The trend toward ubiquitous computing does not representsimply a change in the way people access and use information. Inthe end it will have a profound effect on the way people access anduse services, enabling new classes of services that only make senseby virtue of being embedded in the environment. Ultimately thesetechnologies will lead us to a world of ubiquitous commerce. Theprospect of ubiquitous computing, therefore, poses a fundamentalquestion to businesses: What will it mean to conduct commerce ina world where our physical environments are teeming with services?

Fundamentally, ubiquitous computing can and will change theway businesses and consumers are able to access each other. Gain-ing access to customers has been in the past a key challenge forbusinesses. What if accessing customers disappeared as a problem?Doesn’t the rise of ubiquitous computing promise businesses theability to deliver the right message to the right person at the righttime at extremely low cost? Yet, these new and improved ways ofreaching customers raise a whole new set of challenges that inmany ways are far more complex than issues of cost. After all, whatis the right message? When is the right time? Who is the right per-son? (If we can even be sure that our customer will be a person.)Beyond simply reaching a customer with a message, what kinds ofinteractions will become possible? How do we deploy and interactwith services in this new world? How will relationships betweenbusinesses and their customers evolve? These questions must be

Ubiquitous computing will change the way welive with technology. As Mark Weiser stated: “The mostprofound technologies are those that disappear. Theyweave themselves into the fabric of everyday life untilthey are indistinguishable from it” [3]. We don’t thinkof pencils or hinges or faucets as technology. They arejust simply features of the world we take for granted andshape the way we act in the world. With ubiquitouscomputing, using information technology will progres-sively feel more like using these everyday objects thanusing personal computers.

The Future of Business Services

in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing

By Andrew Fano and Anatole Gershman

Redefining the keyaspects of the

business-customerrelationship.

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addressed to fully realize the promise of ubiquitouscomputing, and answering them will become a fun-damental challenge for business strategy.

During the e-business boom businesses began touse the Internet to change the ways in which theyreach out to their customers. This has primarily beenthrough Web sites people access from PCs at home orat work. The move to ubiquitous computing wherewe can interact with a service through a productrather than a PC or phone will radically change thenature of customer relationships. As businesses striveto achieve ever more intimate customer relationships,it becomes evident that content and interactionmodes appropriate for past channels no longer suffice.If we take seriously the idea of a relationship with acustomer, we must heed to the same characteristicsthat foster relationships in other areas of our lives:awareness, accessibility and responsiveness.

When you have a relationship with someone, youare highly aware of one another. You know each oth-er’s concerns and how they change over time. Thedeeper the relationship, the greater the awareness.Meanwhile, the less accessible one is in a relationship,the harder it is to maintain that relationship. One canbe perfectly aware and accessible, but if he or shedoesn’t respond in a way that addresses the other’sneeds, the relationship will fail. Interacting withsomeone is an investment in time, energy, and trustone makes with the expectation that it will lead toappropriate and desired responses—responses thatwould not be possible without this investment.

Most current CRM applications focus on identify-ing and targeting the right customers. Tools exist tohelp calculate the expected lifetime value of a cus-tomer and which products one should strive to cross-sell. But once you know with whom you would liketo have a relationship, what comes next? What can bedone beyond dedicated call support, self-service Websites, targeted ads, and other assorted inducementsthat are the current model of the day?

Emerging technologies associated with ubiquitouscomputing including the Web, email, mobile phones,wireless PDAs, pagers, instant messaging, collabora-tion environments, videoconferencing, and kiosksallow us to consider approaches that will expand andalter today’s CRM functionality. Simply, they offer

new ways for achieving awareness, new channels foraccessibility, and new techniques for responding.Increasingly affordable technologies are capable ofsensing the world. The E911 laws will mandate thesale of location-aware mobile phones. Similar capabil-ities will be found on connected PDAs. Radio Fre-quency Identification tags (RFID) and taggingtechnologies increase supply chain efficiency and cus-tomer value. As these tags grow in sophistication anddrop in price they will enable a variety of new servicesthat provide awareness, access, and new ways ofresponding. Other technologies are also finding morewidespread use. Some will support security concerns,such as biometrics, which will enable us to identifyand verify individuals in a variety of situationsthrough fingerprints, voiceprints, signature verifica-tion, face recognition, and handprints. To addressthese questions in terms of their impact on businessand strategy we describe the following examples ofhow ubiquitous computing could transform cus-tomer relationships and services.1

Online Medicine Cabinet. Imagine walking intothe bathroom in the morning, beginning to brushyour teeth, and as you look into the mirror of yourmedicine cabinet, hearing a voice suggesting that,since it is a high pollen day, you should take yourallergy medicine. The cabinet recognized you andyour needs. Reaching for the medicine, you mistak-enly choose the wrong drug. The Online MedicineCabinet gently corrects you and, since you are almostout of pills, orders a refill automatically [2].

