices you can implement to either build your pre-registration process from scratch or improve your existing one.
1. Identify the Most Important Information
Pre-registration should be quick and painless for both your visitor and your staff. This means that it shouldn’t take too long to do. Whittle down your questionnaire to include only the essential questions that you need to know about the visitor to create an awesome visit. This may include:
- Name
- Contact information
- Reason for visit
- Referral source
2. Use the Information You Already Have
If you already know the basics, don’t ask. Just verify. This is a little tweak that can affect the visitor’s impression of your organization. Asking a visitor who you may have already seen for a consultation to restate their basic information so that you can pre-register them for an upcoming visit will seem like a huge waste of time to both the visitor and your staff. And they’re right. It is a huge waste of time.
Instead of asking for that same information again, input as much as you currently know into the system and then ask the visitor for the rest of the information as you go.
3. Ask About Future Communication Preferences
Communication preferences vary wildly. Some visitors prefer to communicate via email and others like SMS messages. Some want frequent communication, others prefer close to none. To create a favorable experience for your visitors that ultimately positively impacts their impression of your brand, you need to get this right. Fortunately, this is one of the sets of questions you can ask in your pre-registration form.
4. Implement a Pre-Registration System
Creating a simple pre-registration process can be hard. Making it look simple and easy requires a lot of planning on your part. But it also requires the right tool. Fortunately, you can use our visitor management system to set up your pre-registration process.
Here's the secret to setting up a simple pre-registration process: Share on XThe Receptionist for iPad is a complete visitor management tool that will enable you to pre-register your visitors in advance. A member of your staff can add information about your visitors ahead of their arrival. Your staff can also send visitors emails or calendar invites directly from the Receptionist for the iPad administrative dashboard. Your visitors can then verify their information.
You can also use our system to give your visitors pertinent information that they need to know ahead of their arrival. This may include directions to your office, your hours of operation, important phone numbers, and the materials they may need to bring with them to their appointment.
Learn more about the Receptionist for iPad’s pre-registration feature and more here.
Final Thoughts
Not only should your pre-registration process be simple for your visitors and your staff, but it should also be useful and efficient. The goal of pre-registering is two-fold: First, you want to empower your staff to have all of the information they need to create a smooth experience for your visitors. Second, you want to ensure that each of your visitors feels welcomed and prepared for their visit ahead. Use the above tips to improve your pre-registration process and hit these goals.
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