All facilities have visitors. Deliveries, salespeople, friends and family of staff members, resident or patient family members, students’ parents, visiting professionals –– these are just some of the people who might step through the front door depending on your industry.
But how much do you know about these individuals? Are they truly who they claim to be? What risk do they present to your business, staff members, residents, students, or patients? Today, threats proliferate, and they’re not confined to cyberspace. Physical security is more critical than ever, and it’s not enough to invest in a visitor management system.
You must transcend mere visitor management. Visitor intelligence solutions can deliver instant information, help you leverage critical insights, and create a safer environment for everyone.
Not sure what visitor intelligence is or how real-time visitor intelligence systems can enhance your security and business decisions? We’ve got you covered.
What Is Visitor Intelligence?
You might be more familiar with the term “visitor management”. Essentially, this refers to a set of practices that businesses, public buildings, healthcare facilities, schools, and other locations use to control the flow of people entering the property who are not employees. That can refer to contractors, delivery personnel/couriers, contractors, job applicants, family members and friends, business associates, visiting professionals, and more.
Visitor intelligence goes beyond merely controlling the flow of traffic. It allows you to achieve important goals, such as:
- Identifying individuals who enter and exit the building
- Identify an individual’s reason for visiting the building
- Use custom metrics to screen visitors arriving and leaving
- Track where visitors go within a building
- Track the facilities a visitor uses within the building
- Solicit feedback
- Track third-party agencies
- Gain deeper data insights
Visitor Intelligence versus Visitor Management
Visitor management is the conventional term given to the process of managing visitors to a building or campus. The typical picture of this is requiring visitors to stop at the registration, welcome, or security desk to provide their name and sign in on a clipboard. In some cases, they may be prompted to show their ID or other verification that they have a reason to be there. They might be prompted to provide information about the reason for their visit, and that data will be recorded. Depending on the building’s physical security system, they may be issued a badge that identifies them as an authorized visitor.
Visitor management is critically important to the health, well-being, and safety of people within the building. However, visitor intelligence takes this concept several steps further, providing a proactive stance for security and access control, as well as the ability to leverage visitor insights to inform a broad range of other strategies, from health and safety to marketing.
Why Does Visitor Intelligence Matter?
Visitor intelligence is a critical consideration. If you’re not correctly managing the flow of visitors, the safety of everyone within the building is compromised. It’s all about controlling who has access to your property in general, as well as ensuring that only those with correct authorization can access specific areas.
For instance, you might allow any emergency room patient to enter the ER waiting room and ER rooms. But what about other areas of the hospital, like pediatrics or the cardiology wing? And hospitals are just one example. The same concept applies to other facilities, including schools, elder care properties, and corporate properties.
Simply put, unauthorized individuals should not have unfettered access to all areas of a property.
What Does “Real-Time” Visitor Intelligence Mean?
Too often, visitor management is reactive rather than proactive. Yes, you probably screen visitors at reception and record their names and reason for being there. However, what happens once they leave reception?
Traditional visitor management systems offer little in the way of visitor intelligence. Instead, security must monitor the property for signs of issues. Obviously, that method is lacking.
Real-time visitor intelligence systems give you a way to get around that problem. With the right technology, you can track where a visitor goes within your facility and prevent them from accessing areas they’re not authorized to enter. You can also track what parts of the facility they interact with, from bathrooms and water fountains to supply closets, offices, classrooms, and everything in between.
Real-time visitor intelligence is the difference between guessing what a visitor is doing and knowing precisely where they are and what they’re doing at any given time. Investing in a real-time visitor intelligence system is all about saying goodbye to guesswork and hello to reality. Stop being reactive. Take a proactive stance to visitor management.
Who Needs a Visitor Intelligence System?
What facilities might benefit from a visitor management system? Here are just a few of the organizations where real-time visitor intelligence can be a gamechanger:
- Kindergartens and nurseries
- Elementary, middle, and high schools
- Colleges and universities
- Fortune 500 companies and other large corporations
- Technology firms
- Hospitals and urgent care facilities
- Senior living facilities
What Can You Control with Real-Time Visitor Intelligence?
With the right visitor management system, you can leverage critical visitor insights to create a safer environment. However, it’s not just about security. It’s also about building a strong brand, enhancing workflows, and even legal compliance. Here are just a few ways that real-time visitor intelligence can benefit organizations:
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Entry Control
Entry control is critical for almost all buildings. This is where conventional visitor management excels. However, real-time visitor intelligence offers so much more than requiring visitors to show their ID and sign in on a registration sheet thanks to advanced hardware and innovative capabilities.
