When talking about CRM systems, people – especially managers – mostly think about functions, features, and control. How can a process be supported and managed? How can I get good analytics out of the system? Does it fit into the existing IT landscape?

These and many similar questions take precedence when it comes to selecting software systems. Usability and UX are often only an afterthought or, even worse, lip service. The result of this is often an abysmal user adoption of systems, as they do not do what the users want, don’t help them or, on the contrary, cause even more work than the users had before.

The CRM Sales and Impact report 2021 study by Arlington Research shows that on average 52 per cent of sales leaders report that their CRM platform is costing them revenue opportunities. This average increases up to 65 percent in specific industries.

On the other hand, a study by UsabilityGeek finds that it is beneficial to fuse UX and CX. Similarly, according to research by Jacob Nielsen, when good UX design enhances the customer experience, companies see an average increase of 83 percent of the measured KPIs across marketing, sales, and service. Apart from the revenue boost, benefits include increased and accelerated adoption, higher productivity, improved customer satisfaction, reduced training time and lower support cost.

Therefore, the main question to ask is not whether, or rather in how far improving the UX does improve the acceptance, use, and helpfulness of a CRM system. Instead, one needs to ask what it takes to come to a better UX and what the inhibitors are.

This blog post is based on the CXChangersTalk that I had with Tim Holm. He currently works at SAP and his experience stretches both sides of the aisle. He worked – and works – in sales, also in non-software sales and at different software vendors. This helps him to analyze this problem from both sides, and vendor independent. It also made him a vocal advocate of having great CX in CRM systems.

This is, because UX becomes visible in nearly everything employees, in particular do. How long does it take to enter and track activities or opportunities in the system? Or how hard is it for sales reps to get all the information they need for their work out of the system? The stories of sales reps who literally spend nights to create a quote are galore.

For Tim, user experience encompasses “everything from how we use something, how intuitive it is”. This sounds simple, but has a lot of implications, not in the least that the CRM system should work for the user and not the other way round. And in the end, the benefits are not only more productivity and user satisfaction, but at the end also an increased customer experience and -satisfaction. Using the preparation of a quote as an example again, the time to create it could come down to an hour instead of days. The customer gets it that much faster and should have a better experience with it; at the same time, more quotes can be created, leading to more possible revenue and definitely increased productivity.

The 1-million-dollar question

Why then, isn’t UX looked at so late, if at all, in the life cycle of a CRM system? Why don’t companies make it a core theme?

One of the answers lies in inertia. It is quite difficult to replace, or only change, a historically grown system quickly. A lot of business is depending on it and then business might still thrive. Therefore, there is less feeling of urgency than in situations where a capability does not exist, or something breaks. And although studies as the ones quoted above give KPIs and strong evidence that good UX is beneficial, it still is difficult to build the corresponding business case.

In Tim’s words “the urgency is not seen as too big as somehow the overall business is running but the question is where you want to go”. And this question often is not asked the right way.

So, what are some good KPIs? In sales, one of them is very obvious: Additional revenue. Another one is productivity – how much time does it take to create a quote? In other business areas there will be different KPIs to look at.

However, another main KPI that Tim sees is employee attrition. He says “I also met colleagues who left a company because they were so yeah, frustrated by the processes. And because they do not see any worth in spending like more than 50% of their time with just administrating the software instead of doing the real business for us as sales, which is selling stuff”.

This statement rings true for other departments that are not customer facing, too, and includes finance, or HR, to name but two.

In the end, the main point is that every user “need an intuitive tool to do the task; you are working with it on a daily basis and have to do so in an efficient way. For example, when you're working in customer service, you need all your information of your customer, who's calling you, at your fingertips. When you're working in marketing, you need a tool to easily send out marketing campaigns”. 

Having systems with a good and consistent UX in place, companies are creating a virtuous circle. Having good UX gets good data; good data improves the usefulness of the system and the outcomes. This, in turn improves the data, as the users are actually using it. And, btw, an end-to-end solution helps here as it fosters a consistent UX across user groups.

If good UX is so helpful – how do we get there?

One main lever is an alignment of business department priorities and an alignment with IT. Departmental implementation decisions to reduce a pain point are not helpful and cause a fragmented IT landscape and data silos, which in turn lead to a degradation of the customer experience. The challenge that Tim often sees is that “IT teams are so overloaded with so many different projects, not only for the for the sales business, that actually the CRM topic is deprioritized because of some other project, for example, in the ERP space or supply chain”. To achieve this, it is critical to maintain cross departmental communication and prioritization. “Create a feedback loop. Speak to each other and see where can you have quick wins and how you bring different teams together to make actually in the end, all teams happy”.

The second part is to avoid trying to boil the ocean while not going for standalone solutions. Instead, companies need to start small and fix challenges on a strategically aligned solution. As an example, if there is an urgent problem with lead recognition, implement the lead management process first, maybe on a new system that is intended for all relevant departments to use. Or go for quick wins or capabilities that need to be built up. From there on, identify the processes that need change and collaboratively prioritize them. Deliver frequently, so that the user groups see that things are moving into the right direction. This is important as taking the first step might actually lead to an initial degradation of the user experience as the employees might need another system, but by moving more and more capabilities into the new system, the benefits will accumulate.

Third, apply change management. Most humans are reluctant to change. All of us see this for ourselves, e.g. if Spotify moves a button or iOS gets an updated and generally improved UI. Change management makes sure that “people have UX in mind from the first day. It helps changing the mindset of all users, getting them to use the new tool, because the worst thing that can happen, is that you implement a new tool and nobody's using it. Even more so, if has a good UI”.

