The pain points are common when you have had a bad customer experience with a product or service. Identifying these bad experiences is crucial to the success of your business.
Your role as a company is to identify them and actively work to resolve them. The key is to listen to the customer and prospects and identify their needs.
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How to offer solutions to these pain points? Let’s learn more about this concept and how to detect what causes dissatisfaction in our consumers.
What are Pain Points?
Customer pain points refer to the problems or situations that consumers encounter when using a company’s products and services and that generate negative feelings as a result.
Pain points can occur at any point in the customer journey when certain needs or expectations are not met or when customers do not find solutions to their problems.
Companies must exist to solve their customers’ pain points. However, a large number of them don’t really understand the real pain points of their audience.
By understanding your customers’ points, your approach and the way you target your audience change. The key is that the solution must address the customer’s real pain point. To be effective, your marketing and sales strategies should not focus on the product but on alleviating these points.
Pain points are mainly classified into four areas:
- Financial: Those related to money, such as overpriced products and services or unclear expenses.
- Process : Problems that customers have with their daily life processes, such as time-consuming tasks and complicated methods.
- Productivity: These are problems that a customer perceives when time and resources are not properly utilized.
- Supporting: This is when customers feel they don’t have the help they need, such as confusing tasks and processes or lack of guidance.
Importance of knowing the customer’s pain points
Understanding the customer pain points will help you consider your company’s positioning and solutions for potential customers who face some of these problems.
You can also provide useful information on how to meet the needs of potential customers as they move along the customer journey.
If you are dealing with an existing customer, determining what areas of pain they are experiencing will help you develop efficient solutions that reduce
customer churn.
What types of pain points are there?
Pain points can occur in a wide variety of situations. Here are some of the most common types of pain points:
1. Financial pain points
Financial pain points are one of the most common consumer concerns, so there is always an overriding focus on price, value, and potential savings. However, there are a variety of different points within this category, each with its own solutions.
It often seems that the only way to win sales in a competitive market is to have the cheapest prices. While many customers focus on finding the lowest-cost products, there are other factors at play in the sales process.
While focusing on keeping costs low is a safe option for many markets, many consumers equate cheapness with low quality.
That is why it is important to know your market and listen to your customers. If qualified customers are concerned about the price compared to competitors, determine what makes your product worthwhile and make sure customers know that too.
2. Pain points in the online search
Many consumers do research on the Internet before making a purchase, but most are unwilling or unable to spend too much time doing so.
This is a pain point that has a relatively simple solution: make sure your brand is easily visible on the internet easily and that your website has all the information the user needs to resolve their queries.
Improving your team’s marketing skills and utilizing AdWords management for your SEO needs is key. Search marketing plays a huge role in conversion in many markets.
You can also implement a survey on your company’s website
to evaluate if the people who came to your site found what they needed or if they have complaints and suggestions that can help you improve.
3. Product delivery pain points
After customers go through the remote purchasing process, most expect to have information about when they can expect their order. Here, confusing or non-existent tracking options can lead to cancellations and the loss of potential customers.
It is, therefore, important to be transparent in resolving these logistical pain points and to invest in the necessary infrastructure. Invest in the necessary infrastructure to be able to offer reasonable follow-up options. It is also important to use reliable delivery systems to avoid lost or damaged orders.
4. Multichannel shopping pain points
Delivering an omnichannel customer experience is imperative to achieve customer satisfaction today.
Companies that operate with multiple shopping channels, such as physical stores and online stores, must integrate these channels, as pain points occur when the different channels do not communicate, and customers have to repeat things.
To solve this type of problem, it is necessary to keep processes as streamlined as possible. There are many platforms that allow for seamless integration of multiple channels and provide omnichannel customer service, so this is another area in which it makes sense to invest.
How to identify customer pain points?
Clients experience pain in many ways but often don’t know how to tell you what that pain really is.
If you want to increase the popularity of your service or product and achieve customer satisfaction, you have to find out as soon as possible the pain points that can cause problems for your customers.
1. Identify your customers’ needs
The first step in identifying pain points correctly is to research your customers’ needs.
One of the most practical ways to achieve this is with the help of surveys, but above all, through the use of the right questions in your surveys.
At first glance, it may seem difficult to conduct satisfaction surveys, but it is worth the effort. After all, customers who have had a negative buying experience are more than willing to give feedback, and you should take advantage of this information. The trick is to ask questions that get your customers talking.
By applying surveys you will obtain quantifiable data that will help you get to know your audience better and offer them what they really need.
Keep in mind that identifying your customers’ pain points is an ongoing process, and the stronger your pain point identification system is, the easier it will be for you to address and resolve them.
Asking your customers open-ended questions is one of the best ways to understand pain points. Suppose you ask: “How often do you use our product or service?”. “Once a week,” “once a month,” “every 3 months,” and “almost never” are good multiple-choice answers to include. This provides your team with data to help improve your company’s marketing and operations.
You can also gather people in a room (physical/virtual) and have them talk; you can get minute details of the pain points they experience in their daily lives.
2. Research among your Sales Team
It is essential to constantly expand the customer base. If a product or service is not convincing, it may be because certain customer pain points have not been identified.
It may be, for example, a price that is too high, a lack of product features, a lack of support when using a service, etc.
So ask your sales team to do an analysis after every unsuccessful sales call. Analysis after each unsuccessful sales call. In doing so, they should look at the following data to find out more about your customer’s pain points:
- What problems do your customers have?
- What does the potential customer like/dislike about the product?
- Why did the potential customer decide not to purchase the product?
- What would convince the potential customer to choose the product?
- Did the potential customer compare our product with that of our competitors? If yes, what specific aspect has been compared?
In combination with post-sales surveys, you will be able to find out how to improve your product or service.
3. Read online comments
By reading your customers’ online comments, you can quickly identify their needs. It is especially interesting to read the comments about your product or service on social networks.
You can also consult customer review sites. The most important is the collection of their opinions. This step will give you a better idea of the pros and cons exposed and will help you analyze your competition from the perspective of a customer or prospect.
4. Analyze your Competition
Get an overview of what your competitors do and their business approach, as this will help you discover new prospects.
Performe competitive analysis. Check the websites, prices, and FAQs of your competitors. In this way, you will be able to quickly discover their weak points and optimize your product or service based on the information gathered.
For example, you can look up where your competitors rank in Google or what their relevant keywords are. This will give you an idea of their marketing strategy and help you identify what the customer is looking for to alleviate their pain points.
Attack your Consumers’ Pain Points!
Now that you know what they are and how to identify your customers’ pain points, it is time to start collecting key information to generate actions that will help you effectively remedy all the processes, situations, and weaknesses that generate dissatisfaction and loss of customers.
You can start by assessing whether you are providing the solutions your customers require with the help of our survey software QuestionPro, which has free tools for you to collect the data you need to alleviate customer pain from bad service or experience.
If you are looking for a complete solution that helps you to collect customer feedback on a permanent basis and through multiple channels, we invite you to also get to know QuestionPro CX, one of the best voice of customer systems according to Gartner’s ranking.
Listen to what your customers have to say! No doubt, by collecting their feedback, you will find valuable insights that will help you improve. Don’t miss this opportunity.
