Fostering the User Interface Acceptance in Customer Relationship Management: A Multimedia-aided Approach

There has been an increasing demand for organizations to foster real-time interaction with customers, through the development of multimedia and Knowledge-enabled Customer Relationship Management (KCRM) systems. KCRM implementations encounter several challenges, such as information overload and lack of trust. Few empirical studies were devoted to assess the role of multimedia to tackle these issues. Therefore, this paper describes an empirical investigation into the implication of incorporating multimedia elements into KCRM interfaces. To achieve this, an experimental KCRM platform was implemented with three different modes of interaction: Visual-only KCRM (V-CRM) with text and graphics, Multimodal KCRM (M-CRM) with speech, earcons and auditory icons and Avatar-enhanced multimodal KCRM (A-CRM). The three platforms were evaluated by a group of forty-eight participants (n=48) of age group varies from 18 to 55 year old, by performing six common tasks and filling a questionnaire devised to measure the aspects of user acceptance. The results therein revealed that A-CRM was more acceptable than both M-CRM and V-CRM, whereas M-CRM was less acceptable than V-CRM.