small business

The Customer Journey: What It Is and Why It Matters

While it’s obvious that attracting and retaining customers is essential to a business’s success, many organizations actually lack a framework for analyzing key interactions they have with their customers. Interactions ranging from initial conversations with a member of your sales team to troubleshooting technical issues can determine whether a customer continues to support your business over the long run. 

All of these interactions make up the customer journey, and understanding these steps is key to their continued satisfaction and your business’s continued success. Businesses with a strong strategy for analyzing and improving their customers’ journeys can provide their customers, employees, and other stakeholders with an overall better experience. 

To help your business better understand the customer journey, this guide will explore three questions that can help you improve your own customer journey strategy:

  • What is the customer journey?

  • Why does the customer journey matter?

  • How can my business improve the customer journey?

While this may be a new way of looking at customers’ experiences with your business, remember that the principles behind it are ones that your business likely already values. Approach customers with empathy, aim to create frictionless experiences, and constantly strive to improve how customers interact with your business.

What is the customer journey?

The customer journey consists of all of the interactions customers have with your business in the entire course of your relationship. This includes their initial discovery of your business by interacting with marketing materials, their first sales process and purchase, their use of your product or service, the support and communication they receive from your business, and the efforts your business makes to retain them as a customer over time. 

On the surface, the customer journey looks like a simple series of interactions. However, businesses interested in developing a holistic customer journey strategy need a more nuanced understanding of the other concepts and elements that inform a journey, including:

  • Customer experience. Customer experience (CX) is somewhat synonymous with the term customer journey, but it also refers to the broader framework and programs that businesses develop to improve their customer interactions. Specifically, a CX program is a dedicated effort a business makes to collect feedback from customers after key touchpoints in their journey to learn how these pivotal moments can be improved. Your journey mapping and strategy fall under the broader umbrella of CX management.

  • Moments of truth. A moment of truth, or pain point, is a high-stakes touchpoint in the customer journey that can often determine whether a customer sticks with a business or not. For example, a customer contacting a software provider’s support line for assistance to solve an urgent problem with the product would be considered a moment of truth. In this scenario, the customer is likely frustrated and a poor interaction may lead to them seeking an alternative service. By identifying moments of truth in your customer journey, your business can actively implement improvements to minimize negative emotions, show empathy to the customer’s struggles, and provide a solution. 

  • Voice of the customer. Voice of the customer (VoC) refers to your customers’ perspectives on your business. This includes their expectations, likes, dislikes, and any other feedback they have provided. By surveying your customers, you can better understand their unique voice and how changes in your business impact them. A VoC or feedback collection program should be an integral part of your broader CX efforts.

How exactly these concepts and programs should be approached will depend on how your customer journey and communication channels are constructed. For example, a business that uses automated communication for the majority of the process will have different moments of truth to consider than one that focuses more heavily on building one-on-one relationships with individual clients. 

Why does the customer journey matter?

Customers find and stick with your business for many reasons. They might first find you through your standout marketing strategies or stellar reputation in the space. They might stick around because they appreciate your brand’s philanthropic efforts and identity or feel that your product is superior to your competitors. Among these reasons, customers will heavily weigh the service they experienced and the process of making a purchase at your business. 

Your customer journeys matter because all of the individual interactions and factors at play contribute to your ultimate likelihood of retaining their long-term business, which should be a primary goal for any organization. 

In other words, the customer journey your business offers will directly and indirectly impact how customers view your business and if they will buy from you again. There are other benefits to improving your customer journey as well, such as:

  • Improved customer loyalty. Customers who feel that your business created a positive experience for them, showed empathy for their struggles, and implemented their feedback will likely feel increased brand loyalty. This means they will likely be retained not just as long-term customers but as active promoters of your brand. 

  • Faster response time. Part of building a customer journey strategy involves creating a process for responding to negative feedback. For example, during a moment of truth that goes poorly, a customer might fill out a survey that reflects their negative experience. With an effective program in place, your business will be able to reach out to the customer quickly to resolve their issues, potentially saving your relationship with them. 

