How to Identify Customer Pain Points + Tips to Address Them

Every product or service is designed to address specific customer pain points or challenges. Yet, why is it that only a few are an instant hit among the masses, and the rest pass by unnoticed? Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, you can excel only when you identify and solve for the right customer needs.

Read this guide and find answers to:

 

 

What are customer pain points?

Customer pain points refer to the problems experienced by customers across the touchpoints on their customer journey.

Customer pain points that can directly impact the business are also referred to as business pain points. To start identifying the customer pain points that may directly affect your business, we have categorized the most common customer pain points based on the business domain they align to.

 

What are the types of customer pain points?

#1 Financial pain points:

Financial pain points are the most critical of all customer pain points. Financial pain points occur when customers feel they are paying too much for a product/ service. Your customers love choices, be they current or potential customers. They are always looking for cost-effective solutions that offer them more services for the money invested.

Business owners need to strategize for budget-friendly options and customer-friendly subscription plans so they can meet customer expectations. Customer support teams and account managers should understand customer needs, competitor benchmarks, and budgets to offer an optimally priced solution that caters to the needs of the customer.

#2 Process pain points:

Process pain points may refer to operational inefficiencies along the customer journey. Not only does it affect your customers, but it also impacts your support team. Businesses must identify these bottlenecks to improve the customer experience and agent productivity.

Here are a few questions that can help you reveal if you are facing any process pain points. 

• • Do your customers find it difficult to contact customer support? 
  • Is there a delay in notifying your customers about the status of their requests? 
  • Do your customers find themselves repeating the same information to different agents across different channels? 

These process pain points will end up frustrating your customers and result in churn.

Remember, outdated support software or poor internal collaboration may affect the quality of customer service in the long run. It may result in longer wait times for your customers, resulting in frustrated customers and helpless support agents. A single bad customer experience may lead customers to leave and eventually add to the cost of acquiring new customers.

#3 Support pain points:

Support pain points are often internal issues that may restrict businesses from resolving customer pain points quickly or effectively.

Customer support plays a pivotal role in making the customer journey seamless. For any customer issues, support agents must ensure that each interaction with the team or a chatbot results in customer delight.

The easiest way to help your support teams monitor their performance and identify support pain points is to use an omnichannel help desk software. The integrated unified dashboard can help highlight areas of improvement for the support team and stay connected with customers along their journey.

#4 Productivity pain points:

Has your support agent struggled with rerouting queries to the right team? Did they ever have trouble figuring out customer problems? Did your team miss the SLA in providing a solution? If yes, then you might be encountering productivity pain points.

Your customers expect a resolution from your support team as soon as they raise a query. They expect the experience to be seamless for the services they’re paying for. However, productivity pain points may decrease agent productivity and diminish the efforts behind the customer service offered. As a result of these internal inefficiencies, customers may end their relationship with your brand right away or may have a higher tendency to churn.

While process and productivity pain points seem similar, an easy way to understand the difference is to evaluate whether the problems affecting performance are because your team has too much on their plate, or if they are finding it hard to take the next step due to inefficiencies in collaboration or communication. The former is indicative of a productivity pain point that can be mitigated by self-service, canned responses, or AI, while the latter is process-related and requires strategic and systemic change.

 

Learn more about: 

6 Tricky Customer Service Challenges And How To Solve Them 

Common Pain Points Support Agents Face and How to Solve Them Using a Contact Center Software

 

How to identify customer pain points?

Providing a wholesome customer experience helps brands to stay at the top of the game irrespective of the size of the business. From concerns around over-priced services, and low-quality products to queries raised for broken links or poor customer experience, brands should be able to address every customer pain point successfully. If you want to improve customer stickiness for your product or service, here are four ways to recognize those customer pain points.

1. Ask the right questions

Your top priority is to solve the major pain points received through customer feedback. If you’re already sending out surveys to your customers and waiting for those coveted insights, you’d most likely think, —Why don’t my customers respond to my surveys? Is there a way to design surveys better? We’re here to provide you with a simple yet effective solution.

Your customers don’t answer your survey questions because of how you ask them about their problems. Your surveys need to be designed to include open-ended questions so that customers can elaborate on their expectations and needs. Only if you ask the right questions will you get the answers and insights you’re looking for. Take a look at this question.

The options make no sense and don’t give any quantitative insights. Now, here’s the same question with different options.

The options provide valuable data that you can act upon.

You can choose to keep your surveys as simple as possible for customers who hate filling up forms. You can save detailed open-ended questions for customers who volunteer to help with detailed answers or information. Here are some questions you could ask them.

• What problem were you trying to solve when you initially came across our product or service?
• What are the top three benefits you have received from (product or service name)?
• How could we improve (product or company name) to better meet your needs?
• What other roles or titles besides yours do you think would get a big benefit from (product or service name)?
• What would you likely use as an alternative to (product or company name) if it were no longer available?
• What’s holding you back from using (product or company name)?

