By Gregory BlondeauSpring 2019
Tags: workplace design • visitor experience • corporate culture• workplace technology
A Conversation with Gregory Blondeau

The Article
Every year I sit down with workplace experts from across the globe to identify the top workplace trends that businesses simply cannot afford to ignore. The purpose is to help prepare workplace professionals for the future by collecting, assessing, and reporting the trends that will most impact organisations.
In 2019 one strong trend stands out from the crowd: the integrated workplace; and deeper than that, the integrated visitor experience.
As managers and business owners, we must factor multiple technology-driven trends into our strategies. However, getting the front-desk experience wrong can leave a shocking two in five customers and visitors with a negative impression of your brand. Can we as vibrant, growing businesses, risk leaving a potential 40 percent of customers with bad impressions? That’s a significant financial implication no business can afford.
First impressions count
The old saying rings true: ‘It takes over 100 good impressions to make up for one bad one’. As managers who have climbed career ranks know, you can never make a first impression twice.  And that goes for every single visitor who forms an opinion of an organisation within split seconds of entering its reception area.
And it is clear that despite the digital age we live in, the human touch is still king. Every day, more than eleven million face-to-face business meetings happen across the United States (busy professionals attend over sixty meetings every month). In parallel, face-to-face business is calculated to be worth £193bn annually to the United Kingdom economy.
Of the 2,000 US and UK office workers we surveyed for Proxyclick’s annual ‘Front Desk Experience’ survey, over seventy percent (71.5%) cited unfriendly receptionists, followed by over half (53.8%) naming a lacklustre welcome as a top reason for their bad experience.
What measures can businesses take to address this situation? In 2019, the concept of an “Integrated Visitor Experience” (IVE) is the approach many organisations are implementing to ensure their customers are treated as VIPs when visiting their premises.
What are we dealing with?
The entrance lobby is an organisation’s first opportunity to demonstrate how efficiently and professionally it operates. Certainly, no one likes to be kept waiting whether it is for that last restaurant table or that all-important call-back, and certainly not when they are arriving for an important meeting.
Forward-thinking businesses are now combining the latest visitor management technology (e.g. an iPad app for people to check themselves in with), with first-class front-of-house staff to ensure that the check-in-and-wait process is as smooth as possible.
To create great rapport and relationships, you must make clients feel welcome in your premises. Long queues in reception, repeated requests for ID’s, and security escorts through entry barriers are jarring experiences, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Many organisations are now taking a leap forward by integrating entire smart systems that create the ultimate, streamlined visitor experience: a visitor check-in app for arrival, automated gate systems for controlled access, and even meeting room management and catering.
Where are we now?
How have we arrived at such an exciting technological junction? It has been a while coming, and 2018 was the year that saw the rise of property technology, or “PropTech,” as the market finally began waking up to workplace digitalisation. Beautiful workplace environments are no longer enough; state-of-the-art technology must also be part of a modern office….