CX and the customer journey are continuous processes, and regularly reassessing what goes into them at your business will allow you to keep up with changes in customer preferences. Make sure to routinely collect feedback during pivotal touchpoints to check if your improvements have succeeded, as well as how customer needs naturally shift over time. 

How can my business improve the customer journey?

The customer journey can be improved through deliberate tracking, analysis, and implementation. Just like many other internal processes at your business, such as communication, budgeting, and project management, there are software solutions that can help you monitor and generate reports on your customers’ journeys. 

Explore CX software solutions that have customizable survey tools, allowing you to tailor them to ask pertinent questions about your customers’ experiences during critical moments in their journeys. Before designing these surveys, consider your customer journey map. 

The customer journey map is a visual representation of how your customers or customer segments interact with various parts of your business during their journeys. It considers a business's different audiences, each touchpoint, and can help explain why certain outcomes happened. 

PeopleMetrics’ guide to customer journey maps walks through the six core components of creating a map for your business:

  1. Determine your objectives. Establish a specific goal for your map to help focus your efforts. This will be related to the overall scope of your customer journey map. For instance, does your map cover the entire customer journey or hone in on a specific moment of truth? 

  2. Define your personas. Take a look at your customer data to create personas. These personas represent various groups of customers with shared characteristics, such as their product or service tier, motivations, common pain points, and goals. 

  3. Break the journey down. Work with your team to break down the customer journey into distinct steps. Consider the voice of the customer during this step by dividing the customer journey based on what actions the customer is taking, rather than what may be happening internally at your business. 

  4. List all touchpoints. Working through the steps you just identified in the customer journey, list all of the touchpoints customers have with your business in each stage. Consider both actions the customer takes and processes that happen internally that may impact the customer’s experience along the way. 

  5. Compile touchpoints. Identify which touchpoints are relevant to the customer journey in question and organize them based on your map’s overarching purpose. Pay special attention to potential moments of truth and other critical touchpoints—referencing past customer feedback can help you identify these. 

  6. Test your customer journey. Present your map to your team for feedback. Discuss touchpoints they would consider as moments of truth, and make adjustments based on their feedback. Study your customer interactions going forward to see if they follow the course you’ve outlined, collect more information, and make tweaks over time.

If you have difficulty organizing your customer journey map, remember that these journeys are a continuous, non-linear cycle. Try zooming in on specific points of the customer journey to make better sense of moments of truth, rather than analyzing your customer journeys as a potentially overwhelming whole. Doing so can help you identify outcomes related to individual interactions, which can easily get lost when looking at the entire customer journey at once. 


Your business should strive to make your customers’ experiences with your business as frictionless and positive as possible. By analyzing your customer journey and taking steps to improve it, you can retain more customers, build brand loyalty, and stay up to date with changing preferences. Improve your customer journey by mapping it out, creating surveys, and investing in new tools to support your organized, intentional approach.


About the Author:

This is a guest post contributed by Sean McDade.

Sean McDade has been helping companies optimize customer experiences for over twenty years. An angel investor in the Philadelphia region, he is also the founder, CEO, and visionary of PeopleMetrics, a leading provider of experience management software and advisory services. In addition to working with a number of leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, he is the author of two books.

San Diego Business & Nonprofit Crisis Support Network

Thank you fo the San Diego Business & Nonprofit Crisis Support Network for aggregating resources for local organizations. Their spotlight video highlighted DonationMatch Co-founder Renee Zau, who is offering pro bono services of up to an hour per organization (business or nonprofit) to assist with in-kind (unpaid) marketing strategy and fundraising event coaching as we adjust and recover from COVID-19. To apply, use the link in the Free Consultants and Coaches section of the San Diego Business & Nonprofit Crisis Support Network website.