 

2. Get your sales team talking

When it comes to garnering customer pain points, you should focus not only on your current customers but also on the lost prospects. Expanding your customer base is imperative and behind every lost deal is an important customer pain point that your product failed to solve. This could be a pricing-related issue or a missing feature. 

You may resort to digital marketing tools for customer insights, but it’s time to get your sales team talking. Find out about prospective customer pain points and use these insights to get them onboarded as your customer. 

The first step is to get your sales reps to write down their observations after every sales pitch that didn’t end up in a deal. Mapping the insights from your salesperson to the feedback on customer surveys can help you decide on the direction your product needs to be moving in.

The analysis should include answers to questions like:

• What were the pain points shared by the prospect?
• What did the prospect like/dislike about the product/service?
• Why did the prospect turn down the product?
• What would have kept the prospect from turning down the product?
• Did the prospect compare our product with a competitor offering? If yes, which aspect did they compare?

 

3. Check out online reviews

Reviews are a great way to fish for customer pain points. Monitor what your customers write about your product on social media. Take it up a notch by browsing through customer reviews on leading review sites. 

Peer-to-peer review sites are a rich repository of customer grievances, providing a great platform for brands to understand and address customer woes. With many users taking to online platforms to write reviews, you can even find and leverage the pros and cons of your brand and your competitors from the customer’s perspective. 

Qualitative research goes a long way. Once you accumulate reviews from different sources, head over to community forums to find suggestions that could work in favor of your company. 

Pro tip: It is important to ensure the authenticity of reviews. With fake reviews on the rise, a lack of verification leads to false data. Check the reviewer’s profile, rating pattern, and review date.

Here’s a review that outlines the pros and cons of the software.

 

4. Closely watch your competitors

Despite your best efforts, there could be certain buyer personas that are out of your reach. However, that doesn’t mean you can never gain their attention. It’s just that your brand messaging doesn’t resonate with the customers’ needs. 

Here’s where a close watch on your competitor brands can prove helpful. Every business uses a different approach to address customer pain points. Analyzing these pain points helps you make an informed decision when it’s time to revisit and revise your customer experience strategy.

Here are the four steps you can deploy as a part of this exercise.

• Evaluate your competitor’s website, pricing, FAQs, and feature landing pages.
• Take notes of the customer pain points for which they have provided a solution. You might have missed out on the same. See how you can incorporate those into your website or as part of your brand messaging.
• Run a Google search of their ads and take a closer look at their marketing copy. These ads target customer pain points the best. Check if your ad copy needs an edit.
• Make a list of the integrations enabled by your competitor’s brand. How are they making their customer experience seamless? Enable integration with software and tools that facilitate the buyer journey for your customers.

 

How to address pain points and improve customer experience?

Once you have identified your customer pain points and categorized them further, you need to resolve these issues at the earliest to keep delivering an excellent customer experience.

#1 Deploy a feedback management system:

Customer feedback is integral to your success. Implementing a feedback management system that helps you monitor and analyze customer pain points will empower you to stay connected with your existing customers and constantly upgrade your product/services to meet the needs of prospective customers.

#2 Optimize customer journeys:

Once you understand if the current solutions being offered address the major customer pain points, you can start the process of overcoming road bumps and offering personalized customer journeys. Another way to check if the journey mapped works for your customers or not is to walk through the process yourself to check for any unexpected delays. You may even want to bring in expertise from across teams to address issues from all angles.

#3 Document common customer pain points:

Every business needs to document the most common customer pain points. You can use your knowledge base, self-service portals, or FAQ pages to address concerns raised frequently by your customers. This improves customer satisfaction and helps your support teams prioritize and address pain points that need attention.

#4 Automate internal processes:

Internal processes need to be optimized to reduce costs and improve overall productivity. You may deploy a help desk software to ensure specific problems are routed to the relevant teams, reducing wait time for customers. You can even use the in-built automation capabilities to auto-trigger workflows for time-based escalations and deliver as per your SLA.

#5 Revisit your marketing strategy:

Go omnichannel. 9 out of 10 consumers prefer seamless integrations between communication channels.[1] Having a customer service software that offers a unified dashboard with a 360-degree view of customer data helps your teams to collaborate better and deliver personalized experiences across various touchpoints.

 

Identifying customer pain points is critical for your business

Identifying customer pain points has never been an easy task. You need access to historical and real-time data to learn what your customers want even before they realize it. Most businesses worry about losing their customers due to their inability to understand what customers need and how their support teams can help. The above guide should help you identify and address the biggest challenges faced by your customers.

Remember, when you position your product or service based on customer pain points, they will find more reasons to do business with you.

 

 

Updated on September 30, 2022.