Visualizing Client Interactions in B2B Context: Design Explorations

In business-to-business (B2B) commerce, the provider organization’s collective understanding of the client organization is distributed across the communications among a multitude of individuals. However, the substance of many of these communications typically goes unrecorded even when using standard Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools and therefore their value remains largely untapped. In an attempt to capture these valuable client interaction data, we built an intuitive data capture tool that fits in with sellers’ client-facing workflows. But despite giving positive feedback on our prototype, our study participants informed us that the company was transitioning to a new CRM system, an industry standard. Therefore, we pivoted to creating visualizations for client insights. Based on extensive feedback from our participants, we designed four novel B2B interaction visualizations: 1) Interactions, 2) Timeline, 3) Topics and 4) Network. In this paper, we report on our design exploration for using CRM data to visualize client relationships in B2B context and discuss the challenges we encountered.