Two Business Problems

Problem 1    Businesses are unable to influence their customers’ purchases or user experience as they arrive, enter and move within, because they are unable to recognize these customers and unable to send them real-time texts and messages. They would like to be able to communicate at the right time and place with targeted messages. 

Problem 2    For businesses with a mobile app, the mobile app is rarely open on customers’ phones, making it impossible to push messages to customers through the business’s mobile app.

Two Solutions

Greet boasts unique, patented features which enable Greet businesses to solve problem of recognizing and sending real-time messages to registered customers. Greet can also automatically open the business’s mobile app on customer phones, thereby dramatically boosting customer use of the business’s app.

1. Patent #1 –     Greet enables businesses to recognize registered customers as they arrive, bypassing phone defenses against such recognition.

1. Patent #2 –     Greet automatically activates the business’s mobile app on customers’ phones as they arrive, enabling push messaging to each customer as they arrive and as they move within the premises. Such push messaging can be via a text message or as an in-app message through the business’s mobile app.

Business Use of Greet Solutions

Businesses can use Greet to monitor the arrival and movement of registered and unregistered customers, employees and vendors.  As these different users arrive and move about the premises, Greet can be easily configured to trigger automatic text or in-app messages to customers, employees and managers.

Greet can enhance the customer experience on many levels.  The use cases for Greet are limitless. 

Some examples:

1. Businesses can configure Greet to send messages to employees when customers arrive displaying customer name, photo, elite status, and buying history enabling employees to warmly greet customers by name. As part of such encounters, a bank rep might, for example, offer an approaching customer a product suited to their product portfolio (e.g. a mortgage refinancing or stock fund promotion).
2. As customers approach stores, they receive personalized text or in-app greetings and promotions tailored to their interests.  Further, as these customers move within the stores the business can send them location-specific messages.  This can apply in any location in any industry. Examples include retail, trade shows and shopping malls.
3. As customers approach restaurants or other food prep locations, businesses can send automatic general or personalized messages asking for their order and suggesting seasonal specials and promotions.
4. As customers enter secure areas such as hotels, gyms, stadiums, residences, offices or trade shows, Greet recognizes registered users and passes approval/rejection message to devices such as turnstiles, door locks, ATMs, kiosks, etc.  The customer does not have to remove their phone from their pocket or handbag, making entry truly ‘frictionless’.
5. Businesses can use an array of Greet scanners to create heat maps tracking movement of registered and unregistered customers, employees, etc. 
6. Greet can be connected to other authentication tools such as biometrics, passwords or data cards to enable multi-factor authentication.

Identifying customers is done in a broad variety of ways, each of which has strengths and weaknesses.  Conceptually these fall into three categories:

1. Who You Are;
2. What You Know, and;
3. What You Have.

Who You Are

Human beings are unique.   Our unique genetic makeup expresses itself in multiple ways including facial features and iris features, finger and palm prints.  Other features such as gait and speech fall into the category of ‘Who you are”.   In order to use such features to identify individuals there is typically a process whereby the subject registers their biometrics and then each time they arrive at a destination goes through a scanning process to confirm that their characteristics match the stored characteristics.  This process provides great accuracy but has the following negatives:

1. Scanning can be inaccurate with disproportionate errors along racial lines;
2. Biological scanners are relatively expensive;
3. Biological measures are intrusive, often with high degree of friction at points of entry;
4. Biological measures are hackable.  For example, facial authentication can be hacked with photos and videos; and
5. Long-term risks associated with hacking are high.  Once a biological identity is hacked, that biological information may become part of the Dark Web, forever exposed.

What You Know

What You Know refers mainly to passwords.  The advantage of passwords is that, unlike biometrics, they are changeable, which mitigates damage.  Unfortunately human behavior undermines passwords.  People tend to use passwords that are easily remembered and therefore  easily hacked.  They tend to use the same password in different sites and they are easy prey for fraudulent phishing schemes.  

What You Have

Physical objects carried by users is the final category.  Physical and electronic keys, tokens, data cards, and cell phones fall into this category.

The advantage of physical objects for authentication is that theft must either rely upon obtaining the object (e.g. a security ID) or replicating it.

Authentication through physical devices has the following negatives:

1. User must have the device.  If an unsecured physical token is stolen, lost or forgotten, identity theft is possible;
2. Use of physical devices often have friction at points of entry. Delays due to swiping cards frustrate users and staff;
3. Physical devices have high rates of failure due to physical damage, demagnetization, etc.;
4. Physical devices in most cases require installation of scanning devices, which can be expensive to install and maintain

In the category of What You Have, cell phones have the following advantages:

1. Ubiquity.  Almost 100% of the adult population already has a cell phone so no need for an extra device;
2. Because the customer already owns a phone, no user purchase of hardware required;
3. Phones typically have password protection, so loss of a phone usually does not lead to identity theft.  When users lose control of their phone, they typically take rapid action to turn off and replace it with a new device.
4. Upgrades to phone apps are easy for users to download.