5 Podcasts for Charity Fundraising Advice

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As a nonprofit professional (or professional volunteer), hosting a charity fundraiser is a lot of work. It requires organizing, marketing, event planning, sales, people management, and so much more. As fundraisers, we are always looking for improved methods for making our events more cost-effective and profitable. Here are 5 podcasts to help make the efforts of a nonprofit event planner a little easier, or more effective. These podcasts are in no particular order and range from 30 minutes to over an hour in length per episode. It can be great to fit in these helpful tips during a lunch break, long drive, or even during a daily workout routine.

1. The Classy Podcast

This weekly podcast has stories from leading founders and executives in the social sector who hope to inspire the next generation seeking to drive change. 

2. Events with Benefits

Hosted by three longtime event fundraising professionals with 50+ years of combined experience, this podcast seeks to help nonprofits achieve greater success in their fundraising events with less effort. The episodes feature special guests from all different sectors of the nonprofit industry who share their biggest lessons learned, including nonprofit attorneys, directors of events that raise over $1 million or more, benefit auctioneers, and technology companies.

3. CauseTalk Radio: The Cause Marketing Podcast

This weekly podcast, hosted by Joe Waters and Megan Strand, keeps you up to date on the world of cause marketing.  The podcast covers trends, tactics and news related to cause marketing and corporate-nonprofit partnerships.

4. Driving Participation Podcast

This podcast talks with marketers, fundraisers and consultants in order to explore what’s been successful for schools, nonprofits, and associations, in order to attract the right people, maintain their excitement, and encourage them to give back.  

5. Raise and Engage

This podcast if for nonprofit professionals and covers the latest trends and hot topics.  With people speaking from the social good community, it’s designed to help listeners in doing more for their cause.  

Events With Benefits® Podcast

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Experts in the fundraising arena, Renee Zau, Danny Hooper, and Ian Lauth, have pooled their nonprofit expertise to create an educational podcast called Events with Benefits®. Covering topics related to nonprofits and fundraising, the podcast steps inside the world of event fundraising, seeking to provide insights to event planners, nonprofit staff, and volunteers. The episodes are designed to assist nonprofit organizations in achieving success with fundraising events and raising money.

The Events with Benefits podcast episodes are each 30 to 40 minutes in length, allowing listeners to gain quick access to new ideas for future events. Episodes feature special guests from many backgrounds within the nonprofit industry, who share their personal experiences and lessons learned. Listeners can subscribe, stream or download the podcast episodes, which are available on iTunes and at EventswithBenefits.com

 
 

One of the most popular episodes is #6: Thinking Big with Noah McMahon, Founder and CEO of Anonymous.  McMahon, who specializes in holding multi-million dollar events, explains his 3 building blocks for having a lasting relationship with donors and event sponsors, in order to multiply the impact of funds raised.  He also shares many extremely helpful event planning tips.  

Meet the Podcast Hosts:

  • Renee Zau, CEO & Co-founder of DonationMatch.com, has personally worked on over 50 charity events and mentored over 100 business owners.  She personally has experienced and understands the frustrations and challenges that people face during the in-kind donation process.    

  • Benefit auctioneer Danny Hooper has had an award-winning career through thousands of on-stage performances and the creation of Danny Hooper Productions.  He has also had experience as a recording artist, motivational speaker, comic emcee, and celebrity benefits auctioneer.

  • Ian Lauth, VP of Marketing at Winspire, works for a company that provides unique experiences for charity auctions or fundraisers, allowing users to place exclusive travel packages into their charity auctions.  

Engaging Millennials: Don't Give Up on Your Email Marketing!

