5 Tips for Getting the Most out of your Visitor Management System

We live in a time where we’re getting more notifications than ever before. Studies have shown that most people who reside in the United States receive more than one hundred notifications per day, and for people working in offices using their phones or computers for work, that number can double or even triple. Safety coordinators, HR personnel, and visitor management system administrators tend to want to “cover their bases” by setting up many permutations of essentially the same notifications, but this can cause your staff more grief if they receive many, many notifications when their visitor arrives at the facility. This is why we recommend that hosts receive no more than one text message and email each time a visitor checks in to see them.

Nearly all check-in kiosks enable users to customize the look and feel of their kiosks. Often, this allows users to specify background colors, upload the company’s logo, change the interface style, and much more. While we acknowledge that this does indeed feel trivial, all too often, we visit facilities wherein the company either A) hasn’t made any modifications to the default aesthetic of the kiosk or B) has actively made the kiosk look unappealing by using poor color choices, malformatted logos, ugly screensavers, or more. A check-in kiosk is supposed to not only record who’s coming and going in your facility, it’s also supposed to elevate your brand, and improve your guests’ experience in your lobby. Using well-produced videos and colors that are on-brand can go a long way to impressing your visitors.

All visitor management systems enable users to specify the types of visitors they accept at any given kiosk. At first, this seems like an obvious shortlist, but there is actually a very wide variety of types of visitors that may be visiting your facility. There are, of course, those who are coming to see you because they have a scheduled appointment, but what about contractors? Inspectors? Family Members? Job applicants? The list goes on and on, but your responsibility as the administrator of your visitor management system is to identify the broadest “buckets” of visitor types as you can, such that there aren’t too many but also enough that you can customize each visitor’s experience on a more granular level. For instance, it’s probably not that helpful if your visitors can only select “Employee” or “Everyone Else,” but you also don’t want a visitor type that’s so specific only one person ever uses it. Finding the right balance to strike can be tricky, which is why a system like Transmission comes preloaded with all the most common types of visitors, each preconfigured to be checked in in the most appropriate way.