Thank you for attending our August 2024 Office Hours! We have compiled all the questions you asked here, as well as our best resources covering the basics of The Receptionist for iPad. If you have any remaining questions, please reach out to our Support Team using the orange chat bubble at the bottom right of this page.

This New Account Resources article can help you get started if you're setting up your account for the first time. The New Admin Resources article includes a 40-minute video walkthrough of the system and is also helpful for new Users.

In today's Office Hours, we covered the basics of setting up your Home Screen, customizing your Button Configuration, editing your Visitor Fields, and adding Agreements for documents and videos.

How can I send a notification to multiple email addresses when a visitor selects one Contact?

To notify multiple people when a Contact is selected, you can create additional Messaging Rules. From the Contacts page, edit the selected Contact, then add a new Messaging Rule. Assign that Rule to the secondary Contact that you would like to be notified. Here's a quick clip of how to do this:

My visitors need to notify more than one Contact of their arrival. How do I best advise them to check in?

If these Contacts often receive the same types of visitors, the simplest solution is to create a Notification Button. If you are not able to add a button for them, you can create a new "group" Contact. To create a group Contact, add a new Contact that is clearly named (e.g. Graphics Department, Clinical Therapists, Company X, etc.), then assign both Contacts as Messaging Rules under this group Contact following the clip above.

If creating group Contacts does not make sense for your use case, your visitors will need to do separate check-ins for each Contact.

Is there a way to monitor how long it takes for a Contact to respond to a Visitor in the Two-Way Chat? I want to check how long a visitor has been waiting for a response and address delays with my staff.

As we do not keep a log of your Two-Way Chat conversations, the best way to monitor how often Contacts respond to the chat is to add a delayed Messaging Rule for yourself via email for every Contact. To do this, add yourself as an additional Messaging Rule following the clip above, but this time set the "After Check-In Happens" field to the amount of time you want to wait before being notified that your Contact did not respond. The "After Check-In Happens" field is connected to the Two-Way Chat in order to notify the backup Contacts when a Contact does not respond. You can then search your email inbox for these notifications to see how often and which Contacts are not responding to the Two-Way Chat conversations.

If you're interested in this setup, please contact our Support Team. They can add you as a backup Rule to all your Contacts in a single bulk action - saving you time.

We have families that check in at our facility together. Does every family member need to check in separately?

Whether you need family members to check in separately depends on what information you need in the Visit Log and who needs to be notified of their arrival. If separate Contacts need to be notified for each family member, or you need a separate record of each family member in the Visit Log, they will need to complete separate check-ins.

My visitors don't need to notify a Contact that they've arrived, but I need to log their time at our facility (e.g. rotating custodial staff, contractors, etc.). How can I log their visit without sending a notification?

To eliminate Contact notifications, you can create a separate Notification Button or Check-In Button and disable Contact Selection. You'll find this setting in the Button Editing Settings page for the button under "Select Employee Contacts":

Make sure to label this new button clearly for these specific visitors!

If you don't have room for an extra button but have additional Contact availability, you could create a new Contact for this group and assign it to one of your other Check-In Buttons. Create the Contact with a clear description for these visitors, then add a generic or unmanned email address for their Contact information. You may want to provide these visitors with some training on which Contact to select when they check in.

Can I make certain Visitor Fields appear in the SMS Contact notifications?

Only the Name and Company Name Visitor Fields appear in SMS notifications. If you'd like different information to appear in your Visit Log and Contact Notifications, you can change the question for these fields.

We have had requests for editable SMS Notifications, and you can add your vote to the request here in our Product Portal.

Can I set up conditional logic in Visitor Fields (i.e. visitors are brought to a different question path depending on how they answer the previous Visitor Field)?

At the moment, The Receptionist for iPad does not support conditional logic in Visitor Fields. To have visitors answer different question paths, you can create a separate Button for each question path. Otherwise, you can add optional Visitor Fields to any button that visitors can skip if they are not relevant.