The discovery of customer pain points can improve your business performance. Knowing how to navigate customer pain points effectively can positively impact your sales and business practices. By addressing pain points, a company can achieve more success, higher profits, and better customer relationships.
Every business exists to address specific problems that persist among the public. Those problems are a source of discomfort and pain for individuals experiencing them. Your company provides relief. Emphasize improving customer experience so that you can effectively fix the issues that customers face and grow your business.
What are customer pain points?
Customer pain points are problems that a customer or prospective customer faces when preparing to buy a product. Customer pain points are diverse and vary depending on the individual or business. A customer can choose not to make a purchase from your company for any number of reasons. Though the pain points differ, it is common to see them referred to in broad categories
The typical customer pain point categories are:
- Financial
- Support
- Productivity
- Process
Financial pain points refer to customer challenges about the amount they pay for a product or service. Is the service outside their budget range? Does the product match the customer’s expectations?
For instance, a customer may look to lower spending on their communications budget. They could consider purchasing a service from a VoIP app provider offering cheaper digital communications channels.
Support pain points often refer to the level of support a customer needs to complete their interaction with your business. The customer may need help on their way to purchasing a product. Without that crucial support, they opt not to buy. In this case, a prospect may want to buy your product but is lacking some critical information.
Productivity pain points refer to challenges a customer faces in terms of their efficiency. In a B2B setting, clients may want to improve their internal processes and use your solutions. In B2C, customers do not always have the patience to jump through hoops on their way to purchase and may decide not to buy.
Process pain points refer to problems a customer has with your buying process. That means prospects have less favorable experiences on their way to the checkout.
Why do customer pain points matter?
A business or entrepreneur takes pride in the products and services they offer to the public. They invest in solutions expected to be adopted with confidence, e.g., new app ideas. Customers will purchase and adopt those solutions addressing specific problems and improving their lives. Customer pain points lower the performance of products and services in the market.
These pain points have an impact on the traits customers perceive about your business. Trust is a crucial trait that makes or breaks a business. Customers feel more comfortable spending their money on a company they can trust. 92% of customers are more likely to buy a product after reading a trusted review. By addressing customer pain points, a business builds trust among consumers.
It can be challenging for a company to address customer pain points. Pain points can be difficult to diagnose, as quantitative data does not always provide insights into a customer’s mind. By correctly fixing pain points, your business can improve sales and business practices. The changes made can alter the way you handle marketing and sales, but most of all they enable you to build stronger customer relationships.
How to discover customer pain points
A company can improve its performance by addressing areas that are not quite right. No matter how successful a company is, it can improve some practices. A business will want to engage with its customers to get a fresh perspective on its operations. In probing customers, you can quickly uncover their sources of pain.
Here is a list of ways you can find customer pain points.
1. Conduct market research and gather data
According to the Hartford, “market research provides critical information about your market and your business landscape.” This information is useful when trying to position products or a brand in the market.
Market research can be valuable in discovering some pain points, too. Through research, you can uncover challenges customers face when interacting with you or other brands and products. Don’t limit yourself to data just from the sales and marketing department. Cross-team collaboration is key, so get support and product involved to get a holistic view of your data.
To address their problems, a company must know its prospects well. There are many tools available for harvesting valuable customer data.
Today, customers can interact with brands across multiple channels. Customers and prospects interact with a company on channels like social media, a website, email, and chat. You can run analytics tools to understand a customer’s experience or find what they search for.
A company can analyze its customer journey to enhance customer experience and improve their conversion rate in a B2B or B2C setting. Analytics software can be invaluable for discovering patterns and trends that can positively impact a company. The data informs the company on what is happening in their customer journey. Other forms of research will give that data more context.
2. Gather customer feedback
It is easier for a business to uncover customer pain points by opening a dialogue between customers and itself. With customer feedback, you can directly open a conversation on the quality of a product, service, or your business as a whole. Talk with and listen to your customers. Engaged customers will provide feedback that can give a fresh perspective on the company and help improve customer satisfaction rates.
Use short questionnaires and surveys to ask questions that will offer the most precise answers. With short but detailed questionnaires, a company can put itself in its customers’ shoes. Feedback allows marketers to understand the customer experience and uncover ways to improve it. Reviews are another great way to gather feedback from your customers.
Like questionnaires, review sections give extensive insights into a customer’s experience with your company or product. Customers can leave feedback about positive and negative aspects of their experiences. They can post reviews directly on the company website and external sites like Trustpilot. This information provides context to the actions customers take, and can uncover the pain points they face.
3. Gather customer support and sales feedback
Agents receive helpful feedback from their bosses. Bosses can also receive insights from agents. A company must provide proactive customer service driven by call center KPIs designed to address customers’ problems accordingly. Outward-facing employees are a valuable source in identifying customer pain points because they speak with customers all day. Sales agents use creative ways to encourage prospects to make purchases.
