More and more businesses find themselves in a situation where they could benefit by using a visitor management system and accompanying check-in kiosks. However, after ordering the system and turning on the kiosk, they think they’re done, but this couldn't be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is that modern visitor management systems can be extremely powerful tools for streamlining visits to your office, but with that power comes a whole lot of complexity. Feature sets, toggle switches, visitor rules, auto-checkout overrides, sign-in flows, sign-out flows… all of these things can sound very confusing and daunting, but don’t worry; in this article, we’re going to walk you through five ways that you can get more out of your visitor management system.
So many businesses with visitor management systems buy them so the system administrators can see who is in their facility in real-time. While this feature is certainly important, it can be equally as important to empower your staff to be able to quickly identify the visitor by checking out their name badge.
Despite how powerful this functionality is, businesses often skip this portion of the check-in kiosk setup because printers have a perception of being difficult to set up, especially if they’re wireless and operate off of Bluetooth or WiFi. However, modern badge printers are about as plug-and-play as they get, and you can have this set up within just a few seconds. Don’t neglect this aspect of your visitor management system; set up badge printing and make your staff’s lives easier!
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.
Probably the most overlooked aspect of setting up an effective visitor management system is ensuring that each visitor is treated to the most appropriate check-in experience. What does this mean? Well, modern visitor management systems enable users to, for instance, specify that contractors get a certain kind of legal agreement, whereas other types of visitors don’t. Or, perhaps all visitors get an orientation video, but family members of employees are exempt. Maybe executives get an extremely quick check-in that skips the screen about safety protocols. The point is, as an administrator of a check-in system, you have to ensure that visitors are being served exactly what they need to be served, and nothing more. Modern visitor management systems are made to speed up check-in, not slow it down.
In conclusion, visitor management systems can be daunting to set up. With hundreds of settings multiplied by the number of visitor types you’ve set up, system configuration can take weeks to get exactly right. That’s why many companies are turning to Transmission, the only check-in kiosk provider that offers a 100% turnkey system that arrives at your office completely set up. With multi-language support and a whole host of other features, Transmission makes it super easy to get more out of your check-in process by enabling easy badge printing setup, allowing you to pare down those notifications, empowering you to customize the look and feel of your kiosk, and by ensuring you’re serving each type of visitor exactly the content they need to see.
Learn more about Transmission’s industry-leading capabilities today.