Developing a Typology of B2B Customer Journeys
(A2024-119524)

AUTHORS

Christina Kuehnl, University of Stuttgart; Marco Weippert, University of Stuttgart; Moritz Tischer, BCG

ABSTRACT

Business-to-business (B2B) managers appraise customer experience management (CXM) as a promising contemporary approach. In research, however, the notion of B2B customer experience (CX) and its management are still not well understood. Specifically, the great diversity in buying processes, i.e., customer journeys, in B2B industries urgently calls for considering contextual factors in B2B CXM. Surprisingly, scholars remain largely silent on exploring different B2B customer journeys and the respectively appropriate B2B CXM activities. By integrating field-based insights of 56 managers with supplementary literature, we address this void and first transfer existing conceptualizations of CX and CXM from a Business-to-consumer to a B2B context. More importantly, we propose a typology of three distinct B2B customer journey archetypes that help marketers manage their respective environments. Particularly, we identify (1) lean, (2) co-created, and (3) transformational customer journeys.