User Experience, CRM and the Rise and Rise of Social Networking

The UX Professional’s Role in Customer Relationship Management

User Experience design jobs at IC Creative, the industry leading recruitment consultancy for UX jobs. The traditional view of customer relationship management (CRM) is changing as the potential customer wants to interact with companies in a different way, welcome social CRM and the role the UX professional has to play.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is basically how any business manages its interactions with its existing customers and prospective customers. It relies on specialised software that reaps and organises information and simplifies business processes; mostly for use in sales, but it can be employed for other aspects of the business such as marketing, customer service and technical support.

The UX design professional has an important role to play in CRM. The process has to be user-friendly as customers lack patience with, or shy away from, things that seem over-complicated or uninteresting. They need to make it bug free so that it runs smoothly. They need to convince the customer/client that they want to take part, rather than feel they are being forced to give up information. Most importantly of all the customer needs to be convinced that their data will be handled securely and with sensitivity.

While CRM remains a vital business tool, customers’ habits are changing and so CRM has to change to keep up if companies wish to retain their client base. It is believed that by the end of 2012, a massive 20% of the entire population of the world will be interacting through social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn etc. Potential customers for products and services are turning to online peers and social influencers for buying advice; they like to share experiences and opinions. They do not respond as well as previous generations to direct marketing, preferring to be engaged rather that talked at. As companies realise this, they are trying more and more to involve themselves in these online conversations, we are seeing the emergence of Social CRM.

The most oft-quoted definition of social CRM is that which was given by Paul Greenberg:
 “Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It's the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation.”
Companies initially engaged in social media monitoring which involved looking out for their product/service being mentioned and then reacting to it; now some brands actually build their own online communities. It is an important source for potential customers; it gives an idea of product preferences and spending habits and it provides crowd-sourcing solutions which are cheaper that traditional outsourcing. Maria Ogneva, Director of Social Media at Attensity describes the LARA framework they developed which addresses the end-to-end process of social CRM:

• Listen to customer conversations
• Analyse the conversations
• Relate this information to existing information within your enterprise
• Act on those customer conversations

Again the UX designer is an important player. If social network users feel they are being targeted by a direct marketing campaign, the possibility exists that the brand could suffer an adverse reaction with communities making negative remarks about it; therefore, it is important to engage the community members, make the brand interesting for them, for example, by designing interactive apps and games, adding valuable and relevant content and making the company’s page more attractive to visitors.

User experience jobs, Usability, Information Architecture (IA), Interaction Design and Visual Design jobs, visit IC Creative.