Sales agents assess the likelihood of a prospective customer purchasing a product before they act. No agent can achieve a hundred percent conversion rate. They can uncover reasons as to why a customer would opt not to buy from a company. Sales agents can ask customers directly or infer from conversations held.
Similarly, customer support agents interact with customers regularly. Support agents spend days addressing customer problems. Customer support agents can recognize potential issues prospective customers may face with your products. By having briefings and review sessions, sales and customer support agents can put forward pain points customers face. Thus, improving customer relationships and experience.
4. Research the competition
There is an abundance of companies looking to occupy the same spaces online. The internet has made every business local. As a result, competition can be high in various niche markets. To gain a competitive advantage over other companies, you can research them. Researching similar companies enables you to uncover ways a competitor addresses customer pain points.
Learn lessons from other successful businesses. You learn new tactics by comparing aspects of your company with other companies on the market. Online vendors may use Amazon to understand ecommerce 101, and improve their ecommerce processes. Different companies offer varying solutions to problems. Broaden your perspective of the issues customers face in the market and make progress.
5. Online resources
On the internet, you can find information about anything. It is easy to find information on any topic. Search through blogs, FAQs, case studies, and online forums to gather more information about your customers. Digital searches can lead to ideas that address a particular problem your business and customers face.
Thanks to analytics and marketing tools, you can find topics that your customers are searching for. A company must know what its target audience is doing, saying, researching, and wanting. You can improve your sales processes by learning this crucial information. Leverage online resources to quickly discover trends and adjust practices to match customer expectations.
How you can use customer pain points to improve sales and business practices
Within the categories mentioned above, there are many kinds of pain points that need addressing. By fixing customer problems, a company shows that it values them. It tells customers that you empathize and care about their experience, their challenges, and the trust that they put in your company.
Below, we suggest several ways to improve sales and business practices to improve customer engagement while addressing customer pain points.
Financial pain points
Customers need to feel secure, knowing that they are getting value for money with every purchase. Conduct extensive market research to position products suitably in the market. Products should be of good quality and justify their prices. Be transparent about the price of your product. You can provide an overall price inclusive of taxes and delivery or give an invoice highlighting the cost breakdown.
Avoid adding fees at checkout or making drastic price jumps on the product. Customers can feel secure when they purchase a high-quality product that will last. The sales team should always ask, “How can I get more deals?” and “Why am I losing deals?” Asking these questions while gathering customer feedback could uncover issues that can improve sales.
Support pain points
Customer support directly engages disgruntled customers. This department can improve customer experience because customers talk to support agents to relieve their pain points. Use the best digital customer service solutions which utilize RPA technology to improve response times and streamline customer problems to the relevant agents. By quickly addressing customer challenges, whether ones as simple as dropped calls during support or product complaints, you enhance the customer experience.
Some customers require support on their way to checkout. Those customers may need an agent to speak with them or guide them through the sales process. A company can aid the customer by adding chatbots to the company website. Chatbots recognize user intent and engage with customers. When they are unable to move forward, they connect the customer to an agent.
Productivity pain points
A customer may look for more efficient ways to interact with a company. These customers lose interest when their buying process faces roadblocks. In this scenario, a company will want to make the buying process as effortless and smooth as possible. Make use of hybrid working to improve the sales process at any time of day.
Use scheduling software to ensure there is always an agent available when a customer could need one. With hybrid working, some agents may operate from other geographic locations and in different time zones. Lower the number of steps it takes to checkout. Ask, “how can we save the customer time and improve customer experiences?” when considering ways to improve the sales processes.
Process pain points
In these instances, a company may directly hinder its sales due to inefficient business practices. A sub-optimal website can confuse customers and make them bounce. A company that only operates for a limited number of hours can see sales drift to a competitor that runs all day.
Use an omnichannel model to interact with customers on any platform, at any time. Shoppers that can engage with your brand on multiple devices and via several channels spend more money with a brand than shoppers that only use one.
Ensure that each platform delivers a consistently positive experience and customers will appreciate it. Ask the customers about the processes to find ways to improve your process library to make future interactions streamlined.
Final Words
It is challenging to uncover customer pain points, but a company must do so. Finding and addressing these pain points enhances customer experience and builds trust between the public and your company.
Every company should know extensive information about their customers. With that information, it is easier to improve sales and business practices. A company can portray itself as a solution to the problems the customers face. Use pain points to improve your company, and you will see an increase in business performance.
About the Author
Jenna Bunnell is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad, an AI-incorporated cloud-hosted, telephony integration and unified communications system that provides valuable call details for business owners and sales representatives. She is driven and passionate about communicating a brand’s design sensibility and visualizing how content can be presented in creative and comprehensive ways. Here is her LinkedIn.
