Chanakya Kyatham August 7, 2020 It is a proven fact that outdated technology makes workplace productivity suffer. One of the top priorities for businesses in the year 2020 was to use new and advanced technology to increase productivity. One of the foremost spaces that might be suffering due to outdated technology in a professional workplace is the reception area.
Be it a company’s head office, a restaurant, a hospital, or a retail shop – the reception is the first area that any visitor or employee enters through. The outdated paper log, a chaotic visitor’s area, a clutter of parcels, etc. does not make for a very good first impression for any workplace. According to a study, 75% of the people surveyed admitted to having a negative judgment of a place due to a messy and shabby lobby area.
Apart from the impact on the first impression, the reception management tools used by a company also have an impact on its efficiency and productivity. Using the same old pen and paper for a visitor log book in the reception area is time-consuming, tedious, and achieves low operational efficiency. A visitor’s badge made of paper does nothing for security concerns of the office.
Thus, it is high time for organizations to reevaluate and rethink their reception management tools. A complete digital transformation for workspaces is on its way. In order to remain relevant, companies should now start opting for a digital reception management system.
A significant tool for such a digital system is the visitor management system. It performs a number of functions and meets the gaps of a traditional paper logbook management tool. These are discussed below:
Minimizes the Reception Area Traffic: As already mentioned above, the reception area is the one place every visitor in an organization or building goes through. Visitors may range from employees, customers, delivery persons, guests, and so on. As such, the reception area has heavy foot traffic. This is not a very pleasing sight for the visitors. Nor does it encourage an ambiance of productivity among employees.
With the digital reception management software in place, these issues are resolved easily. Now, visitors can complete the process of registration, signing in, filling out necessary personal details, signing on compliance forms, etc. in a matter of minutes. With the self-sign-in feature, they do not need to wait in line at the reception. This decreases the tedious workload of the receptionists, enabling them to focus on welcoming the visitors instead.
Sends Notification Alerts to Employees to Avoid Interruptions at Work: Having visitors at a workplace can often be a distraction. 70% of workers admit to feeling distracted at work. With the traditional tools of reception management, having a visitor at the workplace would mean repeated trips to the reception or entrance in order to receive them, or verify their identity, and so on. This leads to poor utilization of one’s valuable work hours as well.
With updated reception management solutions like the visitor management system in place, employees can now save their time by pre-registering their guests prior to their arrival. When their guests arrive, they will be sent a notification via SMS or email, so that they can be ready to receive their guests. These notifications also help receptionists from repeated trips to the concerned employees, asking them to verify the identity of the latter’s visitors, or guiding the guests to the hosts.
Improves Business Efficiency: Visitor management systems can help improve the efficiency of employees. This is facilitated by recording the employees’ attendance digitally and having a birds’ eye view of the same. Moreover, instead of having reception desks at multiple entrances of an office, the visitor management systems can be used to streamline and centrally manage the information of a guest from multiple locations.
Reduces Safety Risks: The traditional reception tools like a paper logbook can hardly uphold the safety and security of an office premise. In the time taken to fill out the details manually, an unwanted visitor can wreak havoc and cause serious damage to life and property. The safety risks are eliminated with the modern reception management tools such as the digital visitor management system.
The digital system issues a visitor badge for visitors with an expiry date and a QR code. As such, these badges cannot be tampered with. Visitors can also be restricted from entering certain premises of the office. In case they access such premises, the employees are notified. In the event of an emergency evacuation, the visitor management system sends our alerts and notifications to all visitors to evacuate the building. With a receptionist, this would have been challenging to say the least.
Reduces the Possibility of Clerical Errors: The paper logbook is subject to many risks. It can easily get destroyed or lost. Moreover, there might be a lot of clerical errors in the data collected. With digitized reception management tools, the possibility of these errors, and the subsequent costs of correcting these errors are eliminated. As the process is automated, and visitors enter their data themselves, there is next to no chance of clerical errors.
Office automation has now become central to driving workplace productivity. The best place to start with digitizing the professional space is the reception area. Enterprises and workplaces with the traditional reception management system need to reconsider their technology choices at the earliest, not only for more efficiency and better management but also for its image.
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