Which leads to the fourth point. What is perceived as good UX changes over time. Therefore, it is important to move into the cloud. Given you work with the right vendor, this ensures that “you will get all the new functionalities, all the new user experience, the design. You will get it on a regular basis. So you do not have to take the struggle to make sure that your system is always up to date”.

Is it rocket science? No. Are UX and CRM a match? Yes!

The benefits are clear and the way to go there is, too. 

We just need to take the first step.

In the last few days two really interesting acquisitions caught my eye. The obvious one that hardly could be missed, is Slack being acquired by Salesforce for a whopping $27.7 bn, which, to put it into perspective, is $2.2 bn more than Salesforce forecasts as its revenue for the upcoming fiscal year.

The other interesting acquisition is social network behemoth Facebook plucking up Kustomer, a five-year-old company with origins in customer service. What is interesting about Kustomer is that the company promotes managing customer service from the customer (hence the name) angle and not coming from the ticket as the main entity. Kustomer has since positioned itself more into the CRM area, but still with a focus on service “CRM for customer service” and also implemented an AI to help with routing and the end-to-end handling of (simple) cases by chat bots.

Digging a little further, one can find that Snapchat also recently acquired voca.ai, another tech company that specializes in serving natural, human-like conversations.

Salesforce acquires Slack

I have already covered the acquisition of Slack by Salesforce, and so have many other analysts. Thinking a little longer about it, yes, Slack gives Salesforce capabilities that so far only Microsoft can offer, albeit the balance of Salesforce’s productivity suite (acquired with Quip) is no match for Microsoft Office. Using both, MS Teams and Slack, I think that, with all its deficiencies, MS Teams has functional advantages over Slack. And it comes as part of MS 365 (formerly known as MS Office).

On the other hand, Slack as part of Salesforce is giving Salesforce customers that are not yet committed to a collaboration platform a choice. This is especially true, if Slack comes as part of the package, i.e. without an own price tag. The latter is something that I doubt, looking at Slack being on an ARR of around $1 bn and growing, and purchased at nearly $28 bn, but let’s see.

But then, Slack gives Salesforce an edge over SAP and Oracle, neither of which has a comparable offer. Oracle has a strategic partnership with Zoom, which places them high in the video collaboration arena, while SAP has Jam and a strategic partnership with Microsoft.

What Slack mainly provides Salesforce with are two things:

• A leg into the SMB market.
• A conversational UI that offers text, voice, video along with searchable file sharing capabilities.

Facebook acquires Kustomer

At about the same time, Facebook acquired Kustomer. Kustomer was founded around the idea of offering better customer service. This shall be achieved by providing agents better insight into the customer and by making the customer and the conversations with the customer the leading entities. These conversations can happen on arbitrary communication channels. This is in contrast to the traditional way of placing the incident at the centre and referencing the customer to it. To round this off, Kustomer also developed intelligent routing and a chatbot solution that help routing those incidents that are not deflected by the chatbot to the right agent.

You do wonder why a company like Facebook needs a customer service solution?

Well, as Ingrid Lunden also wrote in her readable article on TechCrunch, Facebook makes a sizeable business with companies that have a good deal of their, oftentimes the only, digital identity on Facebook and Facebook owned platforms. These are also regularly interacting with their customers via Facebooks messenger or via WhatsApp. According to Facebook’s own press release, there are currently more than 175 million people who contact businesses via WhatsApp. Up to now, these businesses used, and can continue to use, third party services for customer interactions. Now they can use a Facebook owned service, too.

So, the value of Kustomer for Facebook is twofold:

• It can bring additional revenue streams, directly by the customer service offering, and indirectly, by making it easier for Kustomer customers to create advertisements on Facebook
• Facebook can capitalize on the increasing trend towards conversational user interfaces

The common theme

What do these seemingly different acquisitions have in common?

Both of them revolve around conversations as an important way of interaction between people. This is the natural continuation of texting and messaging having entered the mainstream some years ago, at first in consumer applications, and then more and more in business applications, too.

As I have written in my article about what can be done to make sales people not hate their CRM system, one key ingredient is to make the system “speak with people”, i.e. offer a communication channel that is natural for people and reduces the friction between the communication parties as much as possible (or at least does not create unnecessary additional ones). These communication channels are text and voice, and this preference is, of course, not limited to salespeople.

Or, as Shane Murphy-Reuter, SVP Marketing at Intercom, puts it: “Messengers are how we communicate in our daily lives. They’re also transforming how colleagues communicate at work and are increasingly becoming the primary channel between businesses and customers. Consumers prefer messengers because they’re fast, friendly and personal. The shift toward conversational technologies is accelerating because messengers help businesses build strong relationships with their customers by providing a friendly, quick and easy customer experience that’s just like a face-to-face conversation and makes online communication feel much more personal.”

What does this mean?

This is a question that goes far beyond the immediate consequences for Slack- or Kustomer customers.

The conversation is the new UI

These acquisitions show the acknowledgement of a trend that in my eyes has reached a tipping point. Customers – people – want to communicate with businesses and their representatives in a way that is natural to humans. They expect businesses offering this capability.

The necessary communication channels exist since the advent of social media and mobiles becoming mainstream. Technologies that help businesses scaling communications are there, too. Chatbots and conversational AI’s are coming of age and are maturing rapidly.

Businesses leaders who have not yet started to offer conversational user interfaces to customers (and employees alike) need to act fast in order to keep pace with the demand for this type of user interface. They need to start implementations on limited but relevant scale, learn and grow from there.

Vendors need to build, buy or partner to offer convincing own conversational capabilities throughout their solution stack, starting from where it matters most (to their customers). Missing out on this will have a negative impact on their relevance going forward.

The conversation is the new UI. Are you prepared for it?