Why the latest visitor management tech is in high demand

Lee Copland, Managing Director, EMEA

For months now Maxxess has been seeing strong interest new generation visitor management solutions.

In the post-pandemic world, many workplaces and corporate facilities are expected to be used more flexibly, or in some cases scaled down, redesigned and repurposed. Working patterns will change for large numbers of staff too, with more hybrid working that combines a mix of hours spent at home and in the workplace.

The picture is mixed, with many organizations still feeling their way.

While surveys in the early days of lockdown indicated that home working didn’t impact productivity, more recent studies paint a different picture. For example, a new analysis of 10,000 employees at an Asian tech company highlights more of the pros and cons of home working – the ‘cons’ including longer hours (wiping out gains from reduced commuting) and reduced productivity. Part of the explanation is that proportionally more time was being spent in virtual meetings, and less time on focused individual working.

This survey – like all surveys – is only a snapshot, but it’s more evidence that businesses are now operating in a fluid, less certain landscape.

Expectations have been raised too: around convenience, smart systems, safety and hygiene, and smooth-running infrastructure.

All this helps to explain why, of all the integrated solutions we deliver, visitor management is the element most in demand as we emerge from the pandemic.

As customers upgrade their buildings and corporate infrastructures, they want to be able to manage access more efficiently – and with the same unified system – for staff (including mobile or ‘floating’ teams), contractors, visitors, and guests.

This would once have been a complex challenge, but now it’s easy to manage all these different categories of site user with a visitor management solution that can be quickly bolted on to existing access control software.

In fact, these solutions now interface seamlessly with core business software such as Active Directory as well as other popular databases, and bring together all the other systems that customers need to use, from building management and site-specific controls to security, fire, and safety.

The efficiency benefits run deep. It’s now fast and easy for staff to book meeting rooms, reserve shared resources, or book parking spaces for themselves or guests all from Outlook.  This gives visitors the confidence of having an allocated parking space or an invitation configured to provide wayfinding that directs them straight to a meeting point. At times of higher infection risk, or at high-security locations, security teams may want to pre-screen visitors with vaccine or travel questions, or request identification documents.

It also makes hybrid working more orderly, for example by ensuring that hotdesking and meeting room bottlenecks do not occur, and that facilities are ready – thoroughly cleaned for example – every time they’re needed.

The gains are not just about efficiency, but about user satisfaction and good impressions. When it’s easier to park and to get through security into a building, you don’t just save time for your staff and visitors but also relieve unnecessary frustration and stress.

When access is frictionless, or even via touchless kiosks or tablets with QR codes – with secure, one-time passwords and two-factor authentication – it’s not just faster to get into a physical working space or onto a network, it’s reassuring more and impressive. That’s doubly the case when staff have to work at multiple locations, as with ‘hub and spoke’ operations for example. If everything can be managed in a unified way, and the user experience is the same whichever site they’re working at, they’ll feel more supported and engaged.

Using touchless kiosks that mirror smartphones is now making delays at reception – and pressures on reception staff using signing in books and printing visitor badges – a thing of the past.

These visitor management solutions are increasingly popular now in sectors including healthcare, logistics, higher education, transportation, and mixed-use developments comprising office space, residential apartments, retail, and leisure facilities.

These rapid changes in mixed use buildings might previously have been too difficult and complex to manage, but today’s visitor management technology is ensuring that whenever staff and visitors need secure access privileges the process is hassle-free. For facilities and security managers these powerful, integrated solutions have become available at just the moment when they are dealing with some of the biggest challenges they’ve ever had to face.

It’s now easy for them to integrate and extend their security and building management technologies, and add new value to existing infrastructure by extending legacy systems, and so operate their premises more flexibly.

They can also drill down into their systems to obtain valuable data about the way premises are being used, who is on site, and when – the kind of granular information that was not available to them before. This will help them influence corporate decision-making around efficient, sustainable premises use, and step-up resilience against future risks, including pandemic challenges.

Thanks to smarter integrated solutions superseding traditional siloed systems, organisations can put in place infrastructure that will let them adapt to whatever challenges come their way.