Customer Journey Research
Deepen your understanding of customers’ needs and measure how your brand performs at key touchpoints throughout the buyer journey.
How Can Customer Journey and Path-to-Purchase Research Help?
The gap between winning and losing brands in a B2B purchase decision has shrunk 78% since 2021 and the time it takes to make a decision has increased by 54 days (Source: 2024 Superpowers Index). To push through buyer inertia and improve your chances of being first-choice, customer journey research or path-to-purchase research helps to better understand customer needs and measure how your brand currently performs at every stage of the journey to ensure you’re delivering a best-in-class customer experience.
Define the Stages of the Buyer Journey
Evaluate Needs and Decision-Drivers
Measure Performance at Key Touchpoints
Trusted Research Partner for Top Brands
Why Partner with B2B International for Customer Journey Research?
A Project as Unique as Your Business
Trusted B2B Data Quality
Action-Orientated & Outcome-Focused
Speak to One of Our Customer Journey Research Experts
Want to discuss how customer journey research or path-to-purchase research could benefit your business? Get in touch to schedule an introductory call with one of our team.
Contact UsMapping the Buyer Journey
Understand the stages of the buyer journey and customers’ expectations at each step. Our customer journey and path-to-purchase research will identify the main touchpoints within each stage to uncover the sources of information used and the key influencers.
We will also dive into the decision-making unit and path-to-purchase to identify the primary responsibilities across the journey and which personas get involved at each stage.
Touchpoint Analysis to Understand Drivers and Emotions
To better understand customer sentiment and emotions, touchpoint analysis will identify which touchpoints are most critical to influencing the experience (the moments of truth), where the pain points and moments of delight are that strengthen or weaken the relationship, and any differences between segments or personas.
To assess performance and optimize the buyer journey, we will identify where your brand is strongest in the journey and where you need to improve, what actions would have the biggest impact on satisfaction and where any untapped opportunities to add value lie, and what marketing messages and types of content is most likely to resonate with each audience.
Bringing the Journey to Life
To help bring the customer journey to life, our in-house creative team will design a visually engaging, story-led overview of the end-to-end journey, tailored to the information needs of your business, enabling the research findings to be shared with a wide range of stakeholders.
Beyond the standard buyer journey map, we can also provide a range of additional visualized outputs to bring the findings to life and disseminate across the wider organization, such as digital interactive maps, posters, booklets, and videos.
Examples of Visualized Customer Journey Maps
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Path-to-Purchase Research for Sodexo
Business Challenge
Sodexo, a world-leader in food service and facilities management, recognizes the importance of leveraging primary research to ensure that service offerings meet the needs of the target market.
Sodexo partnered with B2B International to help them understand typical buyer journeys and personas across four different business units. These insights were to be used to inform top-of-funnel marketing strategies, sales engagement strategies during the purchase process, and ensuring that the on-going relationship throughout the contract period is nurtured in order to encourage customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Specific objectives included:
- To understand how to engage with and influence buyers at the early stages of their journey towards outsourcing
- To deepen their understanding of the challenges, pain points, and moments of delight across the buyer journey
- To understand the more emotional needs of clients and prospects during the buyer journey
- To identify the extent to which buyer challenges, motivations, and pain points varied by type of organization
What We Did
Customer journey research was required to understand the needs of organizations and buyers in each sector. There were several key aims of the research:
- To validate and build the buyer journey for each segment
- To develop buyer personas of the different job roles in the decision-making unit
- To develop value propositions for Sodexo to target customers and prospects, through highlighting pain points, delight factors, emotions, and moments of truth in the buyer journey.
Across the four sectors, we carried out over 100 in-depth telephone interviews with Sodexo’s customers and prospects. All respondents were actively involved in the procurement of outsourced services within their organization. Job roles ranged from C-Suite and Finance Directors to Facilities Managers.
The research provided Sodexo with valuable market insights on the journeys that businesses outsourcing services, or business looking to outsource services, go through. For each of the four sectors, we provided Sodexo with an in-depth report covering the buyer journey, highlighting moments of truth for buyers and providing recommendations on the key actions needed at each stage of the journey.
Customer Journey Research for Visa
Business Challenge
Visa is at the forefront of driving a myriad of new payment solutions including Visa Direct and Visa B2B Connect. Visa Direct helps enable money movement to eligible debit cards domestically, and to eligible debit cards and accounts cross border. Visa B2B Connect enables b2b, cross-border, higher value payments to accounts on the same or next day through a single connection.
Visa required research to understand how to connect to and engage with new audiences within commercial banks and how to position Visa Direct and Visa B2B Connect to help commercial banks adopt the solutions successfully.
Given inertia – arguably the biggest barrier holding many organizations back from embracing change – as well as other challenges facing banks like increasing pressure to differentiate and to maintain regulatory compliance, a key goal of the research study was to understand not just the decision-making unit and process, but also the key benefits banks were seeking from Visa’s new payment solutions and how its offerings solved their challenges.
What We Did
A qualitative market research program was designed to expand on Visa’s existing knowledge of the commercial bank audience by identifying personas and mapping the buyer journey for Visa Direct and Visa B2B Connect. We conducted depth telephone interviews with commercial bank decision makers in the US spanning relevant roles in Strategy, Product, IT / Technology, and Sales.
Detailed objectives of the research study included:
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• The decision-making unit
• Key steps in the buyer journey and touchpoints / information sources used
• Desired outcomes (e.g., value drivers) at both the organizational and individual level
• Pain points faced across the organization and by each individual persona
• Perceptions of the Visa payment solutions tested
• Communication preferences
The persona profiling and buyer journey research helped Visa understand key motivators for each persona, identify potential barriers to adopting new payment solutions, and inform a customer-centric value proposition. The insights also enabled Visa to align its sales and marketing efforts for Visa Direct and Visa B2B Connect by understanding the similarities and differences between the two offerings when it comes to how commercial bank decision makers learn about, evaluate, adopt, and implement new payment platforms and solutions.
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Speak to One of Our Customer Journey Research Experts
Want to discuss how customer journey research or path-to-purchase research could benefit your business? Get in touch to schedule an introductory call with one of our team.
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