Commercial Smart Locks: Top 6 Benefits for Your Property or Business
Safety, convenience, and affordability are more important than ever when choosing a commercial access control system. With more employees working at home, temporary workers, and changing schedules, ensuring only those who should have access can get in and keeping those who shouldn’t have access out is critical. That’s where commercial smart locks come in handy.
What’s a commercial smart lock? By “smart lock”, we mean a door lock that can be unlocked with your smartphone (not a traditional key, keypad, keycard, etc) and where access to it can be granted/revoked remotely.
Why Commercial Smart Locks?
Using a smart lock on your office/co-working space, apartment building, gym/fitness center, day care center/school, church, self storage facility, retail store, or other business is an affordable option that adds immediate value to your business. Here are the top 6 reasons why:
1. Easy to Manage
Businesses increasingly look for ways to be more efficient and simple is usually better. Traditional access control has typically been complicated, requiring a lot of steps to make it work. These steps include creating hundreds of detailed user profiles, matching credentials/physical keys/keycards to users, and delivering those credentials to the user. Smart locks, dramatically shorten that process and eliminate one-to-one contact (especially important during this pandemic). Using a cloud-based access control smart lock – users can self-register with an app, eliminating the need to create a user profile. Access can be granted/revoked from anywhere there’s an internet connection. Building managers simply log into access control software and grant/revoke the appropriate access with just a few clicks of the mouse. Once granted, Smartkeys are available in (or revoked from) the user’s app immediately.
Building managers can enroll people even before the smart lock is installed. Scheduled access can be changed in a few clicks. Users can enroll themselves in the system and can deal with lost or new phones without bothering the building manager… all without any special training. The apps and management software on the smart lock are automatically updated and settings are applied whenever someone uses the app to unlock a door.
2. Improved Security
Smart locks eliminate the need for physical keys, cards, fobs, or pin codes, which are easily shared or copied. With smart locks, the user’s Smartkey is unique to their phone. Phones have passwords and people don’t share them. Smartkeys can’t be copied to other phones, making them a more secure solution. And if an employee or tenant leaves, or a user loses their phone, the building manager can simply revoke access in the cloud portal and the Smartkey is removed from the user’s app.
3. Affordable
It’s easy to forget the ongoing cost of access control systems. Sure, the initial cost of a traditional key lock is cheap, but what about the time and hassle it takes to rekey a lock when an employee leaves? You have to have an on-site employee to make the change. Keycard systems aren’t much better… the cost of replacing lost keycards and upgrading the software quickly becomes expensive.
4. Easy Installation
A smart lock can be installed by anyone in minutes with just a screwdriver. Just take off the existing handle, replace it with a new smart lock, and add batteries. VIZpin Smart Locks don’t need a local network or Wi-Fi connection. Best of all, you don’t have a complicated panel to program.
5. Scalable
Unlike access control systems with panels, you can build a system with smart locks one door at a time. There is no up-front expense for a larger system and no penalty for adding other doors. Just add more doors wherever and whenever you need them. When you add doors, updating everyone’s access is literally just checking a box.
6. Easy to Use
When you want to enter a door with a smart lock, you simply open the app on your phone and press a button. It’s that simple! There’s no bulky keys to carry around, no codes to memorize for different doors, and no card to carry with you.
Entegrity™ Smart Lock
Conclusion
Smart locks allow building managers to grant or revoke access or view activity from anywhere without the hassle, expense, and security risk of other types of networked access solutions. A battery-operated smart lock is an affordable way to add convenient security to apartments, offices, utility rooms, and more. It fits into any standard door and installs in minutes.