ROI of a visitor management system

Speaker A: In this economic climate, you want me to spend money? That's what we're going to talk about here on this episode of the Fabric. How do companies create a culture and core values that employees actually live out? The Team at the Receptionist, a Denver based software company, sets out to answer that very question. Welcome to the Fabric. Here's your host, Michael Ashford. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm your host, Michael Ashford. This is our director of sales, Tom Foster. It's been a while since you've been on the show, sir. Welcome back. Thank you. We are talking about ROI today and it's, uh, top of mind in a lot of the conversations that we have with folks looking at a visitor management system, anybody looking to spend money right now. The question, Tom, I'm assuming that you and your team get the most is what's it going to save me? What's versus what's it going to cost me? How do I know this thing is worth it?

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: Expand, please.

Speaker B: I will expand and expand and expand. Yeah. I mean, it seems to be one of the biggest questions that people are looking at right now because as there's a lot of uncertainty, we don't know what exactly is going to happen. What are ways that I can become more efficient from a company standpoint? What are the ways that I can become more efficient with my dollars?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Where can I get, as they call it, the bang for the buck. And we hear this a lot when we're talking to prospects, when we're talking to current customers that are looking to expand. And it's very interesting to watch somebody go, I don't know if we should do that. Then they start using the product and then somebody from another one of their locations comes in and goes, wait, what is this? Because this is actually saving what it looks like is a ton of time. And that is the part I think from an ROI perspective is that is not talked about enough is how much time can I save and what does that equate to from an efficiency standpoint as well as interruptions. Yes, interruptions. Interruptions are bad because we'll talk on that a little too.

Speaker A: Yeah. So we're going to start there. I eventually want to get to the delaying costs or the off putting of costs, uh, the potential for costs down the road. I want to have that conversation too. And I know I'm being a little bit vague, but we're going to get to that. So let's start with the interruptions. We have done some work here at the receptionist to actually try and quantify this because of course, you've got to know if you want to run a return on investment inquiry into a piece of software or a software purchase, you've got to know the numbers of what you're trying to save. So here's some facts and figures for you that I'm going to throw out here. We know, or studies have been shown that when it comes to task switching, I'm deep in work and I get interrupted and I have to task switch to another thing and then come back to the task that I was originally focused on. It takes an average of 23 minutes to reset, to reframe. So you're deep in a spreadsheet, you're deep in a report, you're deep in some task at, uh, perhaps it's your front desk office administrator. I've heard recently reports from some customers I've talked to that it was their CEO whose door was closest to the front desk, the one being interrupted. Now, you take the cost of that CEO's time or the cost of that front desk person's time, or you take that, you take that interruption that costs 23 minutes on average to get back to, and you're starting to talk about thousands and thousands of dollars every year wasted to interruptions and that task of task switching.

Speaker B: Yes. And you move that beyond just one location, 2, 5, 75, 100. To expand on it even further, is that this will happen at different rates throughout the. Of course, um, Gabe and I, one of our account executives, we were out prospecting and it was a door.

Speaker A: In person prospecting.

Speaker B: In person prospecting. Yes. We tried it. So we rang the doorbell and the person that came up was the actual vice president of finance. Talk about task switching costs and understanding that. So it is. And it changes throughout that day. And the average is 23 minutes. Yeah. That means that some are a little bit shorter, but there's probably a lot that are a lot longer as well. Yeah. Because when you stop and think about that, when you're just going, going, going, we can all, we can all go through this. We're just going, going, going. And all of a sudden something happens when you come back. You're like, what, what, what exactly was I doing?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: And then that. What's that do to the quality that's not even talked about in this entire study that we looked at is what's the quality of the work that happens after that interruption? So easy way to combat that.

Speaker A: Well, here's how I think about it too. That's a great example. Here's how I think about it you're heads down, focusing on a task, you're trying to get work done, you get interrupted by a visitor coming in. This can go two different ways. One, I've got to stand up now walk around perhaps to try and find that person. Hey, John, do you know where Jane is? No, I've just interrupted that person. Okay, next. Mary, do you know where Jane is? No, I've just interrupted that person. And so the task switching starts to expand out 100%. Then when those people come back to their work, let's say they take a look at the clock. All right, it's 10:24 right now. I've got a meeting at 11. Do I really want to dive back into this or is it just easier to go check Instagram? Is it easier to go check YouTube? Is it easier to go check. Get a coffee, Go get a coffee, go to the bathroom? Like, of course I don't want. I want people to take care of their bodily needs. Right. But, uh, you start to negotiate the time that you have left until that next thing that you're committed to. So that 23 minutes. Tom, you're absolutely right. It becomes at this point, it's 1024, 1025. It becomes 35 minutes. Because now I'm negotiating. Okay. Before I come back to this and before my next thing I'm going to. I'm already interrupted, so I'm just going to go do these other things.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: And it just builds from there. So not only have you expanded out by interrupting other people who you're trying to find the employee who has the guest.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Or the visitor, but now the time expansion happens when you start negotiating with.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, you know, I hadn't thought of that because we all do that.

