10 Ways to Identify and Fix Customer Pain Points

Whenever an organization or individual comes up with a new product idea or service or even reflects on the current portfolio of options they have in the market, the focus always lies on solving customer pain points.

Understanding the customer journey is one of the most effective strategies to generate brand credibility, especially when it comes to tech-based products and services. Knowing how consumers view your brand and alleviate customer pain points will help you adopt the best customer experience initiatives.

A good product or service experience is essential for keeping your customers pleased. To keep people satisfied, you must understand their pain points. Businesses of all sizes must work hard to discover customer service pain points to attract and retain customers. You can do this by providing a seamless experience through their customer journey.

Before we identify and resolve consumer pain points, let’s define them and their different types first.

What Are Customer Pain Points?

A customer pain point is a specific problem that your client or prospect encounters across all transactions and touchpoints in their customer journey. A pain point is a particular issue that potential clients of your company have. In other words, you may conceive of pain points as fundamental difficulties that your client or customer is experiencing.

Understanding what clients want should be the first step in every business’s customer service strategy. Businesses and entrepreneurs may create a compelling value offer that draws customers to address their problems by analyzing customer service pain points.

Doing business has traditionally been about identifying and addressing pain points. These are the products and services provided by a firm. Some sales methods include convincing the consumer of a problem and offering their product or service as the solution. For example, a corporation may give financial apps a location monitoring gadget to remedy the customer’s problem even before the customer realizes its need.

Main Types of Pain Points

Like any other problem, customer pain points are as numerous and varied as your potential clients themselves. However, not all prospects will be aware of the pain point, which may do marketing to these people challenging.

Therefore, you must successfully help your prospects recognize they have a problem and persuade them that your product or service can help them address it.

Although individuals might consider pain points just daily concerns, they are frequently classified into numerous categories. The four main types and examples of customer pain points are discussed below.

1. Financial Pain Points

Financial pain points are the most important and impactful of all. When clients believe they are overpaying for a product or service, these pain points emerge. Essentially, your clients are overpaying for their existing service provider/solution/products and want to cut their spending.

Examples of financial pain points can include overpaying for a monthly or yearly subscription service and even feeling that the repeat purchase of a particular product or service costs them way more.

2. Productivity Pain Points

The productivity pain points occur when customers demand a more simplified experience and customer journey when contacting organizations. To prevent dissatisfaction, they try to make the most of their time.

Essentially, your clients spend too much time with their existing goods provider, solution, or product or wish to make better use of their time.

An example of a productivity pain point includes when a customer faces difficulty utilizing a service or using a product. Another example can consist of a long and cumbersome buying experience that involves many unnecessary steps.

3. Process Pain Points

Process pain points relate to how firms communicate with consumers via various approaches and processes.

Process pain points are comparable to productivity problems. They arise when a potential customer believes that a firm needs to improve the efficiency of its internal procedures. This is a more prevalent problem in B2B sales than B2C sales.

Examples of process pain points can include calling a customer service helpline and finding it difficult to connect to the required department or even submitting a product demand form in hard copy to three different departments instead of submitting a digital copy to one centralized registry.

4. Support Pain Points

Customer service is an essential corporate function. Most critical areas are harmed by insufficient assistance provided under customer care. Customers may have product-related questions, and most of them demand rapid customer service and response.

Support pain points occur when customers feel that they are not getting the necessary support and guidance during the sales journey.

A prevalent example of such a customer pain point is receiving late replies or responses from customer services or interacting with sales reps with little to zero knowledge about the product or service.

How to Identify Customer Pain Points?

Identifying consumer pain points influences both your marketing and sales approach. Marketers aim to identify these pain points to successfully and appealingly offer their solutions. The sales staff analyses pain points to adapt their strategy and tactics accordingly and market the product as the best solution.

Pain point analysis is a critical step in enhancing the experience of various sorts of consumers. That is why recognizing customer pain spots is so important. We shall now look at how you can identify customer pain points and fix them accordingly to deliver superior customer service.

1. Through Research and Surveys

The first and foremost way to identify your customer’s pain points is to develop surveys and use research tools to help you dig deep into the customer’s psyche. Using the proper market research services, you can deploy relevant surveys that help you identify the customers’ different issues and how it impacts them psychologically.

