The Impact of Digitalization on B2B Customer Experience Across the Customer Journey

Abstract

This research investigates the impact of digitalization on business-to-business (B2B) customer experience across the customer journey stages: pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase, from the perspective of B2B selling firms. Digitalization significantly impacts B2B interactions. However, its impact on the B2B customer journey and experience is largely unexplored, especially in comparison to the business-to-consumer (B2C) context. As B2B interactions increasingly shift to digital channels, understanding this impact is crucial for B2B firms. This study aims to bridge this gap by examining how digital tools and technologies reshape B2B interactions across the customer journey and how B2B selling firms adapt their strategies in a rapidly evolving digital environment. This study employed a qualitative research approach, utilizing semi-structured interviews. Eight professionals were interviewed, each with substantial experience in B2B sales and marketing roles in prominent B2B firms. The interviews provided comprehensive insights into how B2B selling firms are strategically adapting their customer journeys in response to accelerating digitalization while striving to enhance customer experiences. The study’s findings offer nuanced insights that digitalization has distinct and asymmetric impacts on each customer journey stage, presenting unique challenges and opportunities to B2B firms. In the pre-purchase stage, B2B sellers adopt a multi-channel approach to cater to highly digitally empowered buyers. This creates content overload and loss of touchpoint control, primarily through the large language models (LLMs). The purchase stage exhibits steady digitalization through digital tools and platforms while revealing an ongoing tension between automation and human oversight. The post-purchase stage increasingly utilizes digital tools, yet it continues to depend heavily on human interaction. A central finding across the stages highlights the critical need for B2B sellers to find the right balance between digital efficiency and human connection. The study contributes to both theoretical and practical understandings. Theoretically, the study makes several novel contributions to the B2B customer journey and experience literature. It provides a comprehensive mapping of stage-specific digital tool adoption trends, reveals the asymmetric impact of digitalization at each customer journey stage, posits the concept of AI-driven external touchpoint control loss, and extends the understanding of relational contracts’ role in B2B interactions. Furthermore, it demonstrates the cross-stage applicability of digital tools and their impact on touchpoints, roles, and processes across the customer journey. Practically, the research provides actionable insights for B2B practitioners navigating digital transformation, including strategies to enhance content strategy, multi-channel presence, managing sales-marketing tensions, improved touchpoint mapping, leveraging journey-stage appropriate tools, tiered post-purchase service models and utilization of digital analytics. These contributions enable B2B selling firms to balance their digitalization journey more effectively while maintaining the human elements crucial for successful B2B relationships and superior customer experiences.