Visitor management systems play a vital role in monitoring and recording information regarding employees and visitors of a public building or a business electronically. This system also helps in documenting and gathering information about the whereabouts of a visitor in the facility and now more than ever, in the wake of the pandemic, it is very important to safely document visitor activity in your premises.
What are the best visitor management systems you ask? The best ones are solving something specifically that the world needs right now.
• Engage (New! Contactless Visitor Management Module)
• Envoy
• SwipedOn
• The Receptionist
• WhosOnLocation
These systems also ensure that the sign-in process of visitors becomes more consistent, accurate, and efficient; they do well in storing the information of visitors in a database. It also helps in protecting employees and facilities, as well as increase building security
5 Best Visitor Management Systems with Reviews
• Engage (World’s first Contactless Visitor Management System)
Engage is a reliable and powerful visitor management system that offers much more. Apart from being feature rich, and when I say feature rich, I mean like way more than any competition has to offer Engage, in the light of COVID Pandemic, has introduced an innovative contactless visitor management system that solve the much needed problem of managing visitors efficiently without having to touch anything or get close to the front desk team. You have to check them out for a demo to understand how easy and efficient this contactless check-in process is, and the best part, you don’t even need to have a front desk KIOSK/IPAD anymore, just a customised QR code anywhere will do the trick.
Dubbed as Engage Smart Office, the full blow visitor management solution is a powerful software that integrates Employee Engagement, Meeting Room Booking System, and Visitor Management System. It is a market leader and is basically cheaper than envoy, our next choice.
With engage meeting room can be booked and people can be invited seamlessly.It also offers Wi-Fi management and access control. This it achieves by incorporating 3rd party solutions to offer continuous control to Wi-Fi and door access within the dashboard.
It also ensures employee engagement. It permits the interaction of employees with each other, coupled with serving as your brand advocate. It also makes internal ticketing for employees possible; it connects employees to different facilities within the cloud management software and white-labeled app.
Engage also does well in events management. It carries out in-house events and permits members to participate with smart alerts systems and analytics.
Lastly, it helps in improving your fruitful work hours and helps employees place their food orders and beverages from the food court or campus canteen. There’s no need to wait anymore, your food is set and ready; all you need to do is pick up your hot food and enjoy a stress-free break.
Pros
• World’s first contactless visitor management system
• Cheaper than competition
• Employee Social Network
• Meeting room bookings
• Employee announcements & engagement and a lot more.
Cons
• No visible cons
Envoy
With envoy, your workplace will surely keep moving. Envoy helps in redefining the manner in which technology, people, and places, work together.
This start-up was established back in 2013, and it is based in San Francisco. They boast over 200 employees. They team up with IT leaders, security, and facilities from small businesses to get involved in industries like healthcare, technology, and manufacturing.
With simple and modern tools to aid your management of visitors, conference rooms, and deliveries, Envoy does well to save time, ensures you get the best from your workplace, and ensures employees and guests are impressed on their first visit.
Pros
• Platform interoperability
• Ease of setup
• User friendly
• Redefines the workplace
Cons
• It is more expensive than the competition
• No contactless visitor check-ins
SwipedOn
Ensure your workplace and employees are well protected from exposing themselves to viral infections, like the Coronavirus; this is made possible through instant alert notifications, visitor screening, and contactless sign in.
Allow SwipedOn to take full control of your reception desk processes that involve receiving deliveries, visitor management, and employee in-out, etc. Upgrade from using a visitor book to a digital solution in less than 10 minutes. Get your reception desk streamlined with a simple, smart, visitor management solution, which is well-trusted by popular and leading brands globally.
Team up with many other workplaces worldwide that rely on SwipedOn, having seen the system as the easiest to use, fastest to execute, and offers the most reliable visitor sign-in system out there. They have a highly-reliable customer care that responds actively and swiftly to queries; the response time on average is usually below 5 minutes.
Pros
• Protects your workplace and employees
• Very easy to use
• Execute tasks quickly and effectively
• Great support for users
Cons
• It takes some time before visitors can sign in
• No contactless check-ins
• In case there’s an emergency, it could take a lot of time to print the whole list of the staff especially if they are large in number.
The Receptionist
The Receptionist offers another special feature. It helps in calming down any chaos from visitors to your office. This visitor management system takes up tasks like checking-in of guests and notifications, the printing of badge, and storage of visitor information; this is to ensure that you connect better and have more meaningful links with your visitors.
This Receptionist for iPad ensures you create customizable, unique, visitor workflows (button based) to go in line with your business policies and visitor types. This happens to be the only visitor management system that features two-way communication (email, Slack, and SMS).
This system also features the capturing and storing of victor logs, message forwarding, compliance verification, signature and photo capture, creating and printing of drag-and-drop badge, and sign-offs of NDA and legal agreement.
With the new check-in features, you can check-in visitors, question them, and make them sign some agreements via their mobile device, in a contactless manner.
Globally, millions of visitors and thousands of companies make use of this check-in solution in a bid to harmonize their delivery and visitor traffic.
Pros
• Lots of great features
• New check-in features
• Prints photo badges automatically
• User-friendly
Cons
• The kiosk mode isn’t that effective
• No contactless check-ins
• Connecting to the printer through Wi-Fi wasn’t great.
