P RELIMINARY L ITERATURE R EVIEW

Previous research has shown that buyers prefer online buying, especially in the B2B market, and that B2B customers complete over half of the steps in a buying process online (Huer 2013; Think with Google 2013, CEB Global 2018). According to one research conducted five years ago, three out of four B2B buyers prefer to purchase via a website rather than through a salesperson (Hoar 2015). It can be assumed that these numbers have only grown since these studies were conducted. A similar change can also be seen in the way people

want to communicate. McHugh (2018) points out in her article that people these days avoid answering phone calls and are rarely receptive to outbound messaging and marketing. She states that the power has moved away from the seller to the buyer, changing the dynamic of the interaction. Buyers are empowered, and used to getting what they want, exactly when they want (Edelman & Singer 2015) and online interaction tools such as chatbots answer to this need very well. They offer a way for the buyer to chat online from their own initiative, at their own pace.

Chatbots and other online interaction tools have been covered in previous research for some parts. However, the focus has been more on B2C markets and the retail business. For example, McHugh (2018) pointed out that chatbots have proven to be very successful in the retail business but in the services business a lot more careful mapping is required.

Additionally, the research has been more focused on the potential benefits and gains from the online interactions instead of looking at how it is connected to the experience for the customer and the effects on their buying process. This perspective could be very beneficial to study since it has been proven that a social presence at a website affects the perceived usefulness of the website for the buyer (Oganowski, Montandon, Botha & Reyneke 2014).

Paschen, Kietzmann and Kietzmann (2019) suggest in their article that studying AI and how it affects the value creation process for customers in the B2B market good be a good topic for more research. Furthermore, they suggest that it could be beneficial to study the ways AI can help companies to be more effective in capturing tacit and explicit customer knowledge.

Steward, Narus, Roehm and Ritz (2019) suggest that there should be more research towards when and how different online conversation tools are used in B2B marketing and based on that study which creates the most value in the buying process. Moreover, McHugh (2018) points out that marketers should look at the interactions their buyers are already having with their services and create bots that capture these “micro-decisions”. She states that the chatbots that offer help based on these observations are usually the best. Based on these findings, there seems to be a research gap with this specific point of view.

The most recent and seemingly most relevant article on the topic of new technologies as part of customer journeys is one from August 2020, by Hoyer, Kroschke, Schmitt, Kraume and Shankar, even though it is focused on B2C businesses. The article presents a new framework

for understanding the role of new technologies in the customer journey. This framework categorizes the new technologies into IoT, AR/VR/MR and Virtual Assistants/Robots/Chatbots. Hoyer et al. (2020) believe that all these technologies will strongly influence how consumers make purchase decisions in the future based on what experimental value they bring in every step of the process. The authors point out that this new framework is a good basis for future research on factors of these new technologies that influence the customer experience and value creation.

In their framework, Hoyer et al. (2020) have studied the general impact of the mentioned technologies on the customer journey in different stages of the buying process, which they have divided into three: pre-transaction, transaction, and post-transaction stage. This part of the study showed that different technologies and types of contents create value in different stages of the journey. Since this research is focused on one of these technologies (Virtual Assistants/Robots/Chatbots), it is worth mentioning they found that these types of technologies have the most impact on the customer experience pre-transaction and during the transaction. As mentioned before, the framework by Hoyer et al. (2020) was created for B2C businesses and might therefore differ when brought out to B2B context.

All in all, there is a research gap on this topic with a specific point of view on the B2B buying process. Many previous studies have been focused on the B2C consumer and the retail business, but as mentioned before, the organizational purchasing journey is different in many ways; for example, it usually involves more people in the process, who all have different wants, goals and needs for the product, which in this case, is a software. In contradiction to the framework by Hoyer et al. (2020), chatbots are often only seen as a new way to do customer service, which would make them a part of the post-purchase stage, even though there are many implications for both marketing and sales purposes. In this study, the chatbots are seen as a lead-capturing tool used to collect people’s contact information much like a lead-capturing form and a way to offer buyers easy ways to interact with the software provider.