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By Juliet Davenport, Nonprofit Ambassador at DonationMatch

Do you remember being awed by the answering machine? (Does anyone still own one of those?) Or what about the cordless phone? Now it's all about smartphones and iPads. Millennials (those born between 1981 and 2000) are all about digital, and it can be challenging to keep them engaged with your cause or brand. As Cynthia Hamlin of B2C explains in her blog, "[d]espite Millennials' increased internet usage, when surveyed by Pew Research Center for MILLENNIALS A Portrait of Generation Next, there were no significant differences among Millennials, GenXers and Boomers when asked about the amount of email sent and received in the 24 hours prior to the survey. Millennials were more likely to have Tweeted, updated their online profile or sent a text message in that time period."  Millennials are still using email, but in conjunction with social media and text.  Here are some interesting numbers pointed out in her blog that are just as relevant now as they were then:

  • 90% of Millennial use the internet or send and receive email at least occasionally
  • Millennials are more likely than all other age groups to have a cell phone: 94% have one
  • 88% of Millennials use their cell phones to send and/or receive text
  • One-in-five Millennials (20%) have posted video of themselves online
  • Three-fourths (75%) of Millennials have created a social networking profile
  • Among Millennials, 65% say television and 59% cite the internet as their main source for news

As the numbers show, incorporating social media into your email marketing is a smart way to keep Millennials engaged. Ms. Hamlin's blog shares tips on how to accomplish this. How have you incorporated social media into your email marketing?

Infographic - Where Are We Now?

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If you saw our original infographic on Pinterest, you'll notice it was released in 2012, when DonationMatch was just over a year old. Apparently the statistics and data are still appealing, as it continues to be our most popular pin, but the numbers are frankly a bit outdated. So, it's with great pleasure that we share updated results. Congratulations to the schools, charities, businesses, and brands who made these win-win connections!  

 
DonationMatch Impact Infographic 2014

Many thanks to Bella Vidaña for contributing to this infographic's creation.

What Information Should You Collect Before Your Next Event - And Why?

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Constant Contact has developed a simple strategy for asking the right questions, and in a blog post they explain why obtaining the right information is so valuable in planning your next event. The key to collecting the right guest information before your next event is to start with an online registration form. This allows you to easily learn more about your guests as part of the ticket purchase process. Anyone can use a company like Eventbrite, TicketDerby, or Ticketleap to make it easier, and the best will suggest pertinent questions that will help in planning your event. Knowing what to ask and keeping the form streamlined is crucial.

According to Constant Contact's strategy, #1 is demographic information.  "A nonprofit can use demographic data when planning entertainment or auction items for their annual silent auction fundraiser." Here is their list of what to collect:

1. Demographics: Name, age, gender, even zip codes can matter to sponsors and event partners.

2. Number of guests: Plan seating, food, and amenities better with an accurate count.

3. Contact information: Don't forget about asking for email addresses for follow-up surveys or future communications.

4. Event-specific information:  Are there meal or seating choices to make?  Need t-shirt sizes for giveaways? Can you sell raffle tickets or add-ons in advance?

5. Payment method

At DonationMatch, we do our best to collect the right information on behalf of our users, too. To help companies and brands find their target markets (and nonprofits present themselves to the right opportunities), we ask event organizers for attendee demographics, ticket prices, estimated attendance, social media links, and more. And even before events can be listed on DonationMatch to be eligible to receive goods, a nonprofit's IRS status and account contact must be verified. Because we know nonprofits need to be mindful of the products and services they accept, we now use third-party resources like Yelp to check donor companies, too. We know having better information at your fingertips creates a better experience for both the giver and the receiver.

If your intent is to create a more successful event, asking for more of the right information, and understanding how to use it, is essential. Read Constant Contact's full articles for their strategy and explanations.

What information do YOU collect for a better event?

Coming Soon: A Fresh Look and Features for DonationMatch

By Renee Zau, Co-founder, DonationMatch You've told us how easy DonationMatch makes getting more customers and event donors, how much time we've saved you, and how great it feels to both give and receive.  We've taken your feedback and are excited to announce that added features and a new look are COMING SOON! Why are we letting you know BEFORE we do the upgrade?  Our site will be unavailable during this transition, and we want you to be able to plan any important DonationMatch account activity around it.  The exact date/time isn't set yet, but it could happen as early as this Friday evening, May 11th, and we'll announce it as soon as we know with an email, on Facebook, on Twitter, AND here on our blog.

