Company websites have become a major way of interacting with customers: of attracting them in the first place, of reducing the cost of interacting with them, and of renewing the company's relationship with them every time the customer vists. They have evolved from early point solutions (e.g. displaying product info) to part of an integrated strategy for customer interaction that typically also includes call center, voice, direct marketing and other components.

As the number of data-capable mobile devices explodes — and given that the mobile device is the world's first and only communication channel to and from the customer that is available to them for virtually all of their waking hours (and maybe even beyond) — leveraging their customers' mobile devices is not only becoming possible, but is becoming central to leading companies' customer interaction strategies.

Consider healthcare. How often does the average plan member visit their healthcare organization's website, or talk to a live person? Once in a while to reorder prescriptions or schedule an appointment if they perceive a health problem. The mobile device offers the tantalizing possibility of touching the customer's health much more often, reinforcing the relationship every time; this benefits both health organizations and customers, leading to both healthier patients and lower cost. For example:

• Every now and then, a (simple) questionnaire can be pushed to the mobile device asking the customer about their health. For example, chronic headache sufferers may be asked to rate their current headache intensity. The information entered into the form would be automatically appended to the patient's medical record, triggering an alert for the physician if responses are out of the expected range. This allows the physician to proactively take care of the customer (e.g. by changing dosage of a prescription), reinforcing both effectiveness of treatment and brand value of the healthcare vendor ("they take care of my health")
• Once a day, an SMS or instant message arrives through the mobile device reminding the customer to take their pills for the day, and why that is important.
• A shortcut on the mobile device allows the user (or a family member) to initiate an emergency sequence: e.g. call advice nurse, order ambulance, provide instructions to people on the scene, provide medical background information to the paramedics etc.

Further, as "connected" patient-monitoring devices are becoming smaller and more and more available to even the average person, a bidirectional connection back into the healthcare organization can become highly valuable and even life-saving for many chronic patients.

Of course, there are substantial pitfalls, some of which are the following:

• Overusing the customer's mobile device so the vendor is perceived as being intrusive and annoying. Every electronic interaction with a mobile device must add clear value from the perspective of the customer.
• The information presented to the customer, and solicited from the customer must be part of a holistic understanding of the relationship between customer and vendor (in other places, we call this the One Life^TM property). If, say, multiple departments at the same health organization interacted with the same customer, but they customer felt that the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing, it would clearly damage the relationship.
• The interaction must be situationally appropriate: if I'm on the phone with an important business contact, I don't want to be interrupted by my health plan asking whether I had my 6 glasses of water already today.

There are substantial opportunities to leapfrog competitors by adding the mobile device as a low-cost/high-return, bidirectional communications channel to the customer, reinforcing the relationship of the customer with the vendor every time. This post only covers the surface of the possibilities of situational software for customer interaction strategies involving mobile devices, but exciting they are. And for the first time in technology history, the infrastructure is now available to make them possible.

I'm interpreting the press release here, but it very much seems to me that Purdue University and Olympus Corp. are attempting the build situational software supported by a peer-to-peer sensor network.

To quote:

The sensors will talk to one another through wireless networks, requesting information that they need to make sense of the local scene and sending information to other sensors as they request it.

The goal is to enable:

people — especially the elderly and impaired — to have fuller lives and greater peace of mind.

No standard web applications or PC applications or whatever applications here; they must be situational I'd think.