Top Considerations for an Enterprise Visitor Management System

By Dave Clifton
Content Strategy Specialist
SpaceIQ

Visitor management is a system that scales to the size of your company or facilities. If you only have four employees and 1,000 square feet of office space, a sign-in sheet might be all you need to keep a record of someone’s visit. If you’re a global company with a dozen different locations that see hundreds of visitors each day, nothing less than an enterprise visitor management system will do.

Thankfully, visitor management is scalable. The technology and touchpoints may get more complex, but the philosophy stays the same: give visitors a seamless interaction with your facilities. For enterprise-level companies, this means more moving parts and more variables to consider and manage.

What is an enterprise visitor management system?

An enterprise visitor management system is visitor management at a grand scale. It might cover an office space that welcomes hundreds of visitors or guests at multiple locations around the world.

Size and location aren’t the only contributing factors to an enterprise system. They’re also technology-based and have more components within their ecosystem. Simply put: they’re more complex and robust, meant to accommodate visitors with more control, in multifaceted workplaces.

What makes a global visitor management system work?

The complexity of enterprise visitor management systems facilitates the need for different resources. Visitor management software is a must-have, and is usually supplemented by both hardware and software. Access control badges. Wayfinding software. Tap-to-click resources. These technologies are prevalent at every stage of the visitor experience, from check-in to follow-up.

Technology is only the means to different features that make a visitor management system successful. Technology allows facility managers to craft the processes that define the total visitor experience. Here’s a look at some of the most essential features of a large-scale global visitor management system and why they’re vital:

• Permissions: Visitors need strict yes/no access to different areas of facilities to keep them safe and to limit distractions or disruptions. The company cafeteria? Yes. Proprietary engineering lab? No. Access control and other permissions-based technologies are key in visitor management.
• Accessibility: The flipside of permissions is accessibility. Visitors don’t want to feel like they’re in prison! Make sure they know exactly what they have access to, as well as where to find these areas on a map. In an enterprise system, this needs to extend from location to location, too.
• Traceability: Especially now, during COVID-19, traceability is a key part of visitor experience. If there’s a viral outbreak at your Morristown, PA facility, you need to understand how guests at that location are affected…or if they’re responsible for bringing it into facilities.
• Synergy: Make the visitor experience fluid from start to finish. If a smooth check-in process culminates in someone wandering facilities aimlessly, the visitor experience suffers. At an enterprise level, this means more touchpoints between check-in and check-out, so guests can easily get their bearings. Wayfinding and digital resources are key.
• Automation: Large enterprise visitor management systems need automation to reduce the burden of oversight on facilities managers—especially when managing multiple locations through a single cloud-based system. Automate wherever possible—welcome and departure emails, guest badge permissions, wayfinding routes, and more are all meaningful automations that improve convenience and save time.
• Convenience: Ultimately, the visitor experience needs to be a convenient one. Even for the biggest companies, guests should feel quickly welcomed and at-ease thanks to a visitor management system that’s seamless. With so many resources governing it, an enterprise system should anticipate and meet visitor needs proactively.

These variables are what take a well-designed visitor management system and turn it into an enterprise-level one. More moving parts may bring complexity to the system itself, but they should ideally make the visitor experience more frictionless.

Also keep in mind that visitors expect more from enterprise companies. A sign-in sheet and some verbal directions to their destination won’t impress guests. An enterprise visitor management system will, which instantly improves their experience and reflects positively on your company.

Manage every visitor’s experience

Whether your workplace sees one or 100 visitors each day, or you welcome dozens of visitors across several locations, companies need a way to ensure visitors have the right experience at an enterprise level. That depends entirely on the system’s structure and features, and how it’s set up to support the needs of visitors.

Use enterprise visitor management software to create an integrated, immersive visitor experience—one that’s stringently controlled yet broadly helpful. Infuse it with the features above and make sure it works the way you need it to. Then, roll it out to every location and every visitor to ensure their interaction with your facilities is the best experience it can be.

Keep reading: Essential Visitor Management System Features