Mobile Valet. Imagine entering an electronicsstore while carrying a wireless-enabled PDA. It recog-nizes your location and presents you with service cat-egories appropriate for shopping, such as productinformation, customer service, warranties, financing,and so forth. You choose a product comparison ser-vice you’ve previously found useful and point yourdevice at inkjet printers you’re interested in. This givesyou a product comparison on your PDA. Unfortu-nately, with a frustratingly small screen on your PDA,you can’t see much information. Mobile Valet allowsyou to context-shift the service into a nearby kiosk,where you can view the information in far greater

Ubiquitous computing can transform some key characteristicsof customer interaction: the role of their location, the scope of the service, and its duration and frequency.

1The prototypes described here were developed at Accenture Technology Labs.

detail [1]. You then point your PDA to one of theprinters and ask a different service provider for prod-uct reviews that are also viewed through the kiosk. Youcheck financing and warranty options. You ask yourpersonal customer service provider if the printer is agood choice to use with your digital camera. Within afew moments, a customer service representative fromthe store arrives to address your remaining questions.

Both examples illustrate the three characteristics—awareness, access, and responsiveness—of a relation-ship enabled by ubiquitous computing. The servicesare aware of the customer and his or her needs. Theycan access the customer and provide easy and naturalaccess to the customer at exactly the right time—whenthe customer needs it most. The services are responsiveto the specific needs of the customer and take advan-tage of the resources available at the customer’s loca-tion. The examples also illustrate how ubiquitouscomputing can transform some key characteristics ofcustomer interaction: the role of their location, thescope of the service, and its duration and frequency.

The location of your customer becomes the loca-tion of your business. Technology enables serviceproviders to make the location of their customers thelocation of their business. This is the fundamentalprinciple of anchoring cyberspace back to a physicalcontext. I can take a cell phone equipped with a bar-code scanner to a bookstore, use the store to select thebooks I like and then buy them from a different storeby simply scanning the barcodes on the back cover.My cell phone is thereby transformed into a self-service portable cash register for my favorite onlinebookstore. But the online and physical worlds do nothave to be viewed as adversarial. By creating new andinnovative service delivery channels integrated intothe locations we inhabit and the accessories we carry,business will be able to meet people on their ownterms—in the physical world. The Online MedicineCabinet is a good example of how a business can takeits services directly to the most appropriate locationfor its customers. The Online Medicine Cabinet alsoclearly illustrates the competitive importance of phys-ical points of presence.

A physical point of presence wherever your prod-ucts and services are used will become a competitivenecessity. Today, an e-commerce-driven Web site isconsidered critical for many businesses. Yet, havingsuch a site hardly means you’ve reached the pinnacleof customer interaction. Consider, for example, twopharmacies. One has the world’s greatest e-commerceWeb site, featuring easy ordering, wondrously effi-cient fulfillment, self-service support, order-tracking,advice, account management, and all flavors of per-sonalization. The other pharmacy has this cabinet in

your bathroom. You’ll probably never get to that won-derful Web site. Why would you? Accessibility at thepoint of need to services that are aware of your imme-diate needs enables a far different class of interactionsand consequently customer relationships than dissoci-ated contact points. It would be meaningless even if itwere possible, for example, to receive an email mes-sage on your laptop hours later that you took thewrong pill.

Businesses will need a point of presence at the loca-tion where their customers use products and services.While Web sites are important, and will remain so,they are, in the end, just one of many points of con-tact with customers. The examples also show that it isnot enough for a service to have a physical point ofpresence: critical elements include awareness, access,and responsiveness at that site. A passive kiosk is notaware of the customer’s needs and cannot be veryresponsive.

Mobile devices and appliances become the eyesand ears of remote service providers. Knowledge ofthe customer is mostly historical: what the customerhas done in the past, not what the customer is doingnow. This means businesses can apply a variety of datamining tools to estimate a customer’s expected value,select appropriate marketing campaigns, and choosethe level of service. But it helps little to enable andimprove the service or product provided to the cus-tomer at a given moment, because the business does-n’t know the customer’s current situation. Firedepartments don’t rely on data mining records frompast fires to tell them where to go next. They rely onsmoke detectors to tell them what is happening now.