Once you have identified these issues, your team can resolve them through the different features you offer in the product or services you specialize in.

2. Customer Interviews and Focus Groups

One of the best ways to listen to your customers is by interviewing them in person and conducting focus groups. Of course, this has the advantage of face-to-face interaction, which has a more significant impact than sending out a list of questions via email.

You can also use the help of body language specialists and psychologists to observe the focus groups or customers when they’re interacting with you. You will use data acquired through these interactions to improve your offerings. Of course, all of this must be done with the customer’s consent, as the data you collected needs to be authorized.

3. Monitor Customer Interactions on Social Media And Review Customer Complaints

In these fast-changing times, we have seen that social media has played a pivotal role in not only the identification of customer pain points but their address as well. Therefore, you should deploy a dedicated social media team that monitors the different customer interactions conducted on social media and helps resolve customer complaints.

You can resolve this by offering the customers the possible solution in a comment form or asking them the relevant details about the product and service to visit them in person and cater to their complaints.

4. Determine Whether the Problem Is Real or Perceived

Identifying customer pain points and their address is critical to any business’s success; differentiating your efforts between productive and wasted is fragile. This thin line is between the reality of a pain point or whether being the pain point does not exist, and it’s perceived.

Sometimes a customer segment faces a dilemma or issue that has a solution already present or is not a pain point, to begin with but rather a suggestion for an improvement. Your marketing and sales team needs to determine whether the problem is real or perceived and act accordingly based on instincts and experience.

5. Prioritize And Test Possible Solutions

When you can identify possible customer pain points while understanding the customer journey, your team will develop different solutions to address those pain points. But what you must know is not to waste resources while trying to use every possible solution to manage your customer’s issues.

Always prioritize and test all possible solutions on a smaller scale and then, using an objective approach, select the most well-suited solution aligned with the customer experience and your internal processes.

6. Complicated Buying Process

One of the significant pain points that customers complain about in their customer experience journey is a complicated or cumbersome buying process. As an organization in the business, you should simplify your buying process and make it as easy as possible for your customer to navigate.

Remember that the ease you will create for your customer will add value and benefit you in the longer run by enhancing your customer relationships.

7. Use Analytics to Track Where and How Customers Are Interacting with Your Website or App

Technology has been critical in helping us identify customer pain points and shortlist the most critical ones. Using different tools and analytical software, you should track and monitor your customer’s interaction on the other platforms where you are present.

This interaction will help you identify the common areas every customer looks or is attracted to. Identifying such trends recognizes the pain points that the customer is facing. Therefore, helping you analyze these online patterns will improve customer value delivery.

8. Analyze Customer Data to See Which Areas Need Improvement

Remember that you have a treasure chest within your marketing and sales team. They have customer data that varies across different demographics and psychographics. Using various analytical tools to analyze that customer data can help you identify areas that need attention and improvement. These are the same areas in which the customer will most definitely be facing issues and troubles that need to be addressed at the earliest.

9. Talk To Your Sales and Customer Support Teams

Your sales and customer support teams are your frontline warriors when identifying customer pain points.

Interact with them to help you identify the issues that your customer is facing. If you realize that the customer pain points revolve around their lack of knowledge or support response, you can train them accordingly and help them improve their performance.

10. Your Created Library of Helpful Content / Resources

When you are traveling through the customer journey funnel with the customer, you will not only come across different customer pain points but also provide the customer with different solutions and possibly work on them alongside. Therefore, always remember to sort this helpful content and market research that you have done in varied resources.

Make these different resources and content available not only to your customers but also to your internal stakeholders. This two-way process will help optimize the whole customer experience journey. Still, it will also aid in identifying new customer pain points that you can address on priority.

Conclusion

Customer pain points might be the most challenging obstacle to establishing successful customer connections. You can match your service to achieve customer satisfaction goals by making the necessary effort to discover and understand consumer pain issues.

And there is no better approach to understanding client pain areas than to have top-tier customer support tools at hand. Therefore, we recommend approaching industry experts to arm you with the best customer support tools. As a result, you will be able to plan out client journeys, identify their needs, and remove any issues to provide a pleasurable and smoother experience.

NEWSLETTER SIGNUP