With real-time visitor intelligence, you can amplify the amount of information gleaned during registration while also providing more robust entry control.
For instance, visual screening can help prevent unruly or potentially dangerous visitors from entering a property. Biometric screening can help prevent entry by those already on a do-not-enter list.
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Time Limits
How much time does the average visitor need to spend in your facility? The answer is “it depends”. A visiting professional might spend a full workday. However, a delivery person or courier should only spend a few minutes.
Real-time visitor intelligence helps you track how long visitors have been on property and then take the appropriate action if necessary.
With the right real-time visitor intelligence system, you can tie time limits to biometric and physical access systems, preventing visitors from entering additional areas after their time limit has expired, or locking them down within a specific area until security can remove them.
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Door Access Control
No visitor should have unfettered access to your entire building. Real-time visitor intelligence systems can provide robust door access control, ensuring that only those individuals authorized to access an area can do so.
The right system will integrate with your existing building access control system to help manage door access, as well as to leverage important insights about unauthorized entry attempts to inform your security strategy and develop blacklists.
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Blacklist Individuals
Once an individual has been deemed a risk or threat, they should not be allowed back into your facility. The problem, of course, is that conventional visitor management systems aren’t usually advanced enough to prevent it. Manual ID verification is notoriously fallible.
An advanced visitor intelligence system can utilize biometrics like facial recognition to identify visitors. The system can then automatically determine if that individual has been blacklisted and, if so, alert security personnel and prevent the individual from accessing the facility.
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Evacuation Reporting
Evacuation reporting is a critical consideration for both safety and legal compliance. With a real-time visitor intelligence system, you can send SOS notifications to all visitors and building occupants of the need to evacuate.
The right visitor management system will also streamline the reporting process. For instance, sites with multiple evacuation points require a streamlined way to handle roll call. A visitor intelligence system allows colleagues, managers, and authorities to complete roll call across digital devices.
An advanced visitor intelligence system also helps create accurate post-emergency reports to share with authorities. For instance, the system can track and report things like who was accounted for, who was not accounted for, how long the evacuation took, and comments from those involved.
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Reviews and Brand Building
What do your visitors think of your facility? If yours is like most, you likely have no idea and no way to capture sentiment. A real-time visitor intelligence system allows you to capture visitor insights like their experience at your property and then use those in your marketing and brand-building processes.
Imagine being able to capture visitor reviews in real time for use in email campaigns, or allowing visitors to create Google reviews on the spot.
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Get Granular with Questionnaires
Sometimes, visitor control is less about preventing unauthorized people from entering the facility than it is about making informed choices about whom you allow in. For instance, what if a person is technically authorized, but they’re suffering from a communicable virus?
A real-time visitor intelligence system allows you to require visitors to complete a questionnaire prior to being granted entry, which means you can screen for health-related concerns, firearms, alcohol and tobacco, and other risks all from a single point of contact.
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Dig Deeper with Surveys
While most of the benefits of implementing a real-time visitor intelligence system relate to improved security, safety, and well-being, you cannot neglect the ability to leverage visitor insights. Delivering surveys on the spot allows you to capture visitor sentiment and opinion so that you can adjust your processes and deliver a better overall experience.
Real-Time Visitor Intelligence: A Must-Have for Your Organization
What is real-time visitor intelligence? Simply put, it’s the next step in the evolution of visitor management.
An advanced real-time visitor intelligence system allows you to take a proactive stance toward managing visitors, empowers your teams to make more informed decisions, and can even help leverage visitor insights to inform your processes and even improve your marketing campaigns.
From schools to hospitals, corporate headquarters to senior care facilities, visitor intelligence systems make managing visitors and protecting staff, students, and residents far simple and more accurate.
FAQs
Q: Is visitor intelligence the same thing as visitor management?
No, visitor intelligence and visitor management are not the same thing. Visitor management is a conventional process that offers minimal control over visitor access. Visitor intelligence systems, on the other hand, provide granular control over access, including the use of biometrics, integration with building control systems, the creation of blacklists, and more, while ensuring that you can leverage accurate data to improve your business.
Q: Do visitor intelligence systems require direct person-to-person contact?
No, modern visitor intelligence systems help provide no-contact visitor management capabilities thanks to the integration of standalone kiosks and other remote technology. However, it’s simple to integrate human intuition to augment technological capabilities when necessary.
Q: Are visitor intelligence systems primarily designed for large corporations?
No, businesses and organizations of any size with an interest in improving physical security and preventing unauthorized access can benefit from using a visitor intelligence system for visitor management.
