Corporate Offices
With Visitor Assistant, a tablet on the empty desk signs people in: each visitor answers your office's own questions one at a time, such as which company they are with and who they are here to see, and whoever they pick is told by email, a text message or a Teams channel. The app's Reception view then shows who is in the building, and a printable roll-call page lists every visitor and member of staff inside.
The desk by the lift has had nobody behind it since the receptionist's hours were cut, and on most days that is fine: twelve of you, a bell on the counter, a hardbound visitor book and a pen on a chain. Then a candidate turns up ten minutes early for a two o'clock interview, rings the bell, and waits. The manager she is meeting has his headphones on for a call three rooms away, and nobody knows she is there until someone passes on the way to the kitchen. In the meantime she does what the counter asks of her: she signs the book, and reads it. Every entry above hers is on show — the courier, your accountant, a supplier's rep, and the two people interviewed for the same job this morning, one of whom wrote down the company she still works for. You would not hand that list to a stranger. The book hands it to every visitor, all day.
They tap the tablet, answer your questions one at a time — a name, the company they are with, who they are here to see — and are given a badge number at the end. Nobody installs anything, makes an account or remembers a password, which matters for people who will stand at your counter once, or for a week at most: a courier, a candidate, an auditor. The questions are yours to write. Add one, reword one, change the order, retire one you no longer need, and choose for each whether the answer is free text, an email address, a phone number or a pick from a list.
The visitor picks that person from a list on the tablet, and whoever they picked hears about it by email, a text message or a Teams channel. That takes the place of the bell, which only works when someone is within earshot and not on a call. Which of the three suits your office depends on where your people look during a working day, so ask them before the first real visitor arrives rather than after the first one has waited.
A courier with a parcel addressed to the company, or someone dropping off a cheque, may not know whom to ask for. You can end the list of people with "I'm not sure — I need help", but read what that option promises before you switch it on: it needs your opening hours, because choosing it promises the visitor that somebody is at the desk. In an office whose desk is empty most of the day, that promise has to be kept by a real person who will walk out to the counter during those hours. If nobody can, leave it off and make sure the list includes the people a walk-in would actually ask for.
The app's Reception view shows who is in the building now. Staff sign themselves in and out by scanning a poster with their own phones, with no app and no password, so the list can cover your own people as well as your guests. For an evacuation there is a roll-call page listing every visitor and member of staff inside, and it can be printed. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety's emergency management checklist includes the item "All employees and visitors can be accounted for", and puts "Roll call / headcount" among the functions to be clearly defined and assigned to individuals. It is a planning checklist, not a law. The roll-call page helps with that item only for the people who signed in: it cannot list anyone who came in without signing in, so it is only as complete as your signing-in is.
What follows is our reading, not legal advice. PIPEDA, the federal law for private-sector organisations that handle personal information in the course of commercial activity, has a safeguards principle that asks for protection against unauthorised access and disclosure in whatever format the information is held, and it names physical measures such as locked filing cabinets and restricted access to offices among the ways to provide it. In Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec a provincial private-sector law generally applies instead to what happens within the province, though PIPEDA still covers personal information that crosses provincial or national borders. An open book on a public counter works the other way, because reading the earlier entries is part of signing. On the tablet, the screen shows the visitor your questions and their own answers while they check in, which someone standing close behind can read, and the confirmation at the end carries no name.
It is a fair question, and the answer is in the wording. PIPEDA defines business contact information as information used to communicate with someone in relation to their employment, business or profession — a name, a title, a work address or phone number — and section 4.01 takes it outside Part 1, the Act's privacy rules, only when it is collected, used or disclosed solely for that purpose. A visitor book is not usually kept so that you can get in touch with the people in it; it records who came in, when, and to see whom. That is our reading, not a ruling: the exemption does not seem to us to stretch that far, and we would not rely on it for a visitor book.
You pick one of three settings: keep what visitors typed, have it cleared after however many days you set, or have it cleared the moment the visit ends. PIPEDA's retention principle says personal information is kept only as long as the purposes it was collected for require, that information no longer needed should be destroyed, erased or made anonymous, and that retention guidelines should include minimum and maximum periods. So the number is yours to choose and to be able to explain; we do not suggest one. The hardbound book has a retention period too. Nobody chose it.
Our privacy page sets out, provider by provider, what is stored where and what is processed in the United States. Read it before the tablet goes on the counter, because your visitors are owed the answer and you are the one who will give it. For whatever is processed outside Canada, the Privacy Commissioner's guidance on processing across borders is written for organisations like your office: you remain responsible for personal information you transfer to a third party for processing, you must use contractual or other means to secure comparable protection while it is processed, and you must be open about it, which includes telling people their information may be sent to another country for processing, where its courts, law enforcement and national security authorities may be able to reach it.
An illustration, with an invented office and invented people; nothing in it describes a customer. A fourteen-person engineering consultancy rents half of a third floor, and its counter has had nobody behind it since the receptionist's role went. Before the tablet goes out, the office manager writes four questions: "What's your name?"; "If you are here for a company, which one?", reworded from "Which company are you with?" so that an interview candidate can type "none" instead of naming her current employer; "Who are you here to see?", a list of the fourteen; and "What brings you in today?", with a meeting, an interview, a delivery or something else to pick from. She leaves "I'm not sure — I need help" off, because nobody can promise to be at the counter, and makes sure her own name is on the list, since deliveries come to her. Photo, ID check and spoken questions stay off. What visitors type is cleared after thirty days, and she notes why: long enough to answer a question about last month's visitors, short enough that the record does not turn into a directory. At ten to two a candidate answers the four questions, types "none" for the company, picks the hiring manager and is given a badge number; he is told in the project team's Teams channel and comes out to meet her. The confirmation she leaves on the screen carries no name, so the next visitor finds nothing of hers to read. On Thursday a fire drill empties the floor, and the office manager checks the roll call, nine staff and two visitors, against the faces at the assembly point. The old book, three years of names and companies, goes into a locked drawer until the partners settle how long it has to be kept, and then to the shredder.
No. Photo, ID check and spoken questions all start switched off, and stay off unless you turn them on. Before you turn on a photo or an ID check, say what it is for: PIPEDA limits both the amount and the type of information collected to what the identified purposes need, and the supplier who calls in every month is a different case from a contractor who will be alone in your server room.
Only if you can name what you will use it for. Every question you add is one more answer to protect, to clear on schedule and to explain if a visitor asks about it. The roll call does not need one: it lists who is inside.
They don't need to. Staff sign in and out by scanning a poster with their own phones, so nobody queues behind a visitor at the counter, and they appear on the roll-call page alongside the visitors.
No; that is a separate assistant. Voice Assistant answers your business's phone number with a greeting you write word for word, and after each call sends a summary of what the caller wanted, by email or text, to the addresses you list. It does not transfer calls and it does not book appointments. Each caller lands in the same client list as your visitors, with the call summary on their record.
Work out how long you genuinely need it, keep it locked away until then, and then destroy it. PIPEDA's retention principle expects information that is no longer needed to be destroyed, erased or made anonymous, and its safeguards principle asks for care in disposal so that nobody else gets at it on the way out. The recycling bin by the lift is not that.
Setting this up is our work, not a form you fill in. We go through your wording with you, and you can change any of it afterwards.
Digital Front Desk