WhosOnLocation
With WhosOnLocation, your organizations can be well managed with automated contact tracing, ban rules, touchless guest management, guest questionnaires, and more.
This cloud-based software makes it possible for organizations to track and manage contractors, visitors, employees, and evacuations. With the use of a kiosk, touchless, or reception desk, visitors can easily sign in and out.
With Live reports, users can see who is presently on-site; this ensures an easier and quicker way to know the number of people during an evacuation. In case there’s a security incident, historical data can be reported on and filtered to view the movements of people within a specific period.
The platform is also very secure; they keep reviewing and strengthening the security of the system. In fact, they recently gained their ISO: 27001 certification. You can either decide to use all the features of this system or use whichever suits your business
Pros
• Great support
• Easy to use
• Nice interface
• Easy tracking of technicians and employees, and their progress
Cons
• Updates could crash the sessions
• No Contactless check-in
• The app could crash or lag
Learning More about the Visitor Management Systems
What you should know
Visitor management systems help in tracking and managing the visitors coming in and leaving the premises of a business. These tools are put in place to ensure that the sign-in process of visitors becomes more seamless, which eventually improves the overall experience of the visitor.
Some other solutions make it possible for visitors to have a self-sign-in. The staff is responsible for the administering of other sign-ins, giving them the ability to manage some assets like keys and access cards.
These systems can inform employees about the arrival of visitors. It also helps in the documentation and gathering of vital information regarding the whereabouts of visitors in the building. Generally, these management systems were specifically designed to raise the security level of the building, as well as protect the employees and its facilities.
Why Make Use of the Visitor Management System?
The visitor management system offers some benefits to users, which includes:
Reliable Information
The visitor management system stores vital information about visitors coming in and going out. In case of any emergencies, authorities can check through the system to know who visited the office during that period.
Effective check-in process of visitors
With this, there’s no need to create a staff to check identification cards manually or call the office to create an awareness of a visitor’s presence. With these solutions, the licenses of drivers, as well as other identification forms can be scanned into the platform. Also, they can notify an employee through a ping about a visitor’s arrival.
Enhanced office security
With a visitor management system, the existing security system of a building can be enhanced. These solutions require the signing in of all visitors, which plays a role in notifying the adequate quarters when someone comes in and goes out of the office.
Who can use the Visitor Management Systems?
Visitor management systems can be used by virtually any business that receives visitors regularly. The businesses listed below are just a few of them.
College Campuses
There are campuses that have some areas strictly meant for the faculty and staff alone. With a visitor management system, it makes sure that only faculties and staff that have been authorized are permitted into these areas of the college campus.
Corporate Offices
Offices having large buildings usually have more than one office. Each of these offices welcomes in visitors from time to time, whether they are candidates coming in for a job interview, or clients coming in to hold a meeting. With these solutions, visitors will find the right office and meet the time of their appointments.
Elementary and High Schools
Elementary and high schools usually make their visitors put on their ID badges while coming into the school premises. These identity badges can be managed with the help of visitor management systems.
Different types of Visitor Management Systems
Because all visitor management systems offer the same services, their different solutions are very similar. Users may face two different options in the administering of the software.
Staff-administered
Here, the building staff members are responsible for administering the solutions. They can welcome visitors and scan the needed forms of identification. The employee can then be called by the staff expecting the notification of the arrival of visitors.
Self-service
With self-service, visitors can sign in themselves. They can type in their details on the device and submit it. Once submitted, the system sends the employee a notification about the visitor he or she is expecting.
Features of the Visitor Management System
The features below are usually seen in the visitor management system:
Notifications:
As soon as a visitor signs in using the system, it can notify the employee through a ping that the visitor they have been expecting has arrived.
Self check-in: With this feature, visitors can check themselves in, in contrast to requiring to check-in through the building staff. The visitor management system is usually organized on a tablet kiosk, requiring them to fix in some information like their email, name, and the main reason for their visit.
Preregistration: With this software, visitors can pre-register their guests. Utilizing these tools, various businesses can send emails to their visitors to gather whatever information will be needed for their visit.
Visitor management and reporting: This is clearly the most important of all the features of the visitor management system. With this feature, you can store information about your office visitors, i.e. the exact time at which they visit the premises, and how long they stayed on the premises.
With this, the precise location of visitors can be tracked down, and reports created on the flow of visitors.
Possible Issues faced with Visitor Management Systems
Just like other technologies, visitor management systems have their issues. Some of them are:
Cost: Visitor management systems could be very expensive, most especially for big businesses. Some solutions require the integration of hardware like business card scanners, license readers of drivers, cameras, and more.
It could be complicated to safeguard sensitive information
At times, the information of visitors could be sensitive. If the selected solution is cloud-based, there will be a need to encrypt it, so as to protect the identities of your visitors. There’s also a need to back up this encrypted data as well.
Conclusion
Visitor management systems are great for all organizations, either small or large. They do well in organizing things, especially the coming in and leaving of visitors. It also monitors and records information regarding employees. The Visitor Management System is highly-recommended if you are a business owner.