Speaker A: I 100%.

Speaker B: I do too. I was like this morning before the drive in, I was like, okay, if I do this. No, it does. It happens every single day. And this is just the real stuff. Yeah. And to stop and think about, that's the situation that everybody is in right now. So from an economic or an roi, um, standpoint, when you're looking at this, it's beyond just what I think that was Harvard Business Review or it was

Speaker A: Gartner or Harvard Gartner.

Speaker B: Yeah, it was one of those that

Speaker A: we looked at a couple different sources.

Speaker B: Yeah. So when we looked at that, it was like, wow. And then you start really getting deeper and deeper and deeper into this. Yeah. And how do you solve that problem? Well,

Speaker A: that's what we're here to talk about. Real quick on that though. So to get that ROI, what we've done is we've taken that average of 23 minutes per interruption. And the simple calculus, the simple math is you multiply those 23 minutes by, um, you get your hourly rate for that employee who's being interrupted. You divide that by 60 to get their minute by minute rate, and then you Times that by 23. Now, you don't have to do that math right now, because in the. If you're watching on YouTube in the description, or if you're watching on our site or listening in the show description, we've got a link to a page on our website where you can actually calculate this for you. We've got an ROI calculator on our website. Go there. Just play around with it. Play around with somebody who's making minimum wage. Just see what the cost of interruptions annually will be for that person or somebody who. Let's say you pay, um, you pay your front desk staff $30 an hour, or let's say the person who's interrupted is your CEO. What's the cost to a daily interruption, an hourly interruption? You can also input the number of interruptions you get a day, and we call them interruptions. They're guests walking in your building. Go play around with that ROI calculator and see what numbers it spits out for you. It's astounding how quickly the numbers can add up. And we're not trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes here. This is just simple math that we're trying to show you. Here's the cost to your time. That this kind of. That our system, that a visitor management system. This is where you're going. That a visitor management system can help you. Satan. How? How does it do it? Let's go there. You brought up a very valid.

Speaker B: You brought up a very valid point there. Something that we don't talk about as well is deliveries, uh, coming in. Yeah. Uh, I mean, we could start going down this whole route, and this could end up being an hour long of all the different types of interruptions. And interruptions aren't necessarily a bad thing. They're a good thing for business. Or they might not be. If you have a locked door, you're trying to keep the individuals out that aren't supposed to be in there for maybe itars.

Speaker A: Darn you salespeople.

Speaker B: Darn sales. We did that the other day.

Speaker A: But that's.

Speaker B: That's meant for that. But how do you take what you think is going to help reduce interruptions and put a system in place that will allow the person to make the decision of whether they want to go up to the front or not. Yeah. And that's where we go with our system. So now we're going to start talking about visitor management because that is literally what it, what we do. And by taking that interruption away and saying, you know, pretending I'm coming in and I'm the salesperson and I want to see, you know, Andy Alsop our CEO, but Michael is the nearest the door. And Michael's our director of marketing. So if I interrupt him, it's going to cost a lot because we don't have anybody in the front. And now we're going to pretend we don't have our system. So I have to interrupt him. Then he has to go find where Andy is and next thing you know we're costing the company hundreds of dollars just for me walking through the door. Yeah.

Speaker A: Now a lot of companies calculate the cost of like an executive leadership team meeting. Like what's it going to cost us to get our entire leadership team in this meeting for an hour? It's the same notion, it's the same idea. What's it going to cost for your, Anybody? Any team member, it doesn't have to be the director of marketing or the CEO, any team member to step away from their work simply to get a visitor where they need to go.

Speaker B: Yeah. There are programs out there and software systems out there that do just that.

Speaker A: And that is what we're here for.

Speaker B: You know. So now we go to this new scenario. I'm here, the door is locked, I go to the iPad, I say, I need to see Andy Alsop. Our system sends a message directly to Andy, bypassing anybody else within the company. Andy knows I'm coming because I'm there to see him. Unless I'm, uh, you know, a pesky salesperson, in which case we have a two way communication feature. So Andy could be like, hey, I'm not available, go ahead and leave or something nicer than that or whatever he wants to say. Because that allows the uh, employee to actually communicate with the visitor without leaving their desk, without leaving Starbucks or leaving wherever it is that they're at at that particular moment in time. They could be across the world and say, hey, I'm actually not in the office. Go ahead and leave your card. Saving everybody a whole lot of time and not disrupting the entire business.

