Are you keeping track of the visitors who check in and out of your office? If not, you could be missing out on an opportunity to improve your organization. You can actually use your visitor data to boost your staff’s productivity levels, make cost-saving decisions, and safeguard your office from avoidable security risks.
In this post, we’ll discuss how to use visitor data that you collect to level up your visitor experience and improve your overall operation.
The Case for Using a Visitor Management System
Before we discuss what type of visitor data you should collect and how to apply it, let’s discuss the benefits of using a visitor management system like ours, The Receptionist for iPad.
So, what’s a visitor management system?
A visitor management system is a tool that you can use to supervise your visitor’s entire experience, from arrival to departure. Your management system will record all visitors who arrive at your facility. But a visitor management system like The Receptionist for iPad is much more than a digitized log book. It’s a receptionist, a security check-in, a badge printer, and a messaging system all wrapped up in one.
If you’d like to improve your visitor’s experience and boost your staff’s efficiency at work, you must first establish a reliable system for collecting visitor data. Paper logbooks are prone to inaccuracies. Sometimes, visitors write the wrong time or fail to record their reason for visiting. And some visitors may not even sign in at all.
If your visitors must check in through a human receptionist, this system is at risk of human error, too. Your receptionist may forget to record information, which makes it difficult for you to collect the visitor data that you need to improve your processes.
This is why you need a visitor management system. Our software enables you to consistently collect information about every single visitor who enters your facility. Plus, you’ll have access to a secured record of all of your visitor activity in the cloud instead of a local hard drive. This means that you can log in from any Internet-connected device to see who’s visited your business, when they did, and why.
And once you have this system in place, you can do the following:
Understand Who Your Visitors Are
Your visitor management system gives you immediate insight into who your visitors are and why they’re visiting. In addition to their name and reason for visit, you can require your visitors to provide other personal details, such as their address and phone number.
How to use this data to improve your office:
When you know who’s visiting your office, you can intentionally tailor a more personalized experience for all of your future visitors.
For example, if you know that some of your visitors are delivery people, you can create a check-in process just for them that eliminates friction and frustration. A delivery person can arrive at your reception kiosk, select the “delivery” option at check-in, and choose the type of delivery (food, documents, etc.). They can then receive instructions on what to do next, whether it’s to take the delivery to a certain destination or wait for their party to come to them.
Or, if you’re planning to meet with job candidates over the next few weeks, you can create a check-in experience just for this particular group of visitors. This check-in process may include printing a badge, sending out notifications to multiple team members, and giving the interviewee instructions on what to do next.
Create Restricted Areas
Do you want your visitors to have unfettered access to every part of your office? Probably not. But some visitors will need more access than others. For example, a contractor may need access to otherwise restricted areas. By understanding who your visitors are and why they’re visiting, you can create a better security plan for your office.
How to use this data to improve your office:
Identify the types of visitors you welcome into your office and what spaces they should have access to while in your office. If you want to grant a particular visitor either increased or decreased access to certain areas of your office, you can indicate their security clearance on a visitor ID badge. This badge can then be printed out from your visitor management system upon check-in.
By asking specific visitors to wear badges, you can resolve security weaknesses. Your staff can use the badge to quickly confirm if a person should have access to a particular space or not.
Clock Your Waiting Times
How long do your visitors wait after they check-in? Compare the record of when your customer checks in (which will be recorded on your visitor management system) with the time when they actually make contact with the party that they’re visiting.
How to use this data to improve your office:
Based on the customer service standards that you’ve set for your organization, are your visitors waiting for too long before they’re seen? If so, it’s time to reevaluate your meeting process. Perhaps you’re attempting to squeeze too many appointments in at the same time or you’re not giving enough of buffer space between meetings to account for the inevitable, occasional overrun.
If long wait times have become a trend instead of an occasional hiccup, use your data to identify which types of visitors wait for the longest amount of time, and create a plan to expedite their experience so they’re not waiting around and losing patience and respect for your organization.
Improve Your Pre-Registration Process
Can your visitors register ahead of their arrival? By using your visitor management system to pre-register your visitors, you can set them up for a seamless check-in experience upon arrival.
How to use this data to improve your office:
Instead of asking your visitor to fill out a lengthy check-in form, your staff can do all of this for your visitors prior to their arrival. Because the visitor’s information will already be logged into your visitor management system, the only thing your visitor will need to do when they check-in is to verify that the information is still correct.
This does two things: First, it provides your visitor with a frustration-free check-in experience. This will improve your visitor’s opinion of your organization. Second, it verifies the information that you have about your visitor. Plus, you can usually get a lot more information from a visitor when you record it yourself than if you asked the visitor to do it.
Pre-registering is one way to increase the efficiency and speed of your check-in process.
Guide the Visitors Down the Right Path
What path will your visitors take from their arrival to their departure? To answer this question, you first need to identify what types of visitors you receive and what their ultimate destination will be. For example, let’s say you operate a co-working space and your visitor has reserved a meeting room. In order to provide a great experience for your visitor, you need to give them specific directions to the meeting room they’ve reserved.
How to use this data to improve your office:
Use what you know about their reason for visiting to create a specific path to their destination. You can make dozens of different pathways — one for each type of visitor. And then add wayfinding signs to each path so that your visitors don’t get lost en route to their destination.
Final Thoughts
The above are just a few of the ways that you can use visitor data to improve your visitor experience. Remember that your visitor information isn’t just a record of who’s entered and exited your facility. Your visitor information can be used to beef up security and increase efficiency with your front office staff.
Would you like to see how a visitor management system can improve your organization? Start your free, 14-day trial of The Receptionist for iPad here.
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