Guest Post: Customer Pain Points – How to Identify and Address Them

This week, we feature an article by Manpreet Singh Chawla, senior digital marketing executive at Knowmax, a SaaS-based organization that offers knowledge management solutions for various industries. He shares how organizations can identify and solve customer pain points.

What are customer pain points? 

A customer’s ongoing issue is known as a pain point in business. And if an issue arises, your product can fill an unmet demand. This could be something as simple as frequently forgetting passwords or something more serious like needing help to trace a purchase or needing a necessary feature on the platform they’re using.  

A customer pain point is a distinct issue that your customers or prospects encounter during contact with you at various touchpoints. According to customer service best practices, understanding what customers want should be the first step for firms. Businesses and entrepreneurs may create a compelling value offer that attracts customers and helps them solve their problems by recognizing their pain spots. 

Customer pain points are as broad and varied as prospective customers. It might be challenging to advertise to potential customers if they are unaware of their pain points. You will have difficulty persuading them that your product or service will help them address their issues. 

Types of customer pain points 

Salespeople must understand their prospects’ problems to customize sales pitches for their products or services. To do this, they must first identify those problems. Marketers also need to comprehend these problems to sell and advertise their solutions engaging and captivatingly.  

The four main categories of customer pain points are productivity, finance, process, and support. 

1. Productivity Pain Points

The customer’s expectation of a more simplified experience when contacting firms is one of the process’s pain points. To reduce irritation, they seek to maximize their time. Your support staff is expected to respond as soon as a consumer raises a question. They anticipate a flawless experience with the services they are paying for.  

However, many challenges affect your support team’s productivity, translating into poor customer support. Customers can even sever their association with your brand or churn more frequently due to these internal inefficiencies. 

2. Financial pain points 

Financial pain points are the most important of all customer pain points. Customers experience financial pain points when they believe they are overpaying for a good or service. Whether they are existing or future clients, your customers love options. They are constantly searching for affordable options that give them more services for their money.  

To provide a service that is both affordably priced and meets the customer’s needs, customer support teams and account managers should be aware of those needs and benchmarks set by competitors and budgets. 

3. Process Pain Points

Operational inefficiencies along the customer journey are sometimes called process pain points. It has an impact on your support staff in addition to your customers. Businesses must locate these bottlenecks to enhance customer satisfaction and agent efficiency. 

Long-term effects on customer service quality could be caused by out-of-date support software or ineffective internal communication. As a result, consumers may have lengthier wait times, which could lead to angry customers and helpless support staff. The chances of gaining new customers decrease if a single negative customer experience causes customers to defect. 

4. Support Pain Points 

Internal problems that prevent companies from swiftly or effectively addressing consumer pain points are often called support pain points. Many factors, like lack of contextual customer knowledge, scattered SOPs, and complex troubleshooting processes, could be a few of the reasons that lead to inefficient support. As a result of these challenges, customer queries remain unresolved, leading to bad CX. 

How to identify customer pain points? 

Regardless of the business size, offering an enhanced customer experience helps brands stay at the top of their game. Brands should be able to address any client pain point, from complaints about overpriced services and low-quality items to inquiries about broken connections or poor user experience.  

Here are four methods to identify those client pain spots if you want to increase customer loyalty toward your brand. 

Conduct qualitative market research. 

Finding out precisely what your clients want is crucial. Some important actions in research include: 

•  Learning about frequent consumer pain areas by mapping out their customers’ journeys. 
• Create client personas to organize your work throughout your company, direct product development according to customer needs, and focus on qualified prospects. 

Listening to your customers to identify pain points 

The simplest way to solve a problem is to understand it from a consumer’s perspective. Paying attention to consumers is one of the best ways to identify their issues. Here are the main benefits of paying attention to customers. 

• One of the biggest causes of client churn is bad customer service. 84% of businesses that strive to enhance customer satisfaction note a rise in revenue. However, customers will gladly pay extra if they have a better overall experience. 
• Service conversations typically go more smoothly when support representatives listen to consumers. The seamless experience will significantly impact your client retention strategies. 

