You’ve been there. The procurement team at your biggest client loves you—the price is right, the contracts are smooth. But the end-users on the factory floor? They find your software clunky and disruptive. The IT department has security concerns, and the finance team is questioning the ROI. Who, exactly, is your customer? And whose experience matters most?
For too long, the world of Customer Experience has been dominated by Business-to-Consumer (B2C) thinking. We map the journey of a single person buying a pair of shoes or booking a holiday. But in the complex, high-stakes world of Business-to-Business (B2B), this model breaks down. The B2B customer isn’t one person; it’s a “multi-headed” entity—a collection of individuals, teams, and departments, each with their own needs, priorities, and experiences(1).
Applying B2C logic to B2B is like trying to conduct an orchestra with a single violin. It misses the complexity, the harmony, and the potential for discord. A groundbreaking new conceptual paper in the Journal of Business Research argues that to truly understand B2B CX, we need a new mental model: convergence(2).
This convergence-based lens offers a powerful way to diagnose and manage the fragmented reality of B2B relationships. It’s built on two core ideas: psychological convergence (what happens inside your customer’s organization) and operational convergence (what happens between your organization and theirs).
At its heart, B2B CX is a collective phenomenon. The experience doesn’t just belong to one person; it’s shared, discussed, and debated across the buying organization. Psychological convergence is the process through which these individual experiences align to form a cohesive whole.
Psychological Convergence: The perceived alignment of individual experiences within teams and across the wider organization
Think of it as the journey from individual perceptions to a shared reality. This doesn’t happen by accident. It’s driven by social interactions, leadership, and shared goals. The paper proposes that B2B CX exists on three distinct levels:
| Level |
Description |
Example |
| Individiual |
The personal, subjective experience of a single employee interacting with your product or service. |
An engineer finds your analytics dashboard intuitive and powerful. |
| Team |
The shared experience that emerges within a specific group, like a buying center or a user team. |
The entire engineering team agrees that your dashboard has improved their workflow, and they share tips on how to use it effectively. |
| Organizational |
The collective experience that forms across multiple teams, representing the organization’s overall perception of you as a supplier. |
The engineering team’s success story is shared with management, influencing the finance team’s positive assessment of the tool’s ROI. |
When these levels are aligned, you have psychological convergence. The customer speaks with one voice. When they are misaligned—what the authors call divergence—you get the split personality problem. The procurement team is happy, but the end-users are frustrated, creating internal friction that can ultimately jeopardize the relationship.
While psychological convergence is about what happens internally, operational convergence is about the alignment between the buyer and seller.
Operational Convergence: The alignment of actions, processes, and touchpoints between the buyer and seller organizations throughout the entire customer journey
This means ensuring your sales process, your onboarding program, your support channels, and every other touchpoint are perfectly synchronized with your customer’s own internal processes. The classic B2B pain point is the clumsy handover from the sales team to the implementation team. The customer has to repeat their needs, expectations are misaligned, and the experience immediately sours.
Achieving operational convergence requires sellers to develop strong capabilities in managing the customer journey. This is where the rapidly growing function of Customer Success Management becomes critical(3). Customer Success teams are designed to ensure operational convergence by:
- Proactively managing the
relationship: They don’t just react to problems; they anticipate the customer’s
needs and guide them toward value.
- Ensuring a smooth transition:
They bridge the gap between the pre-purchase and post-purchase phases, making
sure the promises made by sales are delivered during implementation.
- Using data to monitor health:
They use tools like customer health scoring to track engagement and
satisfaction in real-time, allowing them to address friction points before they
escalate.
When a seller like Siemens, for example, sells a complex digital twin solution to a manufacturing firm, its Customer Success team works to ensure every stakeholder, from the C-suite to the factory floor, is aligned and deriving value, creating a seamless operational flow.
The real magic happens when these two forces work together. Strong operational convergence from the seller makes it easier for the buyer to achieve psychological convergence. When your touchpoints are consistent and your handovers are seamless, you give your customer a clear, unified experience, making it easier for their internal teams to get on the same page.
In turn, a customer with high psychological convergence is a better partner. When they have their own house in order, they can engage with you more effectively, making it easier for you to achieve operational convergence. This creates a powerful, self-reinforcing cycle that builds strong, resilient B2B relationships.
This convergence lens provides a clear roadmap for improving B2B CX. The focus shifts from managing individual touchpoints to orchestrating a collective experience.
| For the selling organization |
For the buying organization |
| Assess CX at multiple levels. Don’t just survey your main contact; find ways to measure the experience of end-users, IT, and other teams. |
Coordinate internally. Create cross-functional teams to manage key supplier relationships and prevent a fragmented experience. |
| Identify and engage “CX amplifiers.” Find the key influencers within the buyer’s organization who shape how their teams perceive you. |
Appoint internal champions. Leverage employees who are advocates for a supplier to communicate their value across the organization. |
| Invest in a dedicated Customer Success function. Empower this team to manage the entire journey and ensure seamless transitions. |
Develop structured seller evaluation models. Consolidate feedback from across the organization to create a holistic assessment of supplier performance. |
| Track engagement and feedback across all touchpoints to spot divergence early. |
Onboard your sellers. Involve the implementation and user teams in discussions before the purchase decision is made to ensure alignment. |
B2B CX is a team sport, played both within your organization and within your customer’s. By focusing on driving both psychological and operational convergence, you can move beyond treating customers with a split personality and start building truly unified, valuable, and lasting partnerships.
(1) Gummesson, E. (1987). The new marketing—developing long-term interactive relationships. Long Range Planning, 20(4), 10-20.
(2) De Keyser, A., Antonetti, P., Rouziou, M., Béal, M., Wang, Z. H., Grégoire, Y., & Lussier, B. (2025). Understanding the B2B customer experience and journey: A convergence-based lens. Journal of Business Research, 175, 115481.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115481
(3) Hochstein, B., Becker, A., Kindermann, B., Kraus, F., & Ulaga, W. (2020). Developing the concept of customer success management. Journal of Service Research, 23(4), 361-378.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1094670520932777150953957
