The Brief – I was asked recently how I could assist with the collection of visitor management information across hundreds of locations across Australia. Currently each of the locations have manual data collection methods on visitors including sales reps, product reps and visitors in general.
The request required the ability to ask specific questions of the visitors at hundreds of locations on a global basis as well as have the ability to capture information from site specific questions for individual locations. To add more complexity we could also create questions that were region specific. The purpose of gathering the information electronically was to replace the current manual method for data collection that took months and sometimes never to get the data back to head office.
Reporting – Moving to an electronic method of capturing information from tens of thousands of visitors across hundreds of locations means on Monday morning you can see all the data from all the locations for the previous week Monday to Sunday at the click of a button, running simple but easy to read reports in less than one minute by location, region or across the entire organisation.
What type of common questions can we ask? – What type of questions do we need to ask? By default with visitor management systems you need to ask three questions
- Who are you?
- Where are you from?
- Who are you here to visit?
What can we report on from these three initial questions?
- We can easily Report on how many times an individual has visited a location and for how long the visits lasted in any given date period we select eg. weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually
- We can report on how many times and for how long the visits lasted with visitors from any particular company in any given date period we select Eg. weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually
- We can report on how many visitors any person has had over any given date period we select eg. Weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually
Over the years we have had many customer stories around the reporting on the time individuals like contractors from a single company spend on location. Just last week a customer with hundreds of contract companies supplying labour to a location was asked by one of the contracting supplier companies that was supplying labour if a report could be provided on all the employees from the supplier company for the hours they have worked over the past 7 days. To everyone’s surprise it was discovered the staff working for the supplier company had been adding 2 hours each day of overtime to their time sheets not realising the information was also being collected electronically on site, once the time sheets were matched against the electronic information it was clear their was a daily 2 hours of overtime being claimed illegally.
One employee or contractor claiming 2 hours every day will pay for this system. 
Some other more common questions used to collect information from visitors can include
- Job/Task number
- Do you need assistance in the event of an evacuation?
What are some other not so common questions we see with Visitor Management?
Any location or group of locations can ask any tailor made question that you need to create, simple yes no questions, questions with drop down options or multiple choice. The power to create your own questions allows you to create any questions that you want to collect data about from your visitors.
- One customer had to collect data on every visitor to their farm asking if they had been to any of a number of countries listed on the visitor management kiosk in the past 30 days prior to visiting the location
- One customer needed to collect just the drivers licence number
- Some companies need to know if you are working alone while on their location, another question in conjunction with this question is how long to you expect to be on site?
- It is more common today in certain buildings to be asked to hand in your mobile phone as it is not permitted to carry a camera on location, so the question is do you have a mobile phone with you that can take pictures?