Maintaining control of who comes and goes to businesses or residential units is of the utmost importance to ensure the safety of employees and residents. Unfortunately, today visitor management continues to be a problem for most companies because the available platforms do not offer practical and truly secure features. That’s why choosing the right visitor management system should be done carefully. If it is done carelessly, the risk of security degradation will be greater, especially as cyber threats continue to become more prevalent and harder to detect. In this blog, you will know about visitor management must provide features that go beyond access control.
The most widely used visitor systems are often inefficient, given that they fail to maintain historical records of the people who enter, lack specific functions to attend to the movement of visitors, and cannot support integration with access control systems, which impedes effective registration and identification processes. Additionally, many organizations lack the knowledge and experience to find the best solution to fit their visitor and guest management needs.
Contrary to popular belief, an access control system does not by itself satisfy all the specific needs of visitor management, because the processes are actually different. The ideal way to solve this problem is to purchase visitor management software that integrates with the access control system. Thus, such software can meet specific needs, such as automatic data capture from documents and business cards by OCR, USB scanning and reading for quick identification and streamlining of registration procedures, increasing security.
A future-proof visitor management software must have, among others, the following characteristics:
- Separate applications for reception: one for visitor management and another for access control (including databases), that can sync data and integrate seamlessly. This guarantees speed in updating the information and keeping it secure, without creating additional workload.
- Intuitive and easy to operate system so that operations can be carried out without interruption, and minimal training is required.
- Possibility of the system failing when there is no Internet connection. In the event of spotty Internet service or outages, the visitor management and guest access systems should still function and sync back up once connectivity is restored.
- If using key cards for guests, the system should automatically store visitor data, and have the functionality to reset the card so it can be used again by another person.
- “Mobile Check-in” function, which sends an email with the code for quick identification of the visitor via their cell phone. This eliminates key cards, and makes it easy for visitors to get building access while still tracking their activity in the control dashboard.
- The ability to set custom guest access permissions for each visitor. This removes the need to “babysit” guests to make sure they don’t go somewhere they aren’t supposed to be.
It is clear that the use of visitor management systems is vital to optimize security, and therefore it is necessary to use a secure solution. The best visitor management software allows organizations or residential units to automate the entire registration process, from assigning access, badge printing, and detailed information gathering in seconds by simply scanning an ID (such as a driver’s license, business card, or passport). This is a flexible, customizable and highly functional solution that meets the needs of small and corporate organizations with diverse visitor management processes and regulatory requirements.
In short, visitor management requires specific features to improve the flow of people, streamline processes, improve security, and improve productivity in commercial and multi-family residential property management. Currently, there are different options for visitor management software with effective integrations that are approved by access control manufacturers, which allow the application to be executed in a successful and practical way. For the best security, always choose a visitor management platform that easily integrates with your building’s access control, and follow best practices to ensure personal data is kept safe.
