Three compelling reasons to introduce a visitor management system at your office building

You’ve poured millions into your lobby and reception space. It’s spotlessly clean, inviting, and maybe even has a coffee shop in the corner. Perhaps you took some advice from our recent article featuring Colliers experts’ insights into great lobbies. You know it is important to make sure that your occupiers start their day on a good note when they come to work in the morning, so you’ve invested in a touchless access system to help ensure that everyone can smoothly access their spaces each day. So why does it feel like something is missing?

If your occupiers are able to enjoy your lobby and access their spaces free of friction, you’re certainly moving down the right track but you might be neglecting the lobby experience of one important group of space users: Visitors.

Making the visitor entrance process smooth and easy is perhaps unexpectedly critical for each of your occupiers, and has some very real impacts for your own real estate organization as well. The right visitor management system can add a lot of flexibility and smoothness to the entire building experience, so here are three of the top reasons why you should consider investing in one.

Don’t stand in the way of client business

Do you have any tenants who make important sales out of their office? Since the future of the workplace is so focused on meetings and face-to-face business, it is likely that the office will only become a more common place to close business than in the past. And for these tenants, a stressful lobby experience for their client visitors might be more than a bad impression. A problematic check-in process could show visitors that they are not cared for by their prospective business partners (your tenants), potentially losing them business over a long time frame.

Instead, why not give your clients every piece of ammo they have for closing that deal or making that sale? A smooth lobby process, where your occupiers can invite guests, give them QR code to access the elevator or security turnstile, and provide directions and wayfinding can help put your occupiers’ business partners in the right frame of mind before they even shake your occupiers’ hands.

Give occupier hiring a boost

The hiring landscape in many sectors has only gotten more competitive in recent years, meaning more and more firms are struggling to hire the talent they need to do their business and grow. This has consequently led job seekers in many areas to be choosier with the roles they end up taking. In other words, your occupiers might need all the help they can get to hit their hiring targets.

One way that you can offer that help as a landlord is to make the experience of using your tenants’ spaces as easy as possible. If your lobby experience is full of friction and stress, with confusing or outdated directions and a clunky, outmoded check-in system, you may contribute to showing prospective hires that your tenant firms can’t offer a high quality of workplace experience, and you certainly don’t want that. I myself was once on the receiving end of this. At my first full time job, most of my first week was disrupted by a logistical or communication problem that led to my not being issued proper building access credentials. This drastically reduced the amount of work I could do that week until the issue was sorted out.

There is another element here, as well. Everyone knows how stressful the job interview process tends to be. An unpleasant building access process could exacerbate that stress to the point of being the last straw throwing off an otherwise exceptional candidate at interview time. Not to be hyperbolic about the power of the lobby, but if you could help set everyone up for success or contribute to possible failure, isn’t the answer obvious?

Enhance your competitive advantage

If you operate a class A product in the suburbs, you may be far and away the highest-quality office space presence in town. But if your property is located closer to an urban downtown, it is likely that you face some real competition from similarly advanced properties. And with recent research from Propmodo showing that visitor management tools are a top demand from tenant experience apps, why wait for the rest of your competitors to offer a desired amenity before you jump on it?