Room signs are small displays that are mounted outside meeting rooms or shared spaces. They can show room and event schedules, announcements, welcomes, alerts and more.
We’ve been making a big splash recently with our new room signs, but if you’ve never considered them before, you might not be sure of their use or benefits. Here are four quick advantages of using room signs to improve your business:
1. Allow people to find their meetings or open rooms quickly without going to a desktop
Most facilities with a lot of conference rooms use some sort of scheduling application like Exchange, EMS, Google, 25Live or Delphi. These are great programs for scheduling rooms and ensuring that meetings don’t overlap in the same space. But what about the impromptu meeting that needs to find a space quickly?
Great ideas are often spontaneous, as are great meetings. If you have people who start a productive conversation in the hallway and need to take it somewhere private, they don’t want to interrupt the flow of ideas by having to go back to their desk (or, more likely, to a receptionist or central schedule manager) to find an open room. Room signs show you immediately which rooms are booked and for how long, so someone needing a room right away can see if a room is open just by glancing outside the door.
If a meeting has been planned and scheduled in advance, room signs let the participants know they’re in the right place at the right time by showing the room schedule outside the meeting room door. Everyone at work is busy, and even though they probably should know the meeting room they’re heading to in advance, room signs provide backup for those coming in a hurry or who are unsure of their destination.
2. Book meetings at the room sign while keeping scheduling apps updated
In the event of a pop-up meeting, participants may locate a room that isn’t currently reserved. But what happens if someone else comes along looking for a meeting room and finds the same one? The pop-up meeting wouldn’t be on the room sign schedule, right? Wrong.
Room signs that support interactive booking let people make instant reservations right at the room sign. If your room signs are integrated with your central scheduling application, walk-up reservations are immediately shared with that application to avoid double-bookings. That ensures that your calendars stay up to date no matter where meetings are booked – at the desktop or at the sign. (Of course, you’ll have to train your staff to make those bookings when they grab a room.)
3. Extend digital signage to meeting areas so people don’t miss announcements
Some room signs can display digital signage playlists, either through integration with a content management system or by importing an RSS image feed. This is a great feature because it lets your daily media and messages play on the room signs, along with room and event schedules. This ensures that people who are in meeting areas don’t miss your important announcements.
This is critical is your room signs are an outlet for your emergency alert system. In the case of a training or conference center, people may be spending all day in those hallways, so it’s even more important to make sure your digital signage messages reach the meeting rooms.
4. Save paper, electricity and installation costs with EPS signs
EPS are electronic paper signs. These were originally designed for use in retail stores, but are becoming more popular for businesses.
EPS are an affordable, wireless, battery-operated room sign option, especially for workspace hoteling. These work a lot like e-readers, in that they are only activated when the information changes. That means you only use the battery when you change the schedule information. That allows an average battery life of five years.
EPS are updated via RF communication: an RF transmitter sends out a wireless signal to the room signs, which are RF receivers. This means you don’t have to run a bunch of wires to each room sign for power and network. You can simply mount them outside your meeting rooms or workspaces and turn them on.
Those are just four of the ways room signs can improve your business.