Best Visitor Management Software

Visitor Management Software Buying Guide

The visitor management software is designed to track visitors' numbers at a particular site or building. There are many offices worldwide, and each office has many visitors daily. In most of these, the visitor's entries are taken and stored manually. Maintaining the documents manually is hectic and consumes a lot of time and effort.

If one wants to check the visitors' old records, one must go through many files and get them, which is cumbersome. As technology improves, visitor management has become easy. The latest visitor registration software will track every visitor who attends the office and ensure that the list is maintained correctly.

The visitor can be the main man, pizza delivery guy, employee's or CEO's friend, one of the clients, or any other person who isn't the office's regular employee. The record of each person who enters the office is maintained intact with the visitor management software's help. Previously, the companies used to have a receptionist near the door who used to get all the required details from the visitors and inform the person whom they came to see.

This system was excellent and perfect then, but it wasn't a secure option. It isn't an easy task, and paying the receptionists to keep the log is very hard for the companies. This is where software comes in handy. The software is highly secure and makes sure that each visitor is recorded. At the same time, the software is very cost-effective. Once you invest a little amount in it and get it installed.

Why Do You Need a Visitor Management System?

The sole purpose of this software is to track the entry and exit of individuals. This is done for security and the creation of evidence in case of any mishaps in the organization. There are so many benefits of a visitor management system for an organization. It is highly reliable and helps the organization in so many ways. Here are some of the reasons why you would need visitor tracking software in your office.

1. No Interruptions

There are so many offices out there that don't have dedicated receptionists. In such offices, visitors are a massive disturbance. According to a study, any person who is interrupted between tasks will take nearly 25 minutes to get back to that task again. This math is enormous, and it surely wastes a lot of time for an organization. But with the visitor management software, the visitors are handled by the software, and your employees won't be interrupted.

2. The Productivity of Receptionists

The receptionists aren't only confined to greeting the people who walk in through the door every day. There are other roles and responsibilities for receptionists. If they waste their entire time with and track the visitors, their productivity is affected, which won't do any good to the organization. If the visitor registration software manages the visitors, the receptionists can concentrate on the other works that are more helpful for the organization.

3. Information Security

There are so many organizations out there where there are a lot of confidential documents around them. In this situation, a stranger roaming around the office is dangerous. With the visitor management software, all the visitors are restricted from staying outside the office, and their meeting is streamlined as per the schedule of the person they are visiting. This way, privacy in the office is maintained intact.

4. Privacy of Visitors

If your organization maintains a pen and paper for visitors, anybody will get access to those documents quickly. The visitors' log is essential for legal or financial services, and gaining access to them would easily influence the organization. But with the visitor management software, this won't happen. The visitor list is maintained with the utmost security, and no one would be able to access it.

5. Reinforced Branding

A future-ready and innovative visitor management system impresses the visitors in addition to improving the entire process. It enhances the brand at various touchpoints of an organization and provides the visitor with enough brand visuals to strengthen its retention value.

6. Modernized Reception

The reception of your organization is a visitor's first point of contact with your organization. It speaks a lot about your organization, especially to someone visiting it for the first time. An effortless and seamless check-in tells your visitors how much you value them.

7. Embracing Paperless

Using digital visitor management helps an organization embrace complete paperless processes to reduce paper use and make the organization more responsible and considerate towards nature. It also puts your organization in a good light. Your customers, stakeholders, and partners will appreciate you for these thoughtful measures.

8. Increased Organizational Security

Allowing access and limiting it based on the visitors and enabling better control will enable organizations to improve security on their premises, not only for the organization but also for the visitors. Moreover, robust and centralized visitor management software can navigate visitors in the right direction in case of emergencies.

9. On-Site Transparency

Transparency is an essential element when it comes to running an organization. It helps organize and manage large teams and different resources to optimize workflows and extract better value from them. It also makes it easier for management to identify gaps and take the required steps to fill them.

10. Reduced Costs

Implementing digital visitor management software reduces human resources and eliminates the risk of errors, leading to reduced operational costs and emergency spending. This significant reduction in expenses directly translates to an increase in profits, a valuable return on investment.

11. Integration Synergies

With an organization-wide digital visitor management software, the collaboration software can act between departments, floors, and teams, increasing performance and value. It creates synergies for better efficiency and effectiveness in the organization and encourages resources to work together as a team.

12. Global Scalability

The best visitor management system and other digital solutions enable organizations with scaling capabilities to streamline their paths to global reach and success. As the software scales with the organization's growing demand, it leaves the decision-making executives with one less thing to worry about.

13. Legal and GDPR Compliance

Since these software solutions are fed with the legal and GDPR guidelines, they enable a simple and easy process that never derails from the guidelines and requirements. This takes the burden of adhering to the teams' guidance and allows them to focus on the work itself without compromising on the legality of it all.