Mobile devices have the promise to provide similarcontext-sensing capabilities resulting in awareness andresponsiveness. Slowly but surely our phones, PDAs,and other more specialized devices (such as digitalcameras) will become aware of their surroundings.They will soon know their locations—often a criticalindicator of the user’s task. For example, if you are ata gas station you are probably buying gas. If you are atthe bank you are probably banking, and, if you’re in astore you are probably shopping. Furthermore, if aservice provider knows something about the specificlocation, it can deduce what resources are availablethere. For example, the service provider may know thetype of products and services available locally, whoelse is present, and/or the availability of resources suchas kiosks. Finally, as illustrated by the Mobile Valet,the customer can use the mobile device to inform ser-vice providers by pointing to objects of interest. Thismay be a product they would like to buy, a brokenappliance they would like to fix, or a house for sale forwhich they would like more information. The mobile

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device is, in essence, their remote control to theworld.

Services we associate with locations becomeattached to people. To gain competitive advantageremote services must make the best use of theresources available at the customer’s location. In theMobile Valet scenario the customer accesses his ser-vice provider, and considers financing and warrantyoptions from several competing sellers. The mobiledevice, in essence, enables the customer to access andbring with him a veritable army of service providersand information resources. Businesses can no longerprey on customers’ ignorance. They can no longerhide the fact that someone else has a cheaper price.Yet, if your customer is in your store you can be in thebest position to match the price or sweeten the deal insome other way.

By working with customer’s service providers, busi-nesses can offer more responsive and efficient services.Remote service providers face a serious constraint: theyare, in the end, remote. They probably have no staff atthe location, which greatly limits the nature of the ser-vice they can deliver. The remote service provider can,however, collaborate with the local staff and togetherprovide a better service that is in both of their interests.With the Mobile Valet, the remote customer serviceprovider can inform the local store which model thecustomer is interested in, the accessories desired, andthe concerns he may have. The store is then in a goodposition to select the right service person and providedetailed help, increasing the chances for a sale and asatisfied customer. This results in richer interactions inwhich the staff of the location is made aware of specificcustomer needs and provided with the opportunity torespond specifically rather than approaching the cus-tomer anonymously. The capability to dissociate spe-cific functions such as customer service from aparticular location creates new services such as per-sonal service providers that work across locations tosupport particular needs (such as financing, insurance,technical support, travel, and so forth). This intro-duces a different kind of customer relationship thanone based on a just a specific product or episode.

Services will use the customer’s locationresources to provide the best possible service. Thereis a tremendous amount of hype around today’s

mobile commerce. But when all is said and done, thecurrent race for m-commerce is a race to deliver ser-vices onto what is at any given time the worst displayin the room: the customer’s phone, or PDA. This lim-itation prevents the widespread use of m-commercefor many services. The Mobile Valet illustrates anapproach that helps reach beyond these limitations byincorporating and exploiting the resources of the cus-tomer’s location. If the phone is the poorest screen inthe room, perhaps we can make a nearby better screenavailable. This technology allows rapid response to aremote service request by first establishing the cus-tomer’s context, identifying available service channelssuch as the customer’s mobile device, nearby screens,audio systems, kiosks, and even human staff (throughRFIDs)—and then deliver the highest fidelity servicethrough the available channels. This is feasiblebecause the locations we inhabit want customers tosucceed and should therefore be motivated to maketheir resources available. The challenge, and opportu-nity, is to transform what is today just a screen in astore to a service channel that can be used by multi-ple service providers.

Service providers must pay continuous attentionto their customers. We normally think of medical careas a service we avail ourselves of a few times a year. Yet,through dedicated service appliances like the OnlineMedicine Cabinet, every visit to the bathroom poten-tially becomes a visit to your health care serviceprovider. Mobile Valet services have to be always on,knowing where the customer is, and what his or herneeds might be and enable any type of service throughthis awareness. How many companies are ready tooffer this level of customer attention today?

