Is your building more secure with a visible visitor pass?
What is an expiring visitor pass? Do I need one?
How do you know who is a visitor in your building?
While Visitor books have gone electronic should the visitor pass go the same way? A visitor pass is visible when worn on a shirt or jacket to all employees in your building, what if you stopped issuing visitor passes on paper or with lanyards and instead the visitor pass became electronic?
While the world is going electronic and paper based systems are disappearing at a rapid rate of knots for example think about how many book stores have closed down over the past 5 years including very large chains like Borders and Angus & Robertson once proudly owned by REDGroup.
In Australia like many parts of the world already all transport systems are going ticket less.
So should we still wear a visitor pass when a visitor in a building?
A paper visitor pass does allow anyone in the building to clearly see a visitor, normally all visitors are hosted, that is a visitor normally does not leave the side of the host. It would be unusual for any company today to allow a visitor to walk freely around the back of the business without a host.
Should we take away this visibility ?
What risks are we running by removing the visibility of a paper pass stuck to the chest of a visitor
In 2015 Qantas Australia’s largest airline made available self check in from your mobile phone where the paper ticket is no longer required. You still can’t sneak on the plane without a ticket as you need to bar code in from your phone with the 3d bar code and collect a smaller paper ticket to show on entering the plane. What about visitors into a building, should we allow sign in with a 3d bar code and stop using the visitor pass altogether?
I guess we could challenge and ask any person we do not know to confirm that they are an employee or a visitor and if they are a visitor they could bring out there phone to confirm with the electronic visitor pass, could this work?
Even if we do sign in with a 3 d bar code or chipped card or bar code on a drivers license or scan the drivers license we still need to select our host and answer any questions that are required to be answered as part of the sign in process often referred to as a lite visitor induction.
Today we have the functionality to create an expiring visitor pass that will after a set amount of time expire with a red cross or complete color change stopping a visitor from overstaying. Does your company need this?
What about capturing a photo of the visitor when they sign in?
I have been asked about getting a photo capture onto the visitor pass, the reality is the black and white image that goes onto a visitor pass is so tiny that you cannot confirm if the picture is of the person wearing the pass until you actually stop the visitor and lean in to look closely at the image on the pass, could be a bit embarrassing getting that close to another persons chest. Taking a photo certainly helps in the back end data set where you can easily see the color image against the name of the visitor but the jury is out on the effectiveness of the photo of the visitor on the visitor pass.
After speaking with hundreds of companies over the past few months it is clear that most of the time a visitor is always with the host while on site, it would be extremely rare for a visitor to roam freely around the back of any business unchallenged. The collection of the visitor data is invaluable for future reporting and a visitor pass that is visible does help all people inside the building just to know that the person is a visitor.
The worlds most common visitor label printers are the Dymo 450 and the Brother 720NW which works nicely with the iPad.