14. Health and Safety Compliance

Like legal compliance, safety, and health compliance an important considerations. It protects visitors from any kind of harm by providing them with safety instructions and emergency steps. However, safety compliance is much more critical due to the sheer length of consequences that non-adherence to it could lead to.

15. Visitor privacy: Digital vs. Paper

Digital data management software proves to be more secure and safe than traditional paper-based data collection as the chances of it being lost, misplaced, or breached are minimal. Keeping user data secure would tell your visitors that they are in a safe space, which builds trust and makes relationships more reliable and long-lasting.

Read Our Detailed Article: Key Benefits of Visitor Management System

Key Features of Visitor Management Software

1. Customized Check-In Process

There are so many visitors to an office in a day, and tracking the details of all the visitors wouldn't be right. For a general visitor, you would want the details like their name, email, company, and phone number, you may even want them to wear a badge and sign in the agreement, but it isn't the same with a courier boy or pizza delivery guy. All you want to know about these people is their company name. The visitor tracking software should have this customized process for a better visitor experience.

2. Two-Way Communication

Your employee needs to receive the message and reply to those messages. Your employee may be busy or don't want to have that visitor. They can say that clearly to the visitor with the two-way communication facility.

3. Message Forwarding

Sometimes, the visitor's primary contact may not be available; at that time, the notification is sent to another employee of the organization; if he/she isn't possible, then another employee of the organization is notified. This way, there should be an option to communicate with unlimited people with the help of the software.

4. Badge Printing

There are so many organizations that print the badge about the visitor who has arrived. This is the most searched and talked about feature of the visitor tracking software. The visitor badge will provide high security for the organization and will help in recognizing the visitors quickly.

5. Digital Visitor Log

This is another vital feature of visitor management software. The company will have a log of each visitor who came to the organization even after some years of their visit. This software comes in handy for all types of organizations. It provides excellent benefits for the organization.

Managing the visitors smartly is a key to better hospitality. Apart from this, the employee's safety and security and the premises are essential responsibilities of an organization. The same can be fulfilled with the software. Therefore, choose wisely the software for your needs.

How to Choose the Best Visitor Management Software?

Choosing the best visitor management software is crucial for your business for three reasons - enhancing efficiency & workflow, improving the visitor experience, and strengthening visitor security. It is as important as choosing a security firewall software or a fire alarm. You need to know that it works before you go ahead and implement it.

If you have never used this software before or if you've had a bad experience with one, how do you decide which is the best visitor management solution? With so many options available out there, how to make sure what you choose is right for your organization?

To make that choice, you need to understand the possibilities that guest management software can offer you. You need to understand what capabilities it can provide you with to know what to expect from the best visitor management system when you are looking for it.

Here are five tell-tale signs of the best visitor tracking system:

1. Faster Processes

Visitor management tool accelerates and streamlines the process of check-ins, documentation, and other repetitive tasks. It enables organizations to customize their check-in requirements as per their policies and offer a more personalized and unique experience to their visitors. All these tasks, although considered menial, are critical from the perspective of documenting and reporting.

However, saving time on these processes can provide a lot more value. Moreover, it has better roll-call capabilities to improve a visitor's experience at the premises. In contrast, digital add-ons, like pre-booking of visitors by hosts, effectively reduce the check-in time.

2. Safer Environment

The best visitor management software provides a safer, more secure atmosphere, not just for the organization but also for the visitors. During check-in, a visitor provides his/her data to an organization in good faith, and a breach of this data could prove to be harmful to an organization's reputation. When you assure your visitors that they are safe within your organization, you give them space to open up and be more transparent. This helps in making partnerships, onboarding clients, and making business partnerships stronger.

In addition to that, monitoring visitors based on their categories or access level allows the organization to make sure that a visitor is not overstepping his/her access, potentially losing the organization's data to the visitor. The stringent monitoring and proper visibility of all visitors across the organization at any given point is an essential quality of visitor tracking system.

3. Easy Regulation Compliance

Organizations need to comply with specific regulatory guidelines and requirements. That's why it's crucial to choose software that makes it easier to comply with them. The best visitor check in software will be compliant with GDPR(General Data Protection Regulation) - a privacy law in the EU implemented in 2018. It imposes strict rules and policies for organizations to take the data privacy of EU citizens more seriously.

A GDPR-compliant visitor management software enables you to prioritize transparency and ensure explicit consent in providing adequate information to the system.

4. Insightful Data

Open source visitor gate pass solution that gathers essential information and collates it into comprehensive reports provides you with better decision support software capabilities. Assembling such a considerable amount of data could benefit the organization if the value could be extracted from it, both quantitative and qualitative.

