How to find and solve customer pain points

Any business that wants to retain existing customers, attract new ones, and generate better returns should offer the most transparent view of its products/services. Clients want convenience, efficiency, and value for money in their transactions. Listening to the voice of the customer is vital. This way, you will better understand problems they might be experiencing along their customer journey and offer practical solutions. But what are customer pain points, and how can you find them?

What is a Customer Pain Point?

A customer pain point refers to specific problems that customers and prospective clients encounter along their customer journey. It interferes with their overall experience. These problems are diverse and even though some of them are simple, pinpointing them isn’t usually easy. 

A business has to change its profile from a retailer and take the consumer’s position to understand these pain points fully. It could be related to finances, redundant services, complicated products, etc. 

How to Find Customer Pain Points

Identifying customer pain points is important for improving customer engagement and experience. While these pain points can have simple profiles and are solvable, finding them can be quite challenging. There are two ways to do this:

I. Qualitative Research

It’s a process that involves asking clients open-ended questions to collect data for analysis or interpretation. Qualitative research is usually done with the sales team to determine opportunities and problems.

For instance, why were certain products in demand during certain seasons or certain areas? What’s the brand’s target audience? What are your competitors doing, and why are they popular among consumers?

This way, you can understand why you failed or had higher conversion rates. It’s also important to identify your target audience’s needs since these are your prospective customers.

Generally, qualitative market research is often neglected since businesses like to deal with numbers. However, they are instrumental in discovering customer issues and improving the quality of products/services. The most effective techniques used include:

• Focus groups
• Face-to-face interviews
• Observations
• Telephone interviews

II. Quantitative Research

It’s research that deals with data exclusively. “What number of customers are we targeting?” “how many communication channels do we have?” or “what was our SEO reach?”. Quantitative data has a lot of “what” and “how” but not “why.” 

This is a widespread technique since data can be easily analyzed. Additionally, numerical data provides valuable insights into the latest, relevant trends, and the data can be compared with other data sources. Standard quantitative market research techniques include:

• Organized polls
• Surveys
• Questionnaires

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How to Solve Customer Pain Points?

Once you have done comprehensive research to determine your customer pain points, it’s only right that you offer solutions. You want to retain existing customers and attract new ones, and this can only happen if you implement a mechanism that promotes efficiency in service delivery. To do this effectively, here are the tips you can apply:

Do a comprehensive Voice of the Customer (VoC) Analysis

VoC is a term used to describe customer feedback – their experiences and expectations for your services/products. VoC focuses on understanding customer expectations, needs, and product improvement. It’s important to do a comprehensive VoC analysis since you shouldn’t assume that you perfectly understand your customers’ issues. 

This in-depth analysis will allow you to understand the customer journey using solution-oriented aspects such as tracking social media mentions, analysis of customer support, and open-ended surveys. 

Find Applicable Ways of Addressing Pain Points

Unless the pain points are addressed correctly and on time, it will be impossible to solve them. Once you have established the most common customer pain points, you should address them effectively. Some of the best solutions you can consider applying are chatbots and live chats. These will help ensure that you automatically reply to all customer questions and resolve the issues as needed.

It should be noted that some of these pain points can be resolved without engaging customer service agents. So, instead of putting them in the queue for hours, these automated programs can come in handy. For complex problems, then you can use customer agents. Ensure that you continuously engage with your customer agents to solve emerging issues proactively. The product and service delivery world is dynamic, and customer needs constantly change.

Implement an Integrated Customer Support Channel

Implementing an omnichannel customer support channel is important in providing seamless customer experiences across multiple channels within one system. As a result, customer service agents will have access to all the customer interactions within the multiple channels, enabling them to answer questions efficiently and effectively. This also helps to ensure that no customer is left stranded while waiting for assistance.

Analyze the Client Pain Points

Once you have analyzed the customer’s needs, understood their journey, and provided the necessary solutions, it’s time for you to act on the same customer feedback. Like “what issues were the customer raising?”, “were the issues solved effectively?” and “what can be done to improve the customer’s journey?”. 

The customer needs to know that despite their problems being solved and questions answered, measures are being taken to ensure that problematic issues don’t reoccur.

Be Ready to Walk with Your Customers

Improving customer experience requires you to walk alongside your clients. You should be ready to take them through your solutions and highlight why a solution is the most ideal in a specific case. 

