Treat Your Brand Equity as Gold | High Touch Technologies
How to take care of and protect your brand equity as you expand your business, or things to consider as you expand and become a franchised brand.
As employees become busier and more mobile, text messages have become a key feature of modern visitor management systems.
Visitor management, like our everyday communication and our workplaces, has evolved tremendously over the last 50 years. Fifty years ago, how many imagined you could just as easily sit on a beach or coffee shop with a computer as in an office? It is likely even fewer people dreamed we’d be carrying computers around in our pockets. (In case you missed it, your smartphone is a computer more powerful than what got NASA to the moon, and maybe even better than the best desktop or laptop five years ago.) Those mini-computers have changed our lives in a huge number of ways, with text messages as one large factor in changing communications. Just as texting has become an essential part of the lives of most adults in the developed world, text messaging needs to be a part of your visitor management plan.
In order to understand just how vital text messages are to modern visitor management, we first need to understand how visitor management itself has evolved with our workplaces.
Once upon a time, offices were fairly formal places. Most employees were out of sight of the main entrance, sequestered away in private or shared offices. Visitors were greeted by a dedicated receptionist. The receptionist would pick up a telephone – attached to a cord! - and place a call to the person who was expecting the visitor or the delivery. The host would ask the receptionist to “send them up,” at which point the visitor would either be allowed to wander freely through the building to find their host, or the receptionist would escort them.
This system was never perfect. The host may have been on another call or not have been at their desk – meetings, after all, have probably been occurring since the dawn of time. At this point, the receptionist might have to ask the guest to wait and place the call again in a few minutes. However, it was unlikely the receptionist had too many other tasks to do, so chatting with the guest may have been a welcome distraction.
Modern offices are a completely different environment, both for visitors and for employees. Corporations and organizations of all sizes embraced the open office floor plan, eliminating walls. Visitors, instead of walking in to find a single, friendly receptionist, are greeted with a vast array of desks, workstations, cafe seating, and more. Where does a visitor - who is completely unfamiliar with the building, the layout of desks, and the work environment – turn to for help?
Chances are, the unofficial “receptionist” is the unfortunate person who either was assigned to or chose to sit at the desk nearest the door. This person’s work gets interrupted time and time again as delivery personnel, clients, candidates, visitors from all walks of organizational life filter through the entrance and asks for assistance.
Open offices – especially those that, like some coworking locations, allow employees to choose their seats - don’t often lend themselves to easily giving directions. Either the unofficial receptionist has to call or otherwise contact the visitor’s host, or physically lead the guest to where the host is stationed for the day. This can take a tremendous amount of time and effort on the part of the employee.
What happens if the host is not easily found? What if he or she has hidden in a tucked-away corner for the day? Imagine if the employee has to ask every other person in the office if they have seen the host, and where they have seen them. How many people have to be distracted in order to connect the guest with their host? Think what the pizza delivery person must be thinking: “I just want to drop off this pizza, get paid, and get on my way. Where the heck is the person who ordered it?”
While it is certainly possible for a person to text the host, unless the employee has access to the host’s cell number, this may not be possible. This is where the beauty of electronic visitor registration systems really shines.
Visitor registration apps, or visitor management systems, work by having a standard way that visitors are greeted, checked in, and dispatched to their respective hosts. Electronic visitor management systems allow either a receptionist or the visitors themselves to enter the visitor’s contact information. This would include:
Often, when people consider visitor management systems, they think of them as a way of keeping accurate records. This is a primary benefit that includes records of who visited the office on what days and what the check-in and check-out times were. Depending on the type of business your organization is in, this information can be vital for following legal guidelines, important for security purposes, or simply nice to have as fodder for analysis.
However, some modern visitor management systems come with the incredible benefit of being able to automatically contact a visitor’s host upon the visitor checking in. This eliminates a lot of running around or calling around by a receptionist or any other employee.
Even better, all the employees at the organization can enter their contact preferences into the registration system’s database. This means that those employees who wish to be contacted first by phone, then by text, then by email can set up those parameters right in the system that will do the contacting. Unlike a receptionist or an employee, the digital system can look up the contact information and preferences in microseconds, and electronically carry out the appropriate tasks to get the employee contacted.
If formal receptionists and private offices are less common, belonging more to the past, and open offices and flex workspaces with visitor check-in kiosks are the waves of the future, what is the modern way to connect guests with hosts? Perhaps we should look at the history of communication to determine what communication style is essential to modern employees.
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. The first email was sent in 1971. and the first text message sent in 1992. According to the Pew Research Company, a full 97% of smartphone users use text messaging, making it the most widely-used feature on devices.
While email and phone calls are certainly not dead communications, there are definitely advantages to text messaging (SMS) that email and phone cannot compete with, especially when it comes to short, urgent messages, like that of notifying a host of a visitor’s arrival.
Given the advantages and the popularity of text messages, it is important that, when choosing a digital visitor management system, text messaging capabilities are part of the criteria you consider. Systems that have the ability to contact hosts via text message will have an obvious advantage over those that don’t.
Since digital visitor management systems allow each employee to set their own reception notification preferences, phone calls, email, and instant messaging services may very well be some employees’ contact methods of choice. While they are not realistic communication choices for every employee, there is a reason the best of these systems let employees choose their own preferences. Only having one contact method – email, phone, or text – is bound to fall completely flat for some segment of your employee population.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of phone and email as a method for informing hosts of a visitor’s arrival. This is important as you consider systems, because some systems may limit you to only phone or email notifications.
As a method for contacting hosts of a visitor’s arrival, email has a lot more drawbacks than it might seem at first glance.
All of these different issues make email a relatively poor way to contact a host to announce a visitor’s arrival. A phone call is still very effective, for the right employees.
The digital visitor management system that has the capability to contact hosts in a variety of ways will be the one that best accomplishes the goal of connecting host and visitor. A good system will have the capability to use texting, phone calls, and email. Some will even include Slack notifications and more. You will NOT want to select a system that only has email capabilities, or only does so within your budget.
When choosing a system, take the time to review not only the system’s capabilities but the payment plan options as well. While a system may be capable of text messaging, it may not be included in certain pricing plans.
In the end, it is about getting visitors to your hosts as quickly and efficiently as possible. Doing so requires moving into the modern world and connecting people using the best technology available.
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