The Future of Designing Digital B2B Customer Journeys: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The digital age has fundamentally changed how businesses design their customer journey. This trend started in the B2C environment, but it has also begun to influence B2B customer journeys in recent years. This thesis investigates how digitalization impacts the customer journey and customer behavior after the implementation. It addresses critical success factors, actions to implement a more digital customer journey, and the challenges this change can pose. It also investigates how the touchpoints of the customer journey are changing due to this shift and how it impacts customer behavior and expectations. The study explores how businesses should design their future B2B customer journeys to become more efficient while staying customer oriented. The thesis consists of a literature review to build a knowledge foundation about customer journeys for further empirical research. The research adopts a qualitative method approach, conducting eight expert interviews, providing in-depth insights into the advantages, challenges, success factors, actions, touchpoint changes, and customer behavior. These interviews are coded and analyzed using Atlas.ti to identify recurring themes and trends. The findings reveal that adapting a more digital customer journey poses multiple advantages for businesses such as improved efficiency, a more data-driven approach, a more scalable business, and, if implemented correctly, even an increased customer-centric approach. However, despite these numerous advantages, implementing a more digital customer journey presents various challenges. Organizational challenges including resistance to change or silo thinking, overall challenges as in building deep customer relationships being harder in a digital setting or collecting and utilizing the correct high-quality data in the right way and finally integrating the new digital touchpoints with the traditional ones. Though, when concentrating on the most critical success factors and actions such as staying customer-centric, implementing the right tools and utilizing their data in a correct way while including all relevant departments and offering clear added value through the new digital touchpoints, and staying up to date with customer expectations, businesses can definitely succeed in implementing this digitalization project. This thesis makes a valuable contribution by bridging the literature gap concerning the digitalization of the B2B customer journey and its impact on the customer journey design and the customer behavior. It provides actionable insights for businesses considering or planning to implement a more digital customer journey to enhance their business strategy.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Supervisor	Christopher Korntner-Kanitz (Supervisor)