Speaker A: Now, if it is a person that they're there they're expecting to see, maybe Andy has a meeting with um, another CEO from a different Company, Right. And they're getting together. Andy's expecting him. He heads down and work. He gets the notification from a visitor management system that his visitor has arrived. He can say, hey, be right there in about five minutes, just wrapping up some work. Then Andy can finish the work that he's working on. He's already set expectations with the visitor that he knows that he's there, he or she is there, that he's given them a time frame of when to expect. I'll be there to get you. The visitor has now expectations. Andy set expectations, and he can wrap up his work. Uh, and so again, we're going back to. Are you doing. Is managing visitors and getting visitors where they need to go the purpose of your job, even for front desk staff?

Speaker B: Correct.

Speaker A: It's not always, and mostly these days, it's not at all the primary function of their job.

Speaker B: Correct.

Speaker A: Front desk staff and receptionists and office managers are being asked to do so much more than just sit at a desk and welcome people in and get them where they need to go.

Speaker B: We're beyond that now.

Speaker A: We are way beyond that now.

Speaker B: I mean, you're bringing up. We're talking about the front desk, and we're talking about CEOs, and we're talking about things like that. But I want to go on the other side of this from your employees. So your employees are receiving a notification. Let's pretend that you're in HR and you're going through an interviewing process. There's a lot of nerves and anxiety from the interviewee. The person being interviewed. I'm the interviewer. I can now say I can get a notification. And there's a picture of Michael. I can walk to the lobby and say, hi, Michael, how are you? Because I know that that is who you are. It's just these little teeny things, and they sound like. They may sound silly, but these are the little things that make you more efficient, more comfortable. And it makes the people that are visiting your facility, either for a job or whatever it might be, feel more comfortable. Plus, I mean, there's the, uh. I don't know if I want to call it the cool factor, but there's like, come on. Where we are with technology, there's a reason that we need these things nowadays. Because, I mean, I know when I was prospecting, I did see a few paper logbooks. It didn't make me go, ooh,

Speaker A: the scenario of the. I know we're talking about return on investment here. Um, and I'm going to try and make this case here. So Follow me. This is my line of thinking. What's the return on investment on the potential employee experience coming in and being able to nail the interview versus worrying about where they have to go?

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: So, uh, the building that we're in right now here in Denver, Colorado, we're in a co working space. You walk in the front door here, there is a front desk where our system happens to be, but it is a uh, large open area. There's a key fobbed door that you can't get into unless. So, uh, if an employee or if an interviewee is coming in, there's multiple different directions they can go. The front desk staff is the co working space front desk staff, not our front desk staff. So the experience to a potential interviewee and are they nervous about getting where they need to go or can they focus on, okay, um, I'm here, I'm here on time now. I can just like ease into this, know that I'm, I'm being welcomed by a system and that I'm, I'm recognized as being here. There's a return there that we haven't started to quantify m yet in terms of dollar figures, but it's there. It's a very real thing.

Speaker B: It is. And I mean the focus and the emphasis on, you know, mental health for people as well. Yeah. Like this is just one of those. It. Why, why perpetuate a problem when there's a very simple way to fix the problem right in. And like sometimes it's that the most obvious, uh, the most obvious thing that is the hardest thing. Yeah.

Speaker A: So that's, that's interruptions. Um, in the remaining little bit of time that we have here. I want to talk about the cost avoidance. There's. Because there's an ROI to a cost avoidance here. One of the things you say all the time, and I'm probably not going to get it right, so correct me. Uh, we take care of the little things so they don't become the big things. Am I getting that right?

Speaker B: Close. We handle the small stuff before it becomes the big stuff.

Speaker A: There you go. Okay. You basically said the same thing I said, Tom. Okay, so in this instance we're talking about uh, any regulatory, uh, compliance issues that you might have, auditing issues. And I know not every business has this, but a lot of our transportation and logistics companies, a lot of our manufacturing customers, a lot of our um, food manufacturing and um, uh, producers, consumer packaged goods producers have these kinds of standards where if they don't meet them, there's a heavy cost of Burden to them on the back end.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So when we're talking about return on investment, well, what's the return on avoiding a million dollar fine?

Speaker B: How do you quantify? How do you take that and say, okay, oh, I don't know. When we talk about this, part of it is if you have a doc and people back up to it, you know, you have a person drive around with a clipboard. Oh, wait, there's more cost. There's a person with a clipboard, and they ask the questions. Did you chalk your wheels? Did you put your brakes on, Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Oh, yeah, I did. Are you checking? Are you not checking? Don't know what happened to that piece of paper or are you even doing that part? Because when I say the small things that could become big. I'll tell you a quick story. Yeah.

Speaker A: So Regala style.

