Partner Spotlight: Proxyclick

In this partner Q&A, we caught up with Dorian Van Bever, Marketplace Lead for Proxyclick. Specializing in Enterprise visitor management solutions, Proxyclick provides software with cutting edge security, without sacrificing the visitor experience.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your company?

Yes. I’m Dorian Van Bever and I’ve been leading the partnership efforts at Proxyclick now for about a year. A lucky 13 months, to be exact. But my background actually spans across all things digital and marketing. I’m a believer that technology can be used to genuinely make our lives better. You can say I’ve definitely been drinking the digital transformation Kool-Aid.

We all have, actually, at Proxyclick. 

We started out as a suite of facility management solutions—catering, meeting room management, and parking management, you name it—and eventually turned our razor-sharp focus solely on visitor management. Our cloud-based software allows organizations to build best-of-breed strategies for their workplaces and production sites. 

Who are your typical customers and what kinds of challenges do they face? How is Proxyclick helping to solve these challenges? 

Our customers really tend to be those organizations that manage their employee access with well-documented policies and procedures but need help applying those same principles to their visitor and contractor management. With millions of external visitors and contractors entering corporate buildings and industrial sites every day, this creates a massive security risk for organizations of all sizes. 

Proxyclick helps you mitigate these security risks with a digital solution that also happens to deliver additional benefits:

• Keeping your visitor data confidential
• Improving your branding
• Making your front desks more efficient and reducing costs

We cater to the visitor management and security needs of companies such as Vodafone, L’Oreal, PepsiCo, and Audi. At this point, there really is no industry that can afford to operate without a cloud-based visitor management system. We just happen to also live a best-of-breed approach with the flexibility to integrate with many of the existing legacy applications out there.

Security appears to be an important topic for your customers—how do you address it?

We’re firm believers in the fact that security is no longer a nice-to-have in this current landscape. It’s a must-have. Although we’re a tech company, we’re in the business of people—connecting people—but this should never come at the cost of safety.

Proxyclick uses Aila’s Interactive Kiosk for secure ID verification.

That’s why we’ve been answering the call to action when it comes to spreading the importance of protecting your premises, people, and intellectual property more effectively using cutting-edge technologies. In fact, we’ve seen an increased demand for enterprise-grade security features in just the last year. We’ve seen spikes in interest, from facility managers and security professionals alike, in three core technologies in our offering: 

1. Access control: For granting the right level of access to visitors, and tracking their access points
2. Watchlists: Screening visitors automatically against internal and external watchlists
3. Identity verification: Making sure your visitor’s face corresponds with that of the ID document presented

And actually, the identity verification is what we’re currently working with Aila Technologies on.

Proxyclick is advocating “Best of Breed” – and bringing together the best solutions to deliver an Integrated Visitor Experience. Can you tell me more about that, and why Aila fits into that approach?

Absolutely.  Now, more than ever, organizations are implementing “smart technologies” to deliver the white-glove treatment to their visitors. Branding and company culture come through way before a face-to-face meeting ever happens. So from start to finish, we help make every visit to your building or premises memorable for all the right reasons while keeping everyone safe.

Aila’s Interactive Kiosk greets visitors for simple and secure check-in.

Companies can do this by leveraging our many powerful integrations and partnerships with building, security, and workplace management systems and tools—Aila obviously being one of them. This includes access control systems, Wi-Fi provisioning, wayfinding technologies, meeting room booking, and all the hardware and software that comprises a fully integrated visitor experience.

For example, long lines at reception, repeated requests for ID, and security escorts during a visitor journey can be a pretty taxing experience. Just one example of our offering is a feature we call ID Match, which works with Aila’s computer vision, automates the check-in process by scanning a visitor’s government-issued ID to quickly verify their identity. Using OCR (optical character recognition), ID Match can spot expired cards. For returning visitors, it makes the check-in process instant, with all fields pre-filled automatically.

Keep in mind that the images and data are all processed instantly and securely in the cloud, with nothing stored on the Interactive Kiosk itself to protect each visitor’s privacy and personal data. It’s all about building trust through smart technologies. 

At Proxyclick, we’re poised at the crux of where the service economy meets the experience economy.

Why did Proxyclick choose to partner with Aila?

Ultimately, our decision to partner with Aila was a no-brainer. There are many beliefs that we seem to share in common. First, and foremost, our two companies believe in trusted transactions. And this partnership allows our first-class visitor management solution to evolve in the direction we want to continue—enabling a visitor experience based on engaging and intuitive touchpoints built on a modern, fast, and secure check-in and ID verification process. Research shows that this ultimately leads to better, more productive meetings. Connect with confidence. This is what we want to make happen, one connection at a time.

What are some key considerations when deciding on a visitor management solution?

We’ve actually published a visitor management guide that speaks to this. Depending on your time frame and the scope of your research, we recommend the following:

• Think about your visitors: Consider this an opportunity to see your visitors in a new way by “re-thinking your reception area.”
• Assess your visitor management needs: Having as much information handy will not only help you to better assess your needs, but it will also help you with the process of elimination.
• Research solutions: Once you’ve narrowed down your choices enough to count them on one hand, you’ll get to have some more fun with the process.
• Start a free trial: If you can, then have your reception team and a handful of colleagues test the solution with you.
• Ask tough questions: Figure out what’s important to you and what your deal breakers are.
• Convince internal stakeholders: Because at the end of the day, it’s a team effort.

What are you most excited about going into 2020?

Personally, I’m hoping to find more time to be outdoors whether it’s on a mountain, or on the sea, or even on my deck at home. I am all about achieving some semblance of work and life balance.

Professionally, I’m lucky to be surrounded by some of the best brains and personalities you’ll find on the tech scene. We have lots coming up on our product roadmap, partnerships and all. But most of all, we’ll see tremendous growth in our people and in the size of our team at Proxylick in 2020. No matter what year we’re heading toward, we really believe that the key to success is the human touch. This will never be replaced by technology. 

So you’ll have to stay tuned. Perhaps this time next year you’ll get the full update!

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Aila partners with leading software providers like Proxyclick to create seamless customer experiences and turnkey solutions across industries, from retail and grocery to healthcare and visitor management. Get in touch to see how Aila’s solutions can connect physical and digital in your brick-and-mortar locations. Learn more about Proxyclick’s Enterprise visitor management solutions here.