Envoy

Benefits:

The ease of the overall design and user interface (UI). Also, the nifty features and add-ons you can add to make it specific to your needs. I get tons of compliments from our guests about how great it is to use, and often give out Envoy's contact information so they can set it up for themselves at their own company. The customer service is top-notch as well. They are always happy to give a helping hand whenever something 'seems' to go wrong - even if it is user error (and they don't make you feel bad about it, either). On the whole, I enjoy working with Envoy, and love the software. Keep up the good work.

Drawbacks:

The only thing that I can say that I don't like is that you can't put the email as optional on the iPad - meaning having the word (optional) next to the email bar. This always confuses first-time customers, so it would be great if that were something we could do. I already have it set as not a required field, but the word (optional) would be extremely helpful.

Benefits:

Accurate record of Visitors Ability to add an NDA to the process Saves so much time for front of house staff Auto notification for visitor hosts Ability to pre-register / invite visitors Improves the whole visitors registration experience Ease of use for Administrators Good dashboards.

Drawbacks:

The biggest challenge with deploying Envoy is getting employees to start using it to pre-register / invite their visitors. The product demo videos showing users how easy it is to start using the system could be improved. The benefits of using the system for an organization are clearly laid out in the demo videos - It would also be very helpful to have positive visitor feedback and their experiences on using the system. Options on the front screen are not readily obvious -i.e. a globe to depict different language options? a person that is unfamiliar will have no idea !

In sum:

Getting away from paper based visitor registration and having an ongoing accurate record of visitors. Overall a great system that improves the visitor experience, and frees up so much time of front of house staff.

Benefits:

Using Envoy in our office has made checking guests and visitor a no brainer. We no longer need to have a receptionist at the front desk to welcome guests, Envoy is our go to partner. Using Envoy insures us that all guests , visitors are being helped and our clients are being notified in a quick email or text that they have a guest waiting for them in the reception area. Envoy has made our office more efficient and modern.

Drawbacks:

The only con I can think of is the customer service, it was difficult to get hold of our rep after several emails and calls to setup our service from a free trial, we almost decided against using Envoy but I so glad we didn't give up.

In sum:

One key issue was having a receptionist at the front desk to welcome our guests. visitors and then notifying our staff that there was a guest waiting for them. Now with Envoy, we never miss a guest or visitor and our staff is quickly notified via email that there is a guest in the reception area waiting for them.

Benefits:

The look of the ipad, very stylish and the fact that it remembers guests from previous visits. envoy work hard at making this a functional and smooth experience - on two occasions I have used the live chat online feature to help me over 'hurdles' mostly of my own doing and the specialists were great, fast, friendly and efficiant.

Drawbacks:

I would like the machine to ask for credit card # and expration date but there's no way of doing that (joke.) Really the only con is that I'd like another ipad available at a lower height for clients with disabilities but that is an issue I am raising with my company and not Envoy.

In sum:

When we first had this system I admit I was a bit of a luddite especially given that I had used the old system of access control for over 12 years. Now I'm a convert and would reccomend this to anyone. It's sleek, modern and makes the lobby look far more modern.

Benefits:

Features that are most impactful right now is the Touchless Visitor Sign-In and Envoy Protect. Product is very easy to use and there were no issues implementing Envoy to several of our offices.

Drawbacks:

The only thing that comes to mind is it's an expensive solution.

Benefits:

Having been a Corporate Receptionist at other companies I have found this product to make the task of registering visitors unbelievably helpful. Visitors enter their own name into a system which then prints the badge and automatically notifies the employees. No more complaints about having misspelled a name or not notified an employee. We also use the photo function which makes it very easy for our employees to identify their visitor when collecting them from reception. Our clients are also impressed with our high tech sign in process.

Drawbacks:

The software itself leaves little to be desired. It has been well thought out. Our issues have been with employees not receiving the notification emails in their inbox. The junk filter on email software will place the email in junk or spam folder. Clearly explaining this issue to employees would save some frustration.

