Problem deep dive
No personalisation at the point of service
A number plate identifies a vehicle, so a plate-based system can at best personalise to the vehicle. It cannot tell which of several account holders, family members or colleagues is actually arriving, and so loyalty, pre-orders, preferences and tailored service stall at the window, the barrier or the kerb.
Why it happens
Personalisation needs to know who has arrived, and a plate does not carry that information. The same car is driven by different members of a household, shared between colleagues, or swapped for a hire vehicle, and the plate looks identical in every case. Treating the vehicle as a proxy for the person produces recognition that is wrong often enough to be unusable: the loyalty account, the saved order and the stored preferences all belong to whoever registered the plate, not to whoever is actually pulling in.
What it costs
Loyalty programmes under-perform because recognition happens too late, or not at all: by the time the customer identifies themselves at the till or in an app, the moment to greet, prepare or tailor has passed. Upsell and preparation opportunities go with it, since staff cannot get the right order or the right offer ready for a customer they cannot yet identify. The quieter cost is the experience itself: service feels anonymous even when the operator has in fact met this customer many times before.
Who feels this
Drive-thrus
The order window needs to know who is at the speaker post, not just which car has arrived, before a greeting or a usual order means anything.
Retail click-and-collect
Preparing the right order for the right arriving person is the whole job, and a plate cannot say which household member is in the car.
Fuel stations
Loyalty at the pump depends on knowing who is fuelling, which pay-by-plate alone cannot establish when vehicles are shared.
Parking
Recognising a returning customer, and treating them as one, is impossible when the system only ever recognises a returning vehicle.
How verified presence changes it
The patented method checks whether an authorised user's registered device is present at the location alongside the recognised vehicle. Recognition then attaches to the person, not the plate:
- The operator knows which registered individual has arrived. Not just which vehicle, but which of its possible drivers is verified as present.
- Loyalty applies to the person. Points, tiers and offers follow the individual account holder rather than accruing to whoever registered the vehicle.
- Pre-orders and preferences follow the person across vehicles. The same customer is recognised in their own car, the household's other car or a hire vehicle.
- Personalisation rests on a verified match rather than a guess. Staff and systems can act on the recognition with confidence, because it is grounded in presence rather than assumption.
Implementation would be built by or with a partner into their own systems, and the design would depend on the use case. None of this exists as a Trust product today.