Using live chat to identify customer pain points 

Before providing clients with solutions, organizations must first build customer trust and confidence. Including live chat is a thoughtful approach to learning about client needs and problems. Here’s how live chat assists in identifying client problem spots and providing workable solutions.  

• You can quickly ascertain your customers’ demands and offer them the goods and services that best suit their interests by instant communication via live chat. 
• The advantage of using live chat to pinpoint client pain points is that your representatives will better comprehend every problem with contextual knowledge and provide prompt answers. 
• By integrating your live chat with in-house CRM, your workers will get customer-driven data and identify problems that frequently annoy clients. 

Talk to your sales and customer support teams. 

Obtaining valuable insights into your customers’ perceptions requires regular dialogues with your customer-facing personnel, whether in sales, customer service, or marketing. Regularly speaking to your sales and support team will give you invaluable customer insights. As these roles are directly customer-facing, their feedback on your service processes and strategies will help your craft even better strategies going forward. 

Check market competition 

You might be unable to reach some customer personas despite your best efforts. That doesn’t mean that you can never get their attention. Simply said, your brand’s messaging should connect with the target audience’s needs. Each company has a unique strategy for addressing client pain issues. When it’s time to review and change your customer experience strategy, understanding these pain spots can help you make an informed choice.  

Here’s how you can analyze your market competition:  

• Examine your competitors’ websites, pricing, FAQs page, and feature landing pages. 
• Please list the consumer aches and pains for which they have a remedy. You might have missed the same opportunity. Look for ways to include those on your website or as part of your brand statement. 
• These commercials target the best customer pain points. Do a Google search for their advertisements and read the marketing copy in more detail. Verify whether the ad copy needs to be edited. 
• List the integrations that the brand of your rival has made possible. How do they provide a seamless consumer experience? Enable integration with programs and devices that help your clients during the buying process. 

Please note: A competitive analysis is only to give you an idea of what your competition is doing, not to copy their strategies. 

How to address pain points? 

You must address these problems as soon as possible to continue providing a great customer experience once you have recognized and further identified your customers’ pain points. 

You need customer feedback if you want to succeed. It is easier for you to stay in touch with your current consumers and continuously improve your products and services to satisfy the needs of potential customers if you use a feedback management system that aids in tracking and analyzing client pain points. 

Optimize customer journeys 

You can only start to overcome obstacles in your brand strategies and provide customized customer experiences after you know whether the existing solutions address the main consumer pain points. To tackle problems from all sides, you may even enlist the help of experts from different teams.  

Document common customer pain points 

Every company needs to compile a list of the most prevalent consumer complaints. You can respond to issues voiced often by your consumers by using your customer support knowledge base, self-service portals, or FAQ pages. This raises client satisfaction and assists your support staff in identifying and prioritizing problem areas. 

Automate internal processes 

To cut expenses and boost overall efficiency, internal processes must be streamlined. To ensure that specific issues are channeled to the appropriate teams and shorten client wait times, you can leverage help desk software. Additionally, you can use the built-in automation features to start workflows automatically for time-based escalations and meet your SLA. 

Revisit your marketing strategy

Utilize omnichannel resources. The majority of consumers favor seamless channel linkages in communications. Your teams will work more effectively together and provide tailored experiences across touchpoints if you have multichannel contact center software that provides a consolidated dashboard with a single source of truth for client data. 

Conclusion 

Finding a customer’s pain points is crucial to understanding what your customers need. You can access historical and current data to discover what your clients want to deliver products and services that meet their needs.  

Furthermore, there is no better approach to understanding client pain spots than to have world-class customer care tools. Understanding and addressing customer pain points will improve the customer experience you provide and give you more loyal customers. 

Manpreet Singh Chawla is a senior digital marketing executive at Knowmax, a SaaS-based organization that offers knowledge management solutions for various industries like telecom, banking, healthcare, insurance, e-commerce, etc. When he is not at his work desk, Manpreet loves to watch videos that talk about the world beyond Earth.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors, go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: Industry Insider Discounts Can Lead To Great Word-Of-Mouth Endorsements And Recommendations