Customer centricity from a B2B perspective (part 1)

Have you ever wondered about the differences regarding customer centricity, CX operations, and journey management between a B2C and a B2B marketplace? Now that my team and I have successfully facilitated another two CJM courses with leaders working in both B2B and B2C environments, I see more clearly the distinctions. In this publication, I would like to share my learnings and observations as a follow-up to my previous publication.

Let me start with paraphrasing the opening paragraph of the highly-recommendable publication ‘Understanding the B2B customer experience and journey: A convergence-based lens’ by Arne De Keyser et al. (2024): Practitioners and academics have devoted significant attention to understanding customer experience and the customer journey, which we respectively define as “customer’s responses during direct and indirect interactions with an organisation” and “the series of touchpoints associated with the purchase and usage of goods and services”. This focus is well justified, as both concepts are central to understanding how customers interact with organisations, perceive these interactions, and form long-term relationships that ultimately drive financial success.

Lately, I am reading that managing the customer experience has become a top priority for marketing teams. CEM (or CXM) is a serious field. However, the reality is that from an outside-in perspective (or you could say: customer-centric perspective), those experiences cannot be managed by the organisation. It’s what I mentioned before, namely that a customer’s experience is a mixture of their responses during direct and indirect interactions with an organisation. That is why design teams (such as CX or service design teams) design service interactions (moments that matter) based on the knowledge that customers’ experiences can be positively influenced, but not managed.

Understanding the dynamics of multi-actor environments

Understanding this nuance, how to apply this in a B2B market? In contrast to consumer contexts, B2B involves multiple professionals who are at least to some degree governed by formal rules and procedures, and driven by both organisational and individual goals (De Keyser et al., 2024).

That is why Purmonen et al. (2023) define the B2B customer journey as follows:

The B2B customer journey is a combination of buying and usage center members’ intertwined, goal-oriented paths to purchasing and using offerings along multiple direct and indirect touchpoints, which are affected by the context of business relationships. Interactions at journey touchpoints, as well as the course of the entire journey, are affected by the relationships and interaction history between the customer and the supplier.

They also argue that given that purchases addressing organisational and individual goals tend to recur, the process is depicted as an infinite loop, in which the usage stage ends with a reassessment that may initiate a new purchase cycle. The prevalence and nature of various stages, steps and paths are likely to vary notably according to the buying situation. The purchase tasks may range from routine and low priority to strategic and complex. These situational factors are likely to affect both the presence of specific steps and their thoroughness, as well as the complexity and dynamics of the buying center.

Have a look at their framework that acknowledges that the B2B customer journey comprises several individual paths.

Measuring customer experience in a B2B context

In the publication ‘Strategic B2B Customer Experience Management: The Importance of Outcomes-Based Measures’ (2016), Zolkiewski et al. critique the approach to measuring customer experience in a B2B context, drawing on contemporary ideas of value-in-use, outcomes-based measures, and ‘big data’ to offer potential solutions to the measurement problems identified. Rather than adopting input- and output-based measures, widely used in a business-to-consumer (B2C) context, a B2B context requires a more strategic approach to capturing customer experience.

“Focusing on strategically important issues should generate opportunities for value co-creation and are more likely to involve outcomes-based measures.” And “improving understanding of customer experience in a B2B context should allow organisations to design better services and consequently enhance the experiences of their employees, their customers and other connected actors.”

They argue that interactions with other actors and resources external to the firm, including other customers, intermediaries and wider network actors may also impact customer experience. Customer experience is “holistic in nature involving the customer’s cognitive, affective, emotional, social and physical responses to any direct or indirect contact with the service provider, brand or product across multiple touchpoints during the entire customer journey”. The strategic purpose of measuring customer experience is to use this knowledge to support positive and desirable customer experiences, so that higher levels of long-term loyalty are achieved. Aspects of service delivery that facilitate positive experiences can be designed in-line with overall strategy and firms can develop customer experience-focussed capabilities (Homburg et al., 2015).

Zolkiewski et al. offer a framework that attempts to capture a more strategic, dynamic and co-creation oriented approach to understanding B2B customer experience, involving multiple interactions across different touchpoints with a variety of personnel involved and different expectations that may well relate to these interactions. Have a look at the framework. It shows the key differences between a more operational, static approach to measuring customer experience via input-output-based measures and a strategic, dynamic, and interactive approach to measuring customer experience via outcomes-based measures.

Identifying elements of value creation

I’ll finish this first part of ‘Customer-centricity from a B2B perspective’ with a third, relevant framework. In ‘Gaining Customer Experience Insights That Matter’ (2012), McColl-Kennedy et al. take the view that customers create value with a firm through experiences, specifically by integrating resources at multiple touchpoints in context through activities and interactions. The authors view the customer’s experience as consisting of value creation elements, customer discrete emotions, and customer cognitive responses at distinct touchpoints. They identify 5 elements of value creation: resources, activities, context, interactions, and customer role. Have a look at their framework.

As you may see, the framework incorporates key elements of the CX, that is, value creation elements (resources, activities, context, interactions, and customer role) plus both customer discrete emotions and cognitive responses at touchpoints across the customer journey. The authors incorporated six main emotions (joy, love, surprise, anger, sadness, and fear) and their respective subcategories in the framework. Cognitive responses help organisations to identify root causes and specific opportunities for improvement. Such responses have been characterised as either ‘complaints’, ‘compliments’ or ‘suggestions’.

Not only can the model provide insights into how customers evaluate the experience through cognitive responses and identify root causes as opportunities for improvement, it is also able to uncover customers who do not value the experience and are at risk of leaving the firm, even customers who give high satisfaction scores. I recommend you read the paper. It provides a step-by-step guide for practitioners to follow to put the model into action. To do so, practitioners are advised to ask the following five questions:

1. What do managers need to consider when seeking to manage CX from the B2B customer point of view?
2. What data do practitioners need to collect in order to manage CX?
3. How to build a text mining model to capture details that matter?
4. What are the insights practitioners need in order to manage their B2B customers’ experience journey?
5. How to predict B2B customer satisfaction without relying on quantitative measures (considering designing a short version of their quantitative customer survey and rely more on qualitative measures to capture the customer’s voice)?

Complexity, context and customer relationship

To paraphrase and summarise, building customer relationships in a B2B environment starts with the understanding of the complexity of B2B customer journeys, and the knowledge of the context and the relationships between individuals, departments and organisations involved. B2B customer journeys consist of intertwined multi actors’ paths, multiple direct and indirect touchpoints, which are affected by the context of the relationships and interaction history, as an infinite loop, in which the usage stage ends with a reassessment that may initiate a new purchase cycle.

In order to orchestrate B2B customer journeys well, it’s important to take a B2B customer perspective, identifying root causes, uncovering at-risk segments, capturing customers’ emotional and cognitive responses, spotting and preventing decreasing sales, and prioritising actions to contribute to the improvement of all customers’ experiences. This is not the same as being customer centric. It’s about defining the relevance of customer needs and the relationships with them for the organisation and act accordingly.

Any thoughts and comments? I will further dive into this in another publication.