11 ways to use visitor types to get the most out of Envoy

We’ve always wanted to give customers as much ability as possible to make Envoy their own. One of our biggest steps towards this goal was launching our visitor types feature in March, which allows you to have full control over the sign-in experience. We’re thrilled that this feature has been one of our most widely-adopted to date.

However, a common question that we’ve been hearing from customers is: “Can you give us examples of how we can best use visitor types for our company?”

We hear you — and yes, absolutely! In this post, we’ll cover some of the most popular uses for our visitor types feature. After you’re finished reading, you should have at least a few more ideas for how to further customize your visitor experience. Please note that there are no hard and fast rules about how to use visitor types (the sky’s the limit!), but hopefully these examples will get your creative juices flowing.

Visitor types 101

First off, let’s have a quick primer on visitor types. With this feature, you have the ability to do two powerful things:

1. Create fully customized sign-in flows based on a guest’s purpose of visit, i.e. their visitor type. You can customize every single step!
2. Change which visitor types display on the iPad at any given time.

How does this work?

Your visitors will still tap the “Tap to sign in” button, and then they will see the visitor type selection screen. They’ll select their visitor type, and then will be prompted with the customized sign-in experience you created.

For more information about setting up visitor types, check out our help center article.

How you can use visitor types

You can customize several different features per visitor type. We’ll go over each feature below, as well as provide examples for each.

Sign-in fields

With visitor types, you can customize sign-in fields based on the guest’s purpose of visit. Or think about it another way — if there’s specific types of information you’d like to collect for different visitors, you can do that by switching up the sign-in fields.

Many of our customers use sign-in fields to get new newsletter subscribers. To do so, they’ll ask a visitor during sign-in if they’d like to receive their newsletter. If the visitor agrees, they’ll get added to their subscriber list. With visitor types, you can set which types of visitors you’d like to ask about the newsletter. For example, you can add this “Would you like to subscribe to our newsletter?” field for interview candidates or meetings, but remove it for vendors or contractors.

One of our customers, Headspace, has a Bike Borrow program that allows employees to rent bikes at the front desk. And, they’ve created a visitor type called “Bike Borrow.” Since this visitor type is mainly for employees, the only sign in fields are “Full Name” and “What bike are you borrowing?” instead of fields like “Email address” and “Who are you here to see?”

NDA

Does your legal team want specific visitor types to sign the NDA but not others? The visitor types feature will let you enable NDA signing for interview candidates, but turn it off for friends and family.

Need everyone to sign an NDA, but your legal team wants to ensure the language for each type of visitors is different? You can customize your NDA text differently based on visitor type. Voila! For example: with Headspace’s Bike Borrow program, employees are required to sign a waiver before they can check out a bike. The visitor types feature allowed them customize the text of the waiver for this specific visitor type, but were able to keep traditional NDAs for other visitor types (meetings, interviews, etc.)

Badge printing

You can enable or disable badge printing based on visitor type. If enabled, you can customize the information displayed on the badge.

If your company throws events, this could be a fantastic option. For example, you can enable badge printing only for events, but not for other visitors — or vice versa. (Note: for faster event check-in, you can also print pre-registered guests’ badges out ahead of time!)

You can apply similar logic to other visitor types. For example, you can ensure that badges get printed for certain visitor types (like meetings and interviews), but not for others (like contractors who may have a permanent badge).

Photos

You can enable or disable photo-taking based on visitor type. If enabled, you can also choose if you’d like to use existing photos.

You can use this feature if there are certain visitor types you would require take a photo instead of others. For example, you can require photo-taking for vendors or contractors, but not for interview candidates. If there are scenarios where you’ll have lots of visitors coming in at once (tour groups or events), you can turn off photo-taking for those visitor types so it doesn’t slow down the sign-in process.

If you’d like to have photos of specific visitor types, but do not need a new photo taken every time they visit, you can enable the ‘use existing photos’ feature to shave three to five seconds off the sign-in flow.

Plus one sign-in

You can enable or disable plus one sign-in based on visitor type.

Let’s use an example of a manufacturing plant that regularly runs tours of the facility. Instead of everyone in the tour group needing to sign in, you can just create a “Tour” visitor type and enable plus-one sign in. This feature allows one visitor to sign in with additional unspecified guests.

Note: With this feature, you’ll only capture the sign-in details for the group representative, and only the group representative will sign your NDA. Since you can also edit the NDA per visitor type, you can edit your NDA accordingly.

Final screen

You can enable or disable the final screen based on visitor type. If enabled, you can also customize the final screen per visitor type.

Let’s say that you’re managing Envoy for a museum. If the person who signs in is a new visitor, the final screen could display information about signing up for a membership or a special discount. If the visitor is a contractor, you could instead display the safety and workplace rules.

Additional examples

• If you’re an incubator or co-working space, you can display each company as its own visitor type. (Note: this means you would only be able to set one type of flow per company.)
• The visitor type feature also allows you to change which visitor types display on the iPad at any given time. Let’s say that you’re throwing an event after work hours and you know the only visitors will be coming for that event. You can turn off all the other visitor types beforehand, thus minimizing any chance of confusion. (Note: if you have only one visitor type enabled, the visitor types screen will be removed and will automatically be set to the one you choose.) With Envoy, you can save all your visitor type settings, so the next time you need them, they’re already there.

We hope you found this post helpful. We’d love to hear how you’re using visitor types at your company — let us know in the comments below!

Note: Our visitor types feature is only available on our Premium and Enterprise plans. Interested in upgrading your current plan? Just login to your Envoy dashboard, click Settings > Billing, then click “Upgrade” under “Current Plan.”