The Key Components of Visitor Management
Visitor management is the process organizations use to verify, accommodate, and keep records of visitors. Depending on the organization, it can be as simple as writing names on a notepad or distributing name tags. But many organizations and government entities manage visitors with a more complicated system of policies, practices, and technology to comply with regulations, keep facilities secure, manage occupancy, and improve the experience for guests and employees.
With a clear, comprehensive visitor management system, visitors know how to check in and check out, employees know when their guest has arrived, administrators understand who’s in the building and how to accommodate them, and the organization keeps a clear record of every visit.
In traditional offices, employees tend to arrive at consistent times, making it easier to efficiently manage office space utilization throughout the day. But in hybrid workplaces, occupancy and utilization can fluctuate throughout the day and week, making it all the more important to have a holistic approach to accommodating visitors. And with the widespread availability of delivery services, modern visitor management systems also need to help limit interruptions to frontline employees.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the key components of visitor management and highlight tools and processes used by leading enterprises today, including our premier visitor management system, Tango Visitor.
Pre-arrival: Preparing for each visitor
While “visits” like package and food deliveries are spontaneous, planned visits should involve gathering some key information before guests arrive at your building—whether they’re job candidates coming in for an interview, consultants working with the leadership team, oversight agents taking a closer look at business operations, professional movers, or anyone else. Ideally, you should know details like:
- Who’s visiting
- How to contact them if they’re late or something changes
- Why they’re visiting
- Who their main point of contact (and backup contact) should be
- How long they’ll be visiting
- What accommodations they’ll need
- What documents they’ll need to fill out
Depending on your industry and processes, you may not need all that information. But whether you collect this information via email, phone, contact form, or another channel, you should associate it all with the visit and the visitor in your visitor management system.
The pre-registration process helps ensure your organization is properly prepared for each guest, and it lets them make changes to appointments when necessary. It streamlines visits before they begin by standardizing the process and allowing you to make personalized preparations.
Check-in: Ensuring visits go smoothly
For some organizations, the check-in process is simple. You just need to confirm that a guest has arrived and make sure their host is aware. But this is also a crucial step for keeping your building secure, managing occupancy, and setting up a positive visitor experience. Your organization may have documents for visitors to sign, paperwork for them to fill out, identification to verify, badges to print, and other visitor management processes that start the moment a guest arrives.
Sometimes your office administrators may be able to help facilitate these processes, put a friendly face to your organization, and make visitors feel more comfortable—but they have a lot of other responsibilities to manage, and you may want to avoid turning your front desk into a bottleneck. Not to mention, not every office even has an attended lobby (or any lobby at all). With a visitor management system like Tango Visitor, you can use kiosks or even simple QR codes to provide guests with an intuitive self-serve check-in process.
One of the challenges with visitor management systems is that the check-in process can easily become a confusing sequence of disconnected tasks, where the visitor has to consult an administrator or printed list to work their way through each step of the process. Using a centralized, comprehensive visitor management system gives guests a clear anchor throughout check-in—for however many steps it entails, and whatever the nature of their visit.
Tango Visitor lets you customize the check-in experience to suit your business and the types of visits you need to manage, from deliveries to conferences, meetings, contractor services, and more.
Occupancy analytics: Managing your office space
Whether you’re operating a hybrid workplace or not, occupancy analytics is becoming an increasingly vital component of space management. Administrators and leadership teams need to understand not only who’s in the building and when, but also how their office space is being used—now, and throughout the typical work week.
Unfortunately, this is also an aspect of visitor management where many organizations fall short. Even if you keep paper records of visitors, the information isn’t organized in a usable way. A handwritten sign in/sign out form can be difficult to read, let alone use to determine the average duration of visits, typical number of visitors per day, resources needed, or other information you could use to optimize your space and the experience for guests.
Tango Visitor brings our decades of occupancy analytics experience to a visitor management system, enabling you to track every visit, identify patterns in how your space is being used, and recognize opportunities for improvement. With a simple yet thorough pre-registration process, you can also anticipate days and times where there will be more traffic and higher demand for space, enabling you to improve coordination between hosts.
Perhaps there’s a window where DoorDash deliveries spike, making parking and building access more congested. Maybe there are particular days where certain kinds of visits are more common. Or your visitors might all tend to require conference rooms, forcing you to improvise with less-than-ideal spaces on especially busy days. These are all insights that become easier to see and manage with a centralized visitor management system.
The more you know about who’s in your building and how they’re using it, the better equipped you are to effectively manage your office space.
Get The Check-In Checklist for free
Visitor management has a lot of moving parts. Between document signing, visitor screening, badge printing, host notifications, and analytics, it’s easy to get stuck juggling multiple disparate systems. Modern visitor management systems can facilitate some or all of these pieces, depending on the solution you choose. In The Check-In Checklist: How to Get Visitor Management Right, we’ll walk you through each capability you should look for in a visitor management system.
Ready to modernize your visitor management system?
For more than two decades, enterprises have turned to Tango for state-of-the-art Integrated Workplace Management Systems. Now, organizations like yours can leverage our sophisticated software to facilitate a simple, all-in-one visitor management system. Tango Visitor offers a customizable solution that handles every visit, from before your guests arrive to check-in and analytics.
Want to see what Tango Visitor can do for you?