Human Computer Interaction Approach in Developing Customer Relationship Management

Problem statement: Many published studies have found that more than 50% of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system implementations have failed due to the failure of system usability and does not fulfilled user expectation. This study presented the issues that contributed to the failures of CRM system and proposed a prototype of CRM system developed using Human Computer Interaction approaches in order to resolve the identified issues. Approach: In order to capture the users' requirements, a single in-depth case study of a multinational company was chosen in this research, in which the background, current conditions and environmental interactions were observed, recorded and analyzed for stages of patterns in relation to internal and external influences. Some techniques of blended data gathering which are interviews, naturalistic observation and studying user documentation were employed and then the prototype of CRM system was developed which incorporated User-Centered Design (UCD) approach, Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA), metaphor and identification of users' behaviors and characteristics. The implementation of these techniques, were then measured in terms of usability. Results: Based on the usability testing conducted, the results showed that most of the users agreed that the system is comfortable to work with by taking the quality attributes of learnability, memorizeablity, utility, sortability, font, visualization, user metaphor, information easy view and color as measurement parameters. Conclusions/Recommendations: By combining all these techniques, a comfort level for the users that leads to user satisfaction and higher usability degree can be achieved in a proposed CRM system. Thus, it is important that the companies should put usability quality attribute into a consideration before developing or procuring CRM system to ensure the implementation successfulness of the CRM system.