Helping to provide great service

Business Insider speaks to Keith Rabois from Square, who provide a neat little dongle you can plug into your iPhone and use to process credit cards. The interview’s not that interesting if you’ve been following any kind of Silicon Valley/Square stuff, but a feature of Square’s payment app jumped out at me:

KR: [With the Pay With Square app], when you have favorited a merchant, there is a geographic trigger — there are actually two. Within a certain proximity it alerts them on the register that so and so has walked into your store. Then when you’re within 10 meters, you’re ready to check out, so you authenticate the face, name, click, checkout. If you want more information about that person, it will show you their last visit and their visit frequency, as well as in the future what the most likely orders are.

This is the kind of help people need in order to gain loyal customers and build sustainable businesses, and a perfect example of the kind of thing technology companies can build to level the playing field between large and small outfits. Note the control the customer is offered: they must proactively favourite the merchant before the tracking kicks in.

Everyone gets something from features like this — the customer, the business owner and Square — unlike with scumbags like GroupOn who are out to screw everyone but themselves. Well done Square.