Walmart’s Grocery Network Transformation: The Next Steps on Our Supply Chain Modernization Journey

We discarded questionnaires if one of these items was rated lower than 5 on a 7-point scale. To ensure the reliability of our key informants, we included three items at the end of the questionnaire on the degree of involvement, competence in answering, and overall relevance of the questionnaire. In our study, the unit of analysis is the strategic business unit (SBU) in a firm (or, if no specialization of different SBUs exists, the entire firm). The positive effect of B2B CJMC on customer-related coordination costs is weaker for firms with a product focus than a service focus. As a result, product-focused suppliers can more easily coordinate resources internally to provide appropriate touchpoints along the CJ than service-focused suppliers (Kuehnl et al., 2019). In the same vein, a supplier's product focus typically entails offering fewer and simpler touchpoints in the CJ than a supplier with a service focus (Berry et al., 2006).

As a result, studying a plethora of narrow CJM-related aspects in B2C markets limits comparability and disciplinary maturity of research and leaves B2B managers with high uncertainty as to which CJMC is essential for competitive advantage. Despite valuable contributions, these studies provide only limited insights into a general CJMC, let alone the resulting consequences or potential contingency factors, as the studies are context-specific without providing a comprehensive conceptualization or operationalization of the focal construct. Take the steps we suggested to make your B2B customer journey maps useful, insightful, and a key component of your business strategy. To narrow this gap, it is critical to highlight where the gaps are largest between expectations and experience when customer journey mapping – organizations need to be prepared to meet expectations as closely as possible to avoid this ‘customer expectation gap’ growing larger. To analyze the B2B customer journey map, businesses need to collect data, study customer interactions, and identify areas for improvement. One goal of customer journey mapping is to create a consistent experience across channels and touchpoints.

However, customer journey mapping is not an easy process, and getting it wrong can ultimately leave you with a lack of direction. However, customer experiences, rather than being neat and linear, are often convoluted and complex, particularly in B2B markets where tendering, multi-site requirements, and technical product and service requirements often define journeys. Of course, this exercise captures an internal perspective only, so it’s important to also test this out by speaking directly to customers. It may even be the case that these customer groups are overseen by different departments within the organization; in some cases, it makes sense to create multiple customer journey maps to avoid data overload.

Types of B2B Customer Journey Maps

The key here is to Business-to-business customer journey keep reminding yourself that these touchpoints should all represent experiences through the eyes of the customer and so if a customer does not experience it (i.e. it’s an internal process they do not see), then it should not be included. Typical approaches to customer experience journey mapping here are to segment B2B customers on firmographics (i.e. classifications which make them different such as geography, age, SIC code), behaviors (i.e. what they buy) or needs (what they are looking for). Depending on the industry in which a company operates, the range of its operations and the type of products and services it offers, the starting point will be to define the different groups of customers and to establish how different their “journey” with the company can be. A key point to bear in mind is that the focus should always be on the customer, i.e. the customer journey map must be produced through the lens of a customer.

This is especially true of business-to-business (B2B) companies that offer complementary services. “Referral offers typically work best if the referring customer gets a reward for doing so, so think about building room for perks into your pricing strategy.” When creating a customer referral program, be sure to consider the incentives you can offer to get satisfied customers to participate. Then it’s on the marketing and customer-service teams to encourage repeat business.

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Finally, managers consistently emphasized the need for control systems that examine value generation in the B2B CJ against the individual needs of the interaction partner. Thus, to offer intertwined business processes, integrating touchpoints across digital and non-digital channels and departments is crucial. Similarly, marketing academics have recognized that providing a “positive customer experience requires minimally the integration of myriad suppliers' functions, such as operations, logistics, marketing, and sales” (Mora Cortez & Johnston, 2017, p. 97). The data reveal that suppliers need to amalgamate internal resources in the B2B CJ to deliver customer value. Our consulted managers emphasized the need for this dimension to avoid customer confusion or contractual penalties due to deviating touchpoints.

It’s important always to keep the customers’ perspective in mind when you are drawing the journey map. Make sure that according to the customer journey map all phases are described and shown properly. If possible, utilize a B2B customer journey map template; otherwise, design it yourself by using flowcharts and diagrams. This is the process of getting feedback from the consumers because they are the ones who can give insights into the journey that they go through when interacting with a service provider. This is useful in the development of the journey map to specific target customer groups. It is a visual graphic of all the steps and engagements of the customer from first knowing about product to promoting it i.e. from awareness stage to advocacy stage.

• We ceased the sampling process when no new insights emerged from the field data—that is, when we reached theoretical saturation (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).
• Whilst all customer journey maps are unique to a business and its different customer groups, the process in creating these journey maps is broadly the same.
• Understanding these distinct stages allows you to create tailored strategies that acknowledge the rational and emotional dimensions influencing B2B purchasing behaviors at each critical juncture point.
• These new touchpoints offer additional benefits to the customer, but they also need to be managed and integrated into existing CJs.

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However, when we started to consider customer interactions beyond conversion, we had to increasingly integrate back-end touchpoints. More precisely, the institutionalization of B2B CJMC incurs extensive costs because it entails high customer-related coordination costs, which require combining resources across functions, hierarchies, and departmental boundaries (Ritter, 2020). We contend that B2B CJMC also has a dark side through increased customer-related coordination costs. Especially in the B2B context, marketing scholars typically rely on the differentiation of firms operating in a product or service context (e.g., Hawkins et al., 2009; Parvinen et al., 2013). Thus, from a theoretical perspective, the fundamental proposition that dynamic capabilities enable firms to cope with the challenge of managing the dynamics of CJs remains questionable. Some researchers suggest that dynamic capabilities are particularly valuable in the context of high dynamism (Teece et al., 1997), while others argue that their effectiveness may diminish when firms face high levels of dynamism (Schilke, 2014).