Speaker B: So during a demo, I brought this up, and the individual that I was speaking with was like, uh, oh, my gosh. We had somebody do the exact same thing from a trucking company that did not chalk their wheels. Thought they had their brakes on. You guys know where this is going, right? The semi rolled into the. I forgot what he called it. The top part of the thing. Whatever it's called.

Speaker A: The top part of the thing.

Speaker B: The top part of the thing. But, uh, the building.

Speaker A: Into the building.

Speaker B: Into the building and caused $250,000 worth of damage. Now, luckily in this story, it was kind of a happy ending. They had a great relationship with that company and they took care of it. However, I've also hear the other side of it. It wasn't my fault. Prove it. Prove it. Prove that my driver didn't do that. Prove, even though it's on camera that the truck rolled into the thing, Prove that they didn't do it. It was a malfunction of the truck. It's not on me. Yeah, and that's where we take. Instead of those little tiny things becoming big things. Hey, it's right here. It's in. It's in writing. It's digitally stored. So if something happens and six months from now, somebody needs to see that record instantaneously. Can pull that up.

Speaker A: Yeah. There are regulatory, um, or, uh, compliance standards in, uh. What is it? International traffic and arms regulations. Itar that we've heard. If you aren't able to pull up visitor records, if you aren't able to prove that you are keeping track of who's in your building, why they're there, when they left, what citizenship or nationality they were, and that you're tracking and have an accurate record of all of that. We've heard of CEOs getting million dollar fines. We've heard of CEOs threatened with jail. Uh, this is not like the sky is falling or trying to scare people into this. But again, this is what we mean when we say don't let the small things, the really easy to solve problems, become something that costs your company potentially millions of dollars and your freedom. I'm not trying to be scare tactical here, but this is not a made up scenario. No, these are real world examples of conversations you and your team have had

Speaker B: and have on the daily. Yeah, if you. We have Google alerts for specific kind of fines and things and those are a prime place to go and talk to the individuals about that. But it's not just the two things you've mentioned. There's also the brand.

Speaker A: Yeah. So if you're in the damage down

Speaker B: there, if you're in the middle of a, say, a large contract worth billions of dollars, and all of a sudden you get fined 100 million or $200 million, how stable are you? What is your priority going to appear to be to take care of this fine or to make sure that the production of whatever it is that you're bidding on gets fixed? So those are those unintended things that people don't think about when they're talking about. ROI is like, how do we bring these things to light for you all? So you can go, oh my goodness. Because maybe you're sitting here right now and you're like, hey, I'm at the front desk. I never would have thought about the driver in the back or the CEO. And all that's what we're here to help you guys do is understand that real. What is an roi? What are the components within that ROI as well? Because typically people are like, oh, uh, it's an iPad, it's a software subscript prescription, a software subscription. And there's my cost. Well, what am I going to get out of it? I don't know. Well, we're here to show you how to do that.

Speaker A: And that's. So in wrapping this up, that's exactly what we've tried to walk you through here today. There, uh, is a direction, direct cost that we can calculate. It's that interruption and the fact that it takes 23 minutes to recover from an interruption. And an interruption is, like Tom said, not necessarily a bad thing. You want visitors, you want people coming in, maybe not all the time, but getting those visitors where they need to be, uh, at a moment's notice and only the person that they're there to see is the one that needs to be interrupted. You're saving that cascading effect of time throughout your company, regardless of whether you have compliance standards or not. But that's then where we got to, we got to the point of here, let's talk about this cost avoidance. So, uh, again, go to just as a, as an example point or as a starting off point, go to the link to that page that I described in the description of this video if you're watching on YouTube or in the description of the podcast if you're listening to it and just check out, play around with that ROI calculator and see what a visitor management system can save you and your company when it comes to those interruptions. And have the tough conversations about the avoidance of the little things becoming the big things 100%. Uh, any final thoughts here, Tom, before we close it out?

Speaker B: I think we've done a pretty good job of helping people understand, but if you want more information, just contact us. We'll show you the different scenarios that we can help your company with.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for tuning in and watching this this episode of the Fabric. If you want more content from our studio here in Denver, Colorado, please consider subscribing to our channel here on YouTube. That's YouTube.com thereceptionistapp to see more of our content coming out of this space that you see behind me, as well as more content from the remarkable guests and the rest of the team here at the Receptionist that we plan to highlight and show you much more of, Join us in the comments. We'd love to start interacting with you there. Please join us and we'll see you on the next episode. The Fabric is hosted by me, Michael Ashford, Director of Marketing here at the Receptionist, and it's produced by our creative manager, James Jordan. If you'd like to give the receptionist for iPad Visitor Management System a try in your office, jump over to the receptionist.com freetrial and give us a test drive for 14 days with no credit card required. See what you think. And until next time, take care.