Vetting Visitors in Your Organization

Vetting Visitors in Your Organization.

Since most organizations exist to serve people, it’s normal to have a constant flow of people coming through the doors. Employees are known throughout your organization and have already gone through the traditional background check process, so it’s easy to set up a more permanent screening system like credential check-ins. But visitors to your organization are different. Visitors can come in many different forms from customers and outside colleagues to delivery people or vendors. They often come unannounced, and sometimes there are many of them arriving at one time. And because they may just come once or twice, long-term security screening measures usually don’t make sense.

Unfortunately, visitors may not always have good intentions. We’ve all heard of stories of theft or violence at the hands of visitors who may have seemed innocent at the time that they entered a facility. So how do you properly vet visitors to your facilities and minimize the hazards they may pose? The answer depends on a number of variables. Let’s look at some of the variables that could influence your visitor management strategies.

How many visitors do you expect at a given time?
Visitor management will look a lot different for an elite financial institution than it will for a football stadium. Determine your peak visitor volume and acceptable wait times for these visitors. This will help you determine the right strategy and the supporting technology you’ll need for screening visitors thoroughly and efficiently.

What’s my security risk?
Is your organization an attractive target for terrorists, cyber threats, or other criminals? Different things play into this. Perhaps high-value transactions occur at your facilities, such as a bank or financial institution. Or maybe you house a lot of people such as an amphitheater or stadium, allowing an incident to happen to a mass amount of people. Or maybe you conduct cutting-edge research in your organization that people would like to get their hands on. Your visitor management processes should be based on the level of your security risk.

What are the assets I’m protecting?
What do you stand to lose if your facility is compromised? If you house valuable assets that would be costly to replace or couldn’t be replaced such as original artworks or museum artifacts, visitors will need to be vetted more thoroughly to minimize the chance of theft or destruction.

Utilizing Visitor Management Technology

Once you’ve evaluated your security risks and your capabilities and limitations for dealing with them, you can start looking at different strategies for vetting visitors. Traditional options like walk-through and handheld metal detectors allow for fast screenings of what is on the outside of a visitor, but do not deliver the data needed to truly identify a visitor. You also need the space and electrical sources to power these machines and they may not be a good choice for dealing with high visitor volume.

Thanks to changes from the Department of Homeland Security, security technology systems like FedCheck can assist you in performing instant and informative background checks so you know exactly who a visitor is even before they enter your facility. By utilizing Know Your Visitor (KYV) technology, it ensures that the data you receive in real-time is accurate and up to date every time a visitor scans in. With a quick scan of a driver license, KYV analyzes millions of data points from thousands of databases. Within seconds, your team sees the who, what, where, and when of an individual’s data and assesses their suitability and potential risk of illegal intentions towards your location—or the people within—during their visit. Best of all, your security team will be able to access this technology from anywhere. Utilizing a cloud-based security system means it’s easier than ever for your organization to enforce strong visitor regulations in-house. Using any mobile device, you can conduct security screenings at as many locations across your property as needed. If an alert is detected at any time, your designated personnel within the organization will be notified instantly and voicelessly on their personal device. From the reception desk in your lobby to the entrance of a football stadium, you can approve or deny all visitors with just one touch.

Organizations often walk a fine line between making patrons feel welcome at their facilities and scrutinizing them for being a potential risk. But if you implement clear, concise screening policies, make them available in writing and are consistent in enforcing them, there will be less room for misunderstandings and frustration. Keeping your organization and everything inside safe and secure.

Learn more about how FedCheck can help your organization vet visitors even before they enter your facility.