Customer relationship management (CRM) is software that keeps a company's interactions with customers and prospects in one place: contacts, deals, emails, support tickets, the whole history. Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics are the big names. It's a tool category, not a UX method, but it earns a spot here for two reasons: designers build CRM interfaces, and CRM data feeds the personalization and journey work product teams do.
Use cases
CRM is some of the hardest UX work there is, and some of the worst-designed software people use every day. The users are captive, the person who bought it isn't the one using it, and the same record means different things to five different roles.
Captive frustration: A sales rep spends more time feeding the CRM than selling, because logging one call takes 11 fields and four dropdowns. The company paid for adoption it isn't getting.
Role mismatch: An accountant reads an invoice as an audit trail, a rep sees a commission, a support agent sees a relationship. One screen has to serve all three without burying anyone.
Buyer vs. user: A CFO buys the platform for its board-ready dashboards, while the actual users just wanted faster data entry.
How it's used in practice
Cut data entry to the bone. Pre-fill, smart defaults, and inline editing. Every extra field is a reason not to use the thing.
Design for role. Show each user the slice of the record their job needs, and tuck the rest behind progressive disclosure.
Respect power users. Keyboard shortcuts, bulk actions, and saved views for people who live in the tool eight hours a day.
Surface the next action. Put the one thing the user should do now at the top, not under 40 fields.
Use the data downstream. Feed customer history into segmentation and journey maps so the product knows who it's talking to.
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Pro-tip: Adoption is the only CRM metric that matters. A feature-rich CRM nobody logs into is a very expensive spreadsheet. Watch a rep use it for an hour and you'll find more to fix than any stakeholder interview will.
Challenges & limitations
Captive users, low incentive to polish: Because employees can't leave, companies underinvest in the UX, so bad CRM design lingers for years.
Data quality death spiral: Clunky entry makes reps skip or fake fields, which poisons the analytics the CRM exists to power.
Customization sprawl: Every team bolts on fields and workflows until the system becomes a mess nobody fully understands.
