Visitor Management for Events: Getting it Right from Start to Finish

As the saying goes, “The first impression is the last impression”, making the first impression is extremely important for a business to build more relations. However, it is not as easy as it seems and not as hard as it is said.

Arranging a business conference for the clients and potential clients is one of the best ways to get to know more about your clients, make new contacts, build a business, learn about the improvements and present your future plans to the attendees.

Getting back to the visitor management, there are a few essentials that one has to keep in mind to get it right.

Invitation and the Welcome email :

Once the event has been finalized, every guest should get an invitation. Upon confirmation of the same, the guest needs to be sent an email welcoming them to the event.

The email has some must-have things as mentioned below.

1. Venue of the event
2. Schedule of the event
3. Modes of transport available to the venue
4. Different routes to reach the venue
5. Wi-Fi connectivity details (if required)
6. Nearby stays (if the guests are coming from different region/state)
7. Contact person details in case of any help is needed

In addition to the above information, you can add some nearby tourist attractions in the city where the event is going to take place. There is no need to provide all the information in a single email, instead, the email could act as a quick reference guide and would have different links. The visitors are surely going to appreciate your efforts for the information that has been provided.

Traditional sign-in register vs Self Check-in to the venue

Maintaining a visitor sign-in register manually could be a very hectic task even if you have a dedicated team for it. If the event has hundreds of attendees, it becomes much worse to get the guests to sign in. Guests would get frustrated if they are standing in a line for a long time just to check themselves into the venue. 

Instead of keeping the attendees waiting for a long time, you can provide them with an option for self-check-in with the help of a kiosk which is common nowadays at most of the airports.

This approach will not only save the check-in time, but also add an additional layer of security to the visitor management system. You can pre-feed all the names of attendees and let them enter their names on arrival at the venue. If you have someone on your watch list or even on the security watch list, the kiosk can notify the appropriate person on their arrival as soon as they check-in. This allows the hosts to keep the check-in process hassle-free.

The kiosk can then print visitor badges or IDs with a photograph for an additional security level. If any attendees have any questions or prefer to speak with a person instead of the self-check-in option, you can always guide them towards the appropriate contact person to help them out.

Adding Some Digital Signage at the Venue

It is often seen in the corporate events that the people who are joining into the venue miss the presentations just because they had no idea where the presentation is taking place, or they don’t know the way to get to the presentation hall. This can be easily mitigated by adding some digital signages to the venue.

The signages can be either interactive or static. One interactive signage that has all the whereabouts of each presentation is preferred in the common room which will provide a way to get to the halls/presentation rooms. This will help the attendees to reach to the desired presentation room/hall. One signage could be put up aside from the entrance of each hall/room to let everyone know which presentation is going on inside the room. This will avoid instances where people peek in the room to check and distract the presenter or the attendees.

One more advantage of adding signage at the venue is you can reduce the number of people just standing at some points to give directions to the attendees. This traditional approach of a person standing there to give directions becomes more problematic if the hallways or the staircases are narrow and the person who is giving them directions is blocking the way.

Post Event Follow-ups

Once the event is over, every host would like to know the feedback from the attendees. Feedbacks help the host to get an idea about what went well and what needs improvement.

In the case of traditional handwritten sign in registers, there are many possibilities that the host would not get the required information to do the follow-ups. 

Sometimes the handwriting is unrecognizable, the pages of register might have been torn, the register is missing, etc.

On the other hand, the digital visitor management check-in software that are used during the self-check-in do not have these issues. The data of visitors gets stored on a computer which can easily be fetched at any given point in time. Thus helping the host to effectively manage the post-event follow-ups.

To summarize the visitor management for an event, the traditional approaches do tend to have multiple issues, right from the venue check-ins to the post-event follow-ups. On the opposite side, the new-age digital visitor management systems with an integrated visitor management software provides an extremely great experience to the visitors as well as the hosts of the event. If you are looking for a visitor management system for your next event piLOBI is your one-stop destination.