Prioritisation is the first step in getting organised. It means knowing which task will be dealt with first and which is the most urgent, important or sometimes critical. Every problem deserves clear, appropriate handling to rise to the challenge it presents. Welcoming visitors is no exception to this rule. On sites where many visitors are expected every day, the receptionists on duty can easily become overwhelmed and overloaded. Overload inevitably leads to mistakes, and a mistake never looks very professional in front of a potential customer, especially an important customer or a VIP.

Supporting receptionists in managing visitors

The role of receptionist is essential to any company, freeing up time for employees so that they can focus fully on their own jobs. Reception staff shape a large part of a visitor’s impression of the premises they are visiting, perhaps even the most important part, because the first impression, which lasts only 20 seconds, colours the rest of the interaction. If it was poor, there is a good chance that what follows will not be any better. Here, it is receptionists who hold this vital role: if they get it wrong, the visitor gets off on the wrong foot with you and your company.

To support this crucial role, you need serious tools that guide reception staff as effectively as possible in managing the visitors they have to deal with.

Tools and options such as VIP status to support receptionists and visitors

VIP status is an option that can be added to a visitor’s record to distinguish them from the flow of visits and tailor their welcome accordingly

To support receptionists in their demanding work, you need to keep up to date. A notebook is certainly an inexpensive solution, but it lacks security and belongs to another era. People get lost and muddled, even with the best will in the world, and sometimes the notebook itself goes missing… There really is nothing less professional on the market than this false economy, not to mention GDPR compliance. Today you need state-of-the-art tools to help these employees, and tools such as Hamilton Visitor exist for this purpose, with many built-in options designed to adapt to every situation, such as:

  • Visit pre-registration by your employees, so that your receptionists are notified of upcoming arrivals and can prepare for them.
  • Group check-in, to save your receptionists time when you are hosting a group.
  • Manual or electronic recording of your visitors’ identity documents to avoid any security issues.
  • Management of visitor and resident parking.

The aim here is to help reception run smoothly with a tool that centralises all the tasks that may currently be scattered and lead to disorganisation. With the right solutions, your teams will have a clear, easy-to-use tool that lets them:

  • Centralise your employees’ visit requests
  • Check visitors’ identity to avoid any problems on your sites.
  • Issue badges to visitors so they can access the parts of the site they are authorised to enter.
  • Personalise visitor records to manage each visit with care and guide visitors as well as possible.

This is ideal for smarter management of your visitor flow, but these solutions also need to adapt to your more specific needs.

Why you need to distinguish visitors with the VIP option

Prioritising visitors is standard practice in the business world. Every visit is important, but each one must be handled with particular care that differs from the next.

For small organisations, the number of visitors and their needs is still manageable, although sometimes poorly tracked given the variety of profiles receptionists may encounter. For larger organisations, even if the number of reception staff is multiplied, it is still difficult to handle every request with care.

In both cases, greater efficiency calls for a tailored tool, with options that make it possible to welcome every visitor as well as possible. The VIP option is one of these, distinguishing an “ordinary” visitor from a more important one who may have particular requests for their welcome. These can be specified by your employees when pre-registering the visit. The details can be found on the visit record and via the tool’s internal messaging, which your receptionists can consult to adapt to each visitor.

Help your receptionists manage visitors for a more professional welcome

Reception is the first part of your company that a visitor will see. A visible lack of professionalism will give a poor overall image of your teams, all the more so if mistakes are made because of the workload and number of requests placed on your receptionist.

It is therefore time to take the next step in your development and set foot in the future. Your visitor management should no longer rest on a single person: smart solutions should support your teams, with options suited to how they manage visitors and to the likely requests of those visitors.

With the right solution, all these issues will be resolved by a smart, flexible and easy-to-use visitor tool. A genuine support for your reception teams. Thanks to its many features and options, your employees will get help with their daily tasks, through prioritisation such as the VIP option, or automation such as recording ID cards or driving licences, or checking in groups of visitors at the same time.

Reception is often the foundation of a service: make yours as efficient as possible with Hamilton Visitor!