… and why now is the time to fix them!
The guest sign in experience is often the first physical experience your customers, your partners and your prospective employees have with your organization. And for this reason alone, I feel it’s something that should be great.
While each workplace I’ve visited has many of the same basic requirements for me to complete as a guest. The processes I’ve had to go through each time before I’ve been able to actually do what I came there for, have been as varied as the companies themselves.
And despite experiencing so many, I’m yet to come across one that made we think, “Wow! That was great!”
So why is guest experience so broken?
I believe it’s for 3 reasons.
- No one in charge of defining the process is ever a visitor. If you don't have to use the process yourself, it’s easy to forget what it actually feels like to use it.
- There are lots of internal and external stakeholders or groups that provide a small piece of the service. Facilities usually defines the check-in process. Security tells you what everyone needs to provide you and all the things they need to complete. IT provides you some way for them to access Wi-Fi. And if you are in a multi-tenant building, the landlord usually has something you need to follow to fit their requirements too. for base building. All these provide you with their requirement in isolation and expect you to integrate it with the process guests need to follow.
- It’s always been this way… heck I still see some places with visitors ledgers on front desks!!
Guest experience is something that I feel has been overlooked for many years, however, with the focus of the workplace pivoting more towards employee experience, maybe it’s time to also think about the experience of the ‘other’ people that visit your workplace too.
Your Partners, Your Customers… Your Prospective Employees...
Why change it now?
There’s a long list of reasons why revamping your employee experience is worth every piece of the effort it takes and more;
- Safety and security: knowing who’s really there and when they’ve left.
- Occupancy: most visitors don’t use badges… and if you aren’t going to do occupancy right, and still use badge data… at least get your visitor counts right! Badge data and visitor data are in usually in 2 separate systems…. and many organizations don’t think to combine the two.
- Cost of Labor: How many minutes a day are people checking in guests? Do you know?
- Optimize Productivity: Avoid your guests having to fumble around for Wi-Fi passwords for the first 15 mins of a meeting or waiting for some host to send them a code.
- Get ready for Artificial Intelligence (AI): A solid data foundation if key to accurate insights. Get your visitor system ready to provide business value using AI.
- Experience: Offering your visitors, your clients and as I said before, your prospective employees, a 1st class, concierge experience leaves a lasting impression.
I go into all these topics in much more detail on Episode 5 of the podcast!