Thanks for all your support, and we look forward to seeing you online at DonationMatch!

Sneak peek of new DonationMatch site

In-Kind Partnerships with Nonprofits, Part 2

By Renee Zau, Co-founder, DonationMatch My last post on this topic focused on opportunities tied to nonprofit events. Although these typically offer the most immediate exposure, they are often seasonal. Here are some ideas for in-kind charitable partnerships year-round:

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  1. Be a venue for gatherings. You don't have to be a hotel or restaurant to have a desirable place. Spa Gregorie's Del Mar offers a board room for small get-togethers and meetings. Curves women's fitness centers often host meetings for Chambers of Commerce, Zumba fundraisers, and members' clubs. The Microsoft Store has raised the retail bar for community outreach with store space and free group trainings. Invite a nonprofit over and show them you're friendly!
  2. Give tools and support. PopChips started snacking habits in offices all over town with case giveaways. Microsoft Store free trainings make sure their software is used well. DonationMatch co-hosted a fundraising auction workshop with Red Apple Auctions to help nonprofits run better fundraising events. Though not "flashy," free assistance can put you at the top of a nonprofit's go-to list.
  3. Offer services or samples for a donation. By cross-promoting with nonprofits, Aveda sets up their store, complete with signage, to give mini treatments in exchange for a 100% charitable donation.
  4. A portion of sales helps, too.Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes advertises FunRaisers that donate 15% of related receipts on given nights to nonprofit groups. Macy's gives $1 for every stamped letter to Santa deposited in special letter boxes in their stores to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Even if you can't give something outright, a percentage can be enough.
  5. Offer your expertise. Nonprofits small and large are always looking for specific professional talent in their volunteers. It's become so popular that websites like CatchaFire and VolunteerMatch (not affiliated with DonationMatch) were created to make better volunteer connections.
  6. Not a lot of time? Even simply recognizing synergy within your own circles of friends and making introductions can lead to phenomenal results.

What are your success stories?  Please share about the positive impact that charitable partnering has made on your business!

Related articles

In-kind Partnerships With Nonprofits, Part I

By Renee Zau, Co-founder, DonationMatch A question posed in a LinkedIn group made me reflect on how many (typically small) businesses don't know how to use cause marketing, specifically in-kind (non-cash) marketing, to their advantage.  If you have a great product or service, one experience is all you need to convert newbies into customers, even raving fans.  How do you get yourself in front of more potential customers without "paying" for it?

  1. Donate a package or certificate toward an auction, a raffle, or goodie bags.  Most event attendees love these, and donors often get publicized both before and after the event.  Look at donation request letters as opportunities to get hundreds, even thousands, of eyeballs on your brand. You can do online searches for event calendars, ask your employees and customers about organizations they support, check out community boards, or use DonationMatch (my site) to save time (we make connecting with events, sending pre-filled donation forms, and gift certificate delivery paperless and quick.)  One more reason to like auctions: prize winners are the most willing and able to pay more for it than anyone else. You just found your best customer in the room!
  2. Provide event amenities (photography, food/beverage, decor, spa treatments, etc). For a furniture dealer, it could be VIP seating. Chocolates are popular party favors. I've seen HP and a photographer partner to make ornaments from photos with Santa. And who wouldn't appreciate mini spa treatments or makeup touch-ups from a local beauty product store, spa, or beauty school?
  3. Help spread the word.  Your communications reach is another asset companies tend to forget about.  Employees, customers, followers, subscribers... they count.  Be familiar with events you choose to promote, make them a good fit for your customers, volunteer if possible, and the added awareness can add to a charitable fundraiser's attendance and success just as much as any monetary donation.

These opportunities are all tied to nonprofit events, my favorite kind, but may be seasonal or harder to find.  Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post that gives more everyday ways to help in-kind.

Why not take one lunch break to reach out and explore possibilities with a particularly interesting local organization? And register on DonationMatch to be notified of event opportunities in your market - it's still free in many cities.  I (and your local organizations) will love hearing from you!