By Chris Burton, executive vice president of experiences and design at Sign In Solutions
For government contractors, the stakes are astronomically high when it comes to securing their buildings and the people within them, along with their digital infrastructure and the data stored there. A breach could mean lost intellectual property, costly operational downtime, lost revenue, reputational and relationship damage, or worse.
Because these risks pose nothing less than an existential threat to many government contracting businesses, protecting against them — and documenting these protections for reporting and compliance purposes — is a necessary cost of doing business. Sure, anyone entering a government contracting firm’s facilities may have to endure multiple layers of repetitive, time-consuming, heavy-handed and sometimes off-putting security measures. But that’s a necessary evil with visitor management, right? GovCon companies can’t keep their facilities, people and digital assets secure and compliant without the visitor experience suffering at least a little bit.
Or can they?
Visitor Management Reimagined
A reimagined vision for visitor management — we’ll call it Visitor Management 2.0 — suggests otherwise. With Visitor Management 2.0, a government contractor can get the best of both worlds, and with it, a true differentiator in whatever segment of government contracting they operate. They can keep their buildings highly secure, stop threats before they materialize and stay on the right side of compliance requirements, while at the same time elevating the onsite experience so it consistently provides employees, contract and temporary workers, vendors and guests with a seamless, secure, personalized and ultimately superior experience from the opening invitation forward.
What’s Lacking in Traditional Visitor Experiences
All too often, traditional visitor experiences begin with what feels like an indifferent shrug, unwelcome scowl or even an unexpected blast of cold water to the face. Visitor Management 2.0, on the other hand, greets them with what feels more like a familiar, friendly and welcoming handshake. The former can inspire a sense of foreboding, intrusiveness, friction and distrust; the latter, a sense of trust, competence, and respect. Which would you prefer to be the first and lasting impression that people have of your company and brand?
Security and compliance remain the highest priorities with Visitor Management 2.0. But that security comes with an added dimension: the ability to maintain strong security and experiential threads across an organization’s multiple facilities, and across a person’s multiple visits to those facilities. Instead of relying on various cobbled-together, siloed systems, Visitor Management 2.0 enables a government contracting organization to standardize and unify visitor security, compliance and experience in a single digital environment. The result: elevated security and visitor experiences — the best of both worlds. Here’s a closer look at how Visitor Management 2.0 accomplishes that:
What Visitor Management 2.0 Offers
Streamlining the Entire Visitor Management Lifecycle Within a Single Platform
Instead of relying on manual visitor logs, random spreadsheets and inconsistent security practices, protocols and processes within and across sites and offices, Visitor Management 2.0 centralizes it all within a single system for managing the entire visitor lifecycle.
From gathering documentation (drawing from scores of external databases to identify potential security threats), managing approvals, and verifying visitors before they arrive to ensure compliance, through frictionless sign-in, instant notifications to the appropriate people when visitors arrive, concierge-style guidance for visitors once inside a building, to post-visit analysis of policies and visitor flows to optimize journeys and meet regulatory requirements, Visitor Management 2.0 provides visibility, automation and intelligent analysis at every stage of the visitor lifecycle, giving an organization’s security teams a complete, dashboard-based view into what visitors, employees and contractors are on-site. It also enables an organization to customize visitor workflows to their unique priorities and requirements with NDAs, health checks and other steps.
Standardizing and Scaling Visitor Management to Create Consistent, Unified Security and Compliance Measures and Visitor Experiences Across Multiple Locations
Inconsistent security protocols across locations can produce unnecessary risks that extend well beyond inefficiencies and regulatory fines. In the case of a global aerospace maintenance, repair and overhaul company, for example, their head of compliance was perceptive enough to recognize that the disparate, manual visitor management processes the company was using across multiple locations would eventually become problematic, making it difficult to maintain consistent security and compliance standards. By moving to a unified visitor experience across all locations, it could implement unified core visitor policies across multiple sites while also accommodating site-specific requirements at facilities with high-security areas that require additional screening. Flexibility is a strong point with Visitor Management 2.0. Bespoke and enterprise-grade visitor management systems are available for companies with more sophisticated needs, while others can meet their security needs with an off-the-shelf, self-deployable app. Either way, they get a solution that will scale with them as they grow, and that should be able to effortlessly integrate with existing security, HR and access-control systems.
Enriching Visitor Experiences
Visitor management doesn’t have to mean visitor inconvenience. In fact, quite the opposite. With Visitor Management 2.0, the platform works behind the scenes to enable an organization to provide a concierge-type visitor experience that includes personalized services and emphasizes high-end touches, from having a pre-printed badge waiting when a visitor arrives, to giving them the ability to book a parking space, room or desk in advance. Their information is portable across locations, so they don’t have to endure redundant processes and other hassles.
Whether it’s your lobby, your loading dock, your virtual meetings, or your satellite offices, people get a consistently high-quality experience at your organization’s “front door.” The visitor feels expected, known, respected and welcome, which reflects positively on your organization, reinforcing a progressive, modern and secure brand image. Ultimately, this image can help an organization win more business, and attract and retain talent.
Compliance and Reporting
Instead of scrambling to find, verify, collect and share data, organizations gain a centralized visitor management system and a single source of truth from which they can instantly access digital records to reduce errors, improve safety, and simplify and speed audit preparation. Visitor Management 2.0 streamlines visitor approvals to ensure regulatory forms are signed and track access to facilities, maintaining detailed, time-stamped visitor logs, collecting necessary documentation, and ensuring compliance with safety, legal, and industry regulations.
Automated anonymization and retention policies ensure that sensitive data is handled responsibly. Ultimately, it’s the difference between audit failures that can lead to lost contracts and superior audit performance that can lead to new business.
Putting Cybersecurity and Physical Site Security on Equal Footing
For government contracting firms and their security teams, it’s not just about who you physically let into your buildings, it’s also about what risks your organization is exposed to via its digital infrastructure.
Visitor Management 2.0 employs intelligent capabilities to help GovCon firms control the risks associated with the systems, networks and apps they use.
Harnessing the Power of Intelligent Automations and AI Capabilities
Automation and intelligent capabilities are a big reason Visitor Management 2.0 represents a quantum leap forward for an organization. Powered by AI, a system can:
- Set up automated triggers and events for different visitor types.
- Automatically notify hosts of visitor arrivals.
- Manage data anonymization and retention policies to ensure sensitive data is handled responsibly.
- Automate watchlist screening, ensuring only approved individuals gain access.
- Provide alerts to compliance gaps before access is granted.
- Evaluate visitors against threat intelligence databases before they arrive on-site.
- Use behavior pattern analysis to identify unusual visitor behaviors.
Heightened security or a superior visitor experience? With Visitor Management 2.0, that’s a false choice. It turns out that government contractors can have the best of both worlds.