Service providers will have to be very selectiveand precise in their interactions with their cus-tomers. We walk by the thermostat in our residenceshundreds of times without ever adjusting it. In a sim-ilar way, the online medical cabinet will probably besilent most of the time, with only the occasionalminor interaction. It is important, however, that ourrelationship with the service provider has changedfrom one of a few long, intense interactions (such ascheckups) to one characterized by frequent, briefinteractions in which “microservices” are delivered. Inthis world, we are in an almost constant conversation

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The challenge, and opportunity, is to transform what istoday just a screen in a store to a service channel that can

be used by multiple service providers.

with the provider. In fact, in many instances, it will bedifficult to decide if we are engaged in the use ofcountless micro services or participating in a singlelifetime relationship. Regardless, these developmentssignal a fundamental change in what constitutes theactual product or service, how it is perceived, and thevalue it provides the customer.

If we value privacy, someone will sell it to us.Aware and responsive customer relationships require agreat deal of knowledge about the customer as well asaccess to the current customer context. This necessarilycreates a need to provide personal information to ser-vice providers. The potential scenario of sensors in yourbathroom and mobile devices reporting your everymove to remote service providers naturally inspiresgrave privacy concerns. We agree that threats to our pri-vacy are a very real issue, but argue that rumors of theimminent demise of privacy have been exaggerated.

While privacy will be an increasingly importantconcern, these concerns also present new businessopportunities for privacy management services ratherthan insurmountable obstacles to the kinds of serviceswe describe. Already, a variety of products and servicesexist in this area, including encryption productsenabling secure email to privacy auditing services thatcertify a companies compliance with their privacyguidelines, and phone services that block telemar-keters. Nevertheless, businesses wishing to explore theopportunities by expanding customer relationshipsmust think carefully about the information they col-lect, who they will share it with, and how they will useit. Social acceptance of the use of personal informa-tion will likely grow as the services that use such infor-mation collect it and use it in a manner intimately andobviously related to, and necessary for, the servicebeing enabled. When our doctor asks us to removeour shirts during a checkup it is not perceived as a pri-vacy violation. If our real estate agent asked, it wouldbe a serious problem. The difference, of course, is weunderstand the role it plays in the examination. Pri-vacy concerns can be addressed by a combination oftechnology, legislation, and business policies.

Customers will not necessarily be human. As theobjects around us become more intelligent, they will becapable of making decisions and empowered to act onthem. At this point, inanimate objects will become cus-tomers. Consider the growing sophistication of toys.Today’s popular entertainment robots display impres-sive behaviors. As we endow them with additionalbehaviors, how long before they get commercial behav-ior? To demonstrate such possibilities we have devel-oped a prototype doll that literally has a budget and themeans to spend it: the doll selects and orders accessoriesit “wants” based on what it “sees” on other dolls.

While dolls that go shopping seem like a rather fan-ciful and far-fetched example, we already see examplesof objects making what are, in effect, commercial deci-sions. Your thermostat, for instance, will probablyspend a lot of money on your behalf this winter. Whatif instead of simply telling it desired temperatures, youalso communicated the most you wanted to spend andlet it negotiate the best deals possible with providersand heat the house as well as it could given the budget?In many instances, the things we use are in a betterposition to make decisions than we are. Who knowsbetter, for instance, how to spend the next mainte-nance dollar on your car, you or your car? Once objectsbecome customers the question of what constitutes acustomer relationship must be completely reexamined.How do you market to a car? How do you get a houseto switch providers? How do you earn loyalty from adoll? These are among the challenges ubiquitous com-merce will pose in the years ahead.

ConclusionUbiquitous computing enables businesses to redefinethe key aspects of their customer relationships. Busi-nesses can become continuously aware of their cus-tomers needs and provide more natural and powerfulmeans of access to their services. By using sensors andlocal resources, they can become more responsive totheir customers. These new capabilities also presentcompetitive challenges: How to extend your servicesto every location where your products may be used orpurchased? How to sense your customer’s needs? Howto use all the resources available at each location? Howto be selective and precise in customer interactionwithout violating the customer’s privacy? These chal-lenges will define the competitive landscape in ubiq-uitous commerce.

References1. Fano, A.E. What are a location’s “File” and “Edit” menus? Journal of Per-

sonal and Ubiquitous Computing 5, 1 (Jan. 2001).2. Wan, D. Magic medicine cabinet: A situated portal for healthcare. In Pro-

ceedings of International Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Comput-ing (HUC’99). Karlsruhe, Germany, 1999.

3. Weiser, M. The computer for the 21st Century. Sci. Am. 265, 3 (Sept.1991), 94–104.

Andrew Fano (andrew.e.fano@accenture.com) is a seniorresearcher at Accenture Technology Labs in Chicago, IL. Anatole Gershman (anatole.v.gershman@accenture.com) is thedirector of research at Accenture Technology Labs in Chicago, IL.

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