How to Find Customers’ Pain Points

To truly be able to meet a customer’s needs, you have to identify their pain points, and no matter who your customer is, they have some. Knowing what your customers struggle with on a daily basis can help you structure your sales pitch and articulate the value of your solution. Here are a few ways a company can identify their customers’ pain points and solve them permanently. 

Ways to Pinpoint Customers’ Pain Points

When starting a new business, it’s vital to identify customers’ pain points, their unmet needs and challenges to tailor a solution around it. Here we’ve listed 11 proven methods to identify customers’ pain points. 

Ask the Right Questions

Different customers may experience different pain points depending on their industries. The types of questions you can ask customers will vary by business, industry, and individual. Reach out to your target audience through different ways to learn how they feel about your products or services, website and brand.

Conduct Customer Surveys

Conduct surveys to discover customers’ pain points and encourage them to share their feedback on how you can improve your products or services. Post the surveys on both your social media page and website to gather insights from your customers. Send out the survey at regular intervals to track your progress on resolving pain points and new issues.

Listen Actively

To understand your customers’ pain points, you can get the data by interacting with them through different methods. The more you engage with your customers and show you care about their problems, the more they will be willing to share.

Find the Common Problems

While certain problems are unique to specific customers, many are universal. Once you identify the common pain points, adjust your marketing strategies and re-evaluate your product offerings to address those issues. 

Analyze Your Social Media Channels

Your social media channels and groups can help you understand the issues that customers experience with your products or services. Also, check your competitors’ social media profiles to see the pain points they address and how they improve customers’ overall experience.

Map Out the Customer Journey

Analyze the entire customer life cycle to understand every touchpoint in their end-to-end journey from brand awareness to post-purchase. Thus, you can identify customers’ pain points faster and capture their problems encountered at each touchpoint.

Assess Your Customer Personas

Check out your customer personas regularly to create products or services that improve their lives and solve their problems. You may need multiple customer personas, such as industry, job title, location and interests, to identify their needs and pain points.

Notice Shifts in Purchasing Patterns

Trends in customer demands tend to develop slowly. You can track these shifts with the help of your sales and marketing, and customer service team. Discuss their new observations about the market and customers’ demands or concerns regularly. They can collect customers’ feedback and suggestion to provide you the following valuable insight:

• Customers’ interests, needs and pain points
• What prevents people from signing
• The most frequent complaints your customer service team receives

Focus on Your Customers’ Needs

Prioritizing the customers’ needs will help you iron out their pain points. Find out what motivates them to buy, what sales practices drive them away, and what they expect from your company. Provide customers with content that emphasize how your product or services can solve their problems.

Ask Open-Ended Questions

Asking open-ended questions during the customer satisfaction survey can surely elicit more insights than closed-ended questions. Answers to open-ended questions can help you learn what your customers feel, smooth out the customer journey and gain customer loyalty.

Collect Feedback Regularly

Collecting customers’ feedback will allow you to quickly spot arising patterns or trends in the issues they face and tailor your business to serve their needs and improve their experience.

What You Should Do Once You Identify Pain Points 

Identifying and addressing customer pain points is an ongoing process. Once you have identified your customer pain points perform the following steps to address them in future products or services.

Step 1: Prioritize Customers’ Pain Point

Since you can’t solve all customer pain points straight away due to factors, such as time, money and resources, you must prioritize resolving them. Prioritizing your pain points will allow you to focus on those that can have the most impact on your organization. 

Step 2: Utilize Customers’ Information 

Utilize the data you collect from your customers’ online actions and surveys to identify specific user personas. Then leverage this information to update your marketing tactics with the customers’ ever-changing needs. Now refine and cater your content according to the user behavior and needs. 

Step 3: Create a Solution around the Pain Point

After learning about your customers’ pain points, integrate these insights into your business’ processes and tailor your solution around it. This way, you can smooth out the rough parts of a customer journey, build loyalty, decrease customer churn and increase customer satisfaction.

Step 4: Improve Customer Support

Create an effective customer support system, including a detailed FAQ page and an automated chatbot on your website to answer customer queries, address their concerns and provide them 24/7 support.

Step 5: Eliminate Unnecessary Steps to Complete a Purchase

Share the collected customers’ information with your sales team to help them pitch new customers. Once a customer purchases from you, share complete purchase and customer details with your customer service representatives to provide better customer support. By keeping your sales team, customers and customer support team on the same page you can eliminate unnecessary steps to complete a purchase.

Step 6: Eliminate Gaps between Devices

Provide an omnichannel experience to your customers so that they can have a seamless transition between their devices without having to re-enter information or search for what they saved somewhere else.

Step 7: Make your Customers Aware of the Changes

After solving the pain points, ensure that you make your customers aware of the changes. Also, inform them of the steps you are taking to improve their experience. It will prevent unsatisfied customers from switching to competitors. 

A Few Common Pain Points and Ways to Address Them

By solving customers’ pain points, you can influence the driving force behind their decision to purchase your product or service. Here are a few common pain points and ways to solve them.

Financial

– Customers with budget issues feel that they are paying too much for a product or service, so they look for a low-cost alternative. High delivery charges or hidden costs can also bother customers. 

How to solve: Provide something similar to what customers are currently using at a lower price or without additional costs and fees. 

Process

– Inefficiencies and redundancies in processes may increase the time and effort required to put a new solution in place. Customers get troubled with such a complicated or unnecessary process and look for something to make their lives easier.

How to solve: You can solve process pain points by offering consumers a product or service that can simplify the process or make the most of their time. Use case studies and statistics to illustrate how your solution can streamline tasks.

Productivity

– Consumers with productivity pain points feel less productive due to their current product or process or lack of a product.

How to solve: Provide customers with a solution (a product or service) that is more efficient and productive.

Customer Service Channels

– If your website is hard to navigate or your IVR (interactive voice response) fails to route customers correctly, shoppers can abandon their purchases due to such issues.

How to solve: You can offer various options for seamless customer communication, such as WhatsApp, live chat, chatbots, and quick online forms.

Assistance

– Customers avoid visiting retail stores with long checkout lines, depleted inventory, unhelpful or uninformed staff, and long wait times for customer support. Also, if customers don’t receive good service after purchase, they may switch the brand next time.

How to solve: Place a clear call-to-action on every page and train your employees on how to guide customers. Offer scan-and-pay and other online payment methods at your retail stores to avoid long wait times.

Insufficient or Inaccurate Information

– If your customer service department provides incomplete or wrong information or makes customers wait for an answer, you may lose a sale. 

How to solve: Designate someone to handle inquiries and train that person or team in best practices of solving customer situations. Ensure your entire knowledge base is up-to-date, including your FAQs, video tutorials, articles, IVR, mobile app, online forum and chatbot.