> Discover how you can prevent churn of high-value customers and have real-time response capabilities to keep customers close and happy.

Types of Customer Pain Points

While there are many types of customer pain points, the most common types fall under these four categories:

• Financial
• Productivity
• Processes
• Support

Financial Pain Points

They relate to areas where your customers and prospective clients are likely to spend much money, and they want to reduce their spending. It means financial problems that customers face.

Most (if not all) customers pay attention to price to determine the affordability of a product/service and the value they will get from it.

There is a common misconception that the best way to increase sales in a highly competitive market is by selling products/services at lower prices. While customers love cheaper things, they also look for items that can give them value for their money. Thus, reducing prices isn’t always the best solution for financial pain points, but it might be necessary in some cases. Other aspects of financial pain points include:

• Repeat purchases: some clients love to buy products in bulk since this helps cut overall expenses and saves time.
• Reusability: a product with high reusability is more attractive even at a higher price since consumers don’t like the idea of recurring purchases frequently.
• Ongoing product expenses: does the product come with ongoing expenses such as a subscription? If that’s the case, it might be financially appealing since the buyer can happily afford the dispersed payments. However, others are usually skeptical about subscriptions and would rather make a single payment in bulk.
• Item longevity: this is critical to value for money? How long will a product last before the client is forced to repurchase? In this case, low-quality products don’t have the right appeal since the client will be subjected to frequent purchases which are time-consuming and expensive.

Overall, all these financial pain points have their specific solutions. 

 2. Productivity Pain Points

These pain points relate to the customer’s need for efficiency or a more streamlined customer experience when dealing with your business. Customers want to use their time effectively and, therefore, anything that adds redundancy to the whole buying process since this will result in frustration.

Consumer products should be designed for convenience and usability. That’s why SaaS businesses design products that increase consumer comfort, make life easier, and promote time efficiency. Some productivity problems can be solved by FAQs, simple tutorials, and chatbots. Additionally, you can make the buying process easier by including fewer steps in your checkout. This way, your business will be more attractive to the buyer.

> Find the toxic products that cause a lot of complaints and pain points using the Product Assortment Optimization Framework.

3. Process Pain Points

They almost resemble productivity pain points. However, process pain points usually occur when a potential customer feels that a business should make its internal processes better and more efficient.

When a client starts to have headaches about problems that they think are entirely avoidable, this becomes a process pain point.

Understand that most clients opt for expensive services or products if they can be conveniently accessed or used overcomplicated things. This type of pain point is common in business-to-business sales. 

Examples of process pain points include complicated product workflow rules that are difficult to track or remember. Businesses with multiple disorganized systems that aren’t interrelated or effectively integrated. There are also complicated software programs that need extra training before use.

4. Support Pain Points

These are areas where your clients are not getting assistance during the buying process. Businesses need to implement customer-centric approaches to attract and retain customers. So, customers need timely assistance when making purchases, or else they will seek the same services elsewhere.

That’s why it’s important to build omnichannel support systems to ensure that you correctly and timely answer client questions and clients. Examples of support pain points include poorly streamlined support channels with loops. This leaves the customer thinking the best way and the best time to contact the customer representatives since they aren’t sure if their issue will be seen and solved on time. 

The best way to solve this pain point is by having multiple support platforms. Some clients prefer making direct phone calls, using social media, sending emails, or engaging in live chats. Besides that, brands should learn to use support tickets to ensure that conversations can be automatically traced and tags without wasting time.

If you are looking for a customer data platform that precisely analyzes customer behavior across multiple channels and helps your business understand how to attract, retain, and delight customers, then REVEAL by Omniconvert is the most suitable solution. It helps you unlock data-driven growth that’s vital for eCommerce. 

Conclusion

Pain points are specific problems that affect customers and prospective clients. The customer journey can be challenging, but it’s up to your business to find these issues and offer the appropriate solutions. Discovering customer pain points is vital in ensuring that you can design customized solutions. You can gather customer data by using various mechanisms to listen to the customer’s voice. 

Additionally, you can use software applications to get your potential client’s opinion regarding your services or products. This way, you will have better customer insights and improve the quality of your products/services. As a result, your customers will be more satisfied, consequently leading to better returns. Overall, you should start by finding the pain point, earning the customer’s trust, and solving the problem.

Frequently asked questions about Customer Pain Points