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Comment by FLUX-YOU | Hacker News Reader

What are you using to coordinate with your staff that actually meet customers? Do you have a mobile app or an internal website they use for this?

Same questions for customers: Agents could acknowledge that they are there and waiting (with the customer's desired name/special request). It could also function as a customer support interface as well as providing the support phone number.

This seems like it would be very attractive for business-to-business with traveling employees as well.

Good luck!

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Communication with everyone involved has been a pain point for us, even as we've thrown technology at the problem. Right now, we're of course communicating with our agents via email, phone, and text to make sure everything goes smoothly.

Plus, our clients have the agent's information and the agents have our client's information, so they can communicate directly if necessary. In the near future, the client and the agent will have a Lyft-like experience on arrival or departure, where our agent sees the customer information on their agent app, and the customer sees the agent information on their customer app. This will be a massive improvement to the industry.

Thanks for your feedback/questions!

> In the near future, the client and the agent will have a Lyft-like experience on arrival or departure, where our agent sees the customer information on their agent app, and the customer sees the agent information on their customer app.

That's not going to happen without a data connection on the customer's phone though, which means either expensive roaming, buying a SIM card before they meet the agent, or fighting through crappy airport Wi-Fi sign-up pages. You could potentially partner with the airport Wi-Fi and have your application authenticate them to the Wi-Fi network automatically though. Do you have any other thoughts on how to solve the data problem?

True - it won't work in every situation. We're planning to communicate similarly to how Airbnb communicates when a host gets a booking - push notification, text message, and email at all once. In the cases where someone doesn't have data, they often are still able to receive texts (not always).

Either way, we already over-communicate to the client to make sure they know what to do. Eventually, the agent's app will be helpful too, so the agent can recognize the client if the client uploads their photo to our system.

Your idea about Wi-Fi is certainly something to explore as well.

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