It provides insights into the current order of things to identify the possibilities of improvement in structure, framework, or policies. It makes organizations proactive by delivering actionable insights frequently and improving the workflows for visitors. These insights give the right push for an organization to find faults in its processes and improve on them.

5. Scalability

Software that cannot handle your growing needs is worthless and does not provide you with the value it is supposed to. That's why the best visitor management software grows with you. Its scaling capabilities allow it to manage the increasing demands of a growing organization. It might offer you add-ons or an upgrade, but it still provides you with the increased performance of increased demand.

Types of Visitor Management Software

Visitor management software is a highly developed solution for monitoring visitors' arrival and departure from their premises. By using the best visitor tracking system, businesses strengthen their security protocols, increase visitor satisfaction, and maintain accurate records. Let's examine some of the top visitor management systems.

1. Basic Sign-In Visitor Management

A basic sign-in visitor management solution involves the traditional method of recording an individual's presence in an organization using a physical log. Despite its seeming simplicity, the visitor management system software has shortcomings when it comes to protecting the privacy of data, extracting useful insights, and—most importantly—being prone to human error.

2. On-Premises Visitor Management

The on-premises guest management system functions as a digital version of a classic logbook and streamlines the visitor registration process.  By keeping all visitor information on a local server, organizations can reap the benefits of guest registration software. Businesses can ensure increased control and better opportunities to customize visitor workflows to suit individual requirements with a visitor software system.

3. Mobile App-Based Visitor Management

Certain guest management software offer visitors and guests an enhanced check-in process so they can check in on arrival using their own mobile devices. A mobile-first visitor management platform may have specific smartphone apps that help hosts handle interactions with guests. A visitor check-in software of this kind might include features like contactless check-in via QR code scanning.

4. Cloud-based Visitor Management

Cloud-based visitor management software sets visitor data on cloud storage, making it accessible from any internet-connected location. It is one of the best visitor management systems and is helpful for businesses with several locations or remote workers. This visitor management system for offices provides increased customization, quick badge printing at check-in, easy compliance form integration, and visitor pre-registration convenience.

Challenges of Visitor Management System Software

Visitor or guest management software can significantly improve your building sign-in and sign-out process. However, these solutions have some common issues that you should be aware of. These include:

1. Typos

This happens all the time. When signing in, visitors mistype their name spelling. Now when they try to sign out, they can't find their name anywhere in the database. This makes the process frustrating for both the visitor as well as the person managing the system. To avoid this issue, eliminate the use of names. Instead, use barcode software or other digital identities that can't be mistaken or modified.

2. Security Concerns

The goal of a visitor management system is to reduce the workload of security guards and gatekeepers. With visitor management software in place, guards don't need to check each individual going in and out of the building. On the downside, this can cause security concerns, as guards won't be aware of who's entering and exiting the building. To create a balance, create visitor profiles beforehand. This way, only those with pre-registered access will be able to enter the building.

3. Manual Entry

You'll need to manually add all visitor data into the system. If you have a self-service system, then the visitors will have to add data. In any case, there'll be some inconvenience. You can resolve this issue by setting up an active directory that pulls out visitor data from the internal databases automatically.

4. Difficulty of Use

Security guards and gatekeepers aren't usually good at technology. They're used to managing registers and manually entering visitor information. Though a new system is more efficient, your guard can have a hard time getting used to it.

Latest Market Trends of Visitor Management Software

The visitor management process has shifted from register-based entry and exit to digital sign-in and sign-out. The initial variants of visitor management solutions were increasingly a replacement for registers.

But with technology advancing, new trends are being witnessed in the visitor management software market. Let's take a look at some of these trends.

1. Corporate Governance

As discussed, VMS systems were just a replacement for cumbersome visitor registers when they initially came out. But now, companies and organizations across the globe use these solutions from a mission-critical security point of view. The advantages of visitor management systems have transformed from efficiency and time-saving to security and compliance. Companies now use visitor management solutions to comply with regulations like FSMA, ITAR, CDPR, and C-TPAT.

2. Scope for Scalability

VMS solutions are only good for single locations, and rightly so. Most of these systems don't have scope for customization and can't cater to the security requirements of different locations. For example, you might manage visitors with a VMS in an office building in Seattle. However if you have an offshore office in London, the VMS may not comply with the local visitor laws and regulations.

The latest visitor management companies help you overcome this issue. These systems feature cloud-based capabilities that allow you to customize the system as per regional visitor regulations. This development provides scope for seamless scalability.

3. Globalization

As discussed in the previous point, visitor management software now offer scope for globalization, and companies are cashing in on this opportunity. Earlier, companies with offshore offices had to implement individual VMS systems for each location. This led to increased costs and management burden.

Now, as VMS vendors offer multi-location support, organizations are also sticking to a single system for multiple locations. They can now scale in different locations and countries without worrying about compliance issues, extra costs, and management hurdles.

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