In sum:

The stress of having multiple visitors, delivery vendors, ringing telephones and employees at reception with questions all at the same time was lessened, it didn't disappear; it just took one thing off the multi-tasking plate required to do the job well. I was able to quickly see at a glance what visitors were in the building. Following up with employees to collect their visitors was easier.

Benefits:

Health Check - Regardless of vaccinations, COVID-19 is continuing to stay with variants and spikes throughout the states and countries. The safety of our Associates and visitors is important. We have an onsite RN who has been providing service since March of 2020 and he truly appreciates Envoy. By including Envoy into our daily routine, we've been able to ease the mind of associates and visitors. The program is easy to learn/use and the best part is "the Bot" and if the "bot" doesn't answer the question, we are immediately directed to a "live" person. This is definitely huge. There are many other safety or security programs that take 24-48 hours to respond. Kiosk Multi language is a great success and we hope to see more languages, i.e. Vietnamese, etc.

Drawbacks:

Side bar, when we view Protect and want to verify "employees expected" it jumps to Visitors. That has been the most confusing to many Executives , Managers, etc. Dashboard "Employee Registration" tab should only be available for viewing to Global Access Administrators and No one else! Settings is under Visitor tab and Settings should be on it's own tab.

Benefits:

I love the Dashboard. Super user friendly, the search feature is awesome, and I love that it uses an iPad for sign-ins rather than the staff doing the sign-in manually. The text feature works well for our students.

Drawbacks:

There are a few guest policy restrictions that we have currently that are a little difficult to manage with Envoy so it does rely on our staff to be very conscientious (such as, host residents are only able to sign in one guest at time but the Envoy system does not yet prevent a host resident from doing that. The Envoy team is working on it and we are hoping to have that in place soon!)

In sum:

From the minute I expressed interest in the Envoy system, their customer support was on top of it answering every question I had with as well as being transparent about the capabilities of the system. I work in a residence hall on a college campus and we use Envoy to track our visitors- a huge safety concern and Envoy makes that easier for us.

Benefits:

As receptionist, I use it daily to monitor who is visiting the office and when they leave. I find it very helpful. I no longer have to run down to the lobby to pick people up and bring them upstairs, then contact the person they will be meeting with. This program contacts the host directly and lets them know their visitor has arrived. This saves me a lot of time during my day.

Drawbacks:

There is nothing I don't like about the program.

In sum:

At first people were reluctant to take the time to log in, but once you walk them through it and show them the ease of using it they are okay. Also explain to them that the next time they visit and login it will be easier for them because their information will already be in the system.

Benefits:

I like the notification choices available for each user, the photos and the badge printing.

Drawbacks:

I would love to have three of our workflows that can be programmed to call a specific number without entering the name of the department. Ex. Member Services visitor has to type in Member Services after selecting Member Services. For a particular staff, I see the advantage to typing in a name for a number. But we have 3 workflows that go to a specific Department. I would like to have the access to note that listing ones email when signing in is optional. That has been a stopper for some of our visitors. Other questions I added I had access to list as optional. It is not intuitive to some visitors that they have to select the name for the system to recognize it. Might be nice to somehow direct them to the process. Is it possible to have a Chat to help people that are not techy - for the offices that do not have a receptionist in the lobby?

In sum:

In the sales process, we were told it took 2 hours to set up. It took much longer than that. Now that I have worked with it, it might take me 2 hours. The set up time should be qualified - 2 hours for advanced techies, longer for beginners. It gave us inaccurate expectations about setup. Once we went live, we had 2 weeks were the system worked great. Of course there was training to communicate to staff what to expect and how to update their notifications. One big selling point for us was phone notifications. We have about 4 hotlines that ring on multiple extensions. Very important for a quick response to the visitor in the lobby since we don't have a receptionist. Phone notifications stopped working after 2 weeks. It took 7 weeks for Twilio and our phone expert to figure out the issue - which was a software issue. For weeks we were brushed off that the software was working correctly and it was our phone system issue. I do like the software but have been disappointed in customer service post purchase.