Customer pain points are a specific problem that customers or prospective customers of your business are experiencing in the marketplace.
People don’t buy a product or service just because it’s cheap or has flashy features. While these reasons might contribute to their purchase decision, they ultimately purchase a product or service because it solves a problem.
There are the four main types of pain point:
a. Financial Pain Points
Financial pain points are areas where prospective customers are spending too much money with their current providers or products and want to cut back on their spending. Put simply, financial pain points are the problems customers face that involves money.
Here are some examples of financial point points:
🠊 Expensive subscription plans or membership fees.
🠊 Low-quality products that will need to be replaced frequently.
🠊 Fees added on to at the checkout.
🠊 Lack of transparency about the final price.
🠊 Fees dramatically jumping up after a certain time period.
b. Productivity Pain Points
This category encompasses all pain points where the customer wants to be more efficient or wants a more streamlined experience when dealing with companies. These customers want to make the most of their time so anything that adds redundancy to the buying process will cause them frustration.
You can reduce redundancy and friction within your buying process by implementing things like fewer steps in the checkout process and using intelligent agent routing for customer service. Additionally, you need to offer products that attract customers that want to be more productive. When it comes to the products you offer you want to focus on the following characteristics if you want to solve productivity pain points:
🠊 Optimizing Productivity: How can your product help your customers use their time efficiently? According to a survey, the average employee is interrupted from their work 56 times a day. If you can tell your prospective customers how your product will make them more productive and give them a boost of focus, then you’ll appeal to these buyers.
🠊 Increase Comfort: The more positive the experience the customer has with your product, the more likely they are to use it. For customers who are particularly prone to productivity pain points, comfort can be another way to increase their productivity. After all, you’re more productive when you’re happy and comfortable with what you’re doing or using.
🠊 Convenience: Customers often favour something easy and convenient over something cheaper but less convenient.
Customers' productivity pain points may not be a top focus for all business, and it will depend on what products and services you offer. If you offer software for work or home use, then increased productivity is probably a key feature of your product. However, if you sell shoes, then it might be a stretch to say a new pair of shoes will make you more productive and give you more time to spend with your family.
c. Process Pain Points
Process pain points are areas where your business is creating friction or pain for buyers due to sub-optimal processes. Sometimes this might be something easy to identify such as your call center is only open for 8 hours a day, or customers have to trawl through lots of pages on your website just to get to the information they need. Customers love convenience so they will switch to another brand if they find the buying process too difficult with your company. In fact, around 75% of people are likely to switch brands if they find the purchasing process too difficult.
d. Support Pain Points
Support pain points are areas where your customers aren’t receiving assistance during the buying process. If a customer can’t find an answer to a pressing question either on your website or by getting a timely response from customer service, they will go elsewhere.
Viewing customer pain points in these categories allows you to start thinking about how to position your company or product as a solution to your prospects’ problems. For example, if your prospects’ pain points are primarily financial, you could highlight the features of your product within the context of a lower monthly subscription plan, or emphasize the increased ROI your satisfied customers experience after becoming a client.
Although many of your prospects are likely experiencing the same or similar pain points, the root cause of these pain points can be as diverse as your clientele. That’s why qualitative research is a fundamental part of identifying customer pain points. Qualitative research focuses on detailed responses from customers where they have the opportunity to explain their problems in full. This contrasts with quantitative market research which focuses on standardized questions and answers or a 1-10 scoring system.
The reason you need to conduct qualitative research is because your customers’ pain points are highly subjective. Even if two customers have exactly the same problem, the underlying causes of that problem could differ greatly from one customer to another.
Albeit you know your business inside out and you know what you offer the customer. However, you may be totally unaware of a pain point your business is able to resolve but that you’ve never even considered. If you’ve never considered this pain point, then it’s probably not included in your questions for customers. This is why qualitative research is so powerful. You have the opportunity to ask open-ended questions where the customer can go into as much detail as they like.
There are two primary sources of the information you need to identify your customers’ pain points – your customers themselves, and your sales and support teams. Let’s take a look at how to get the information you need from your customers first.
🠊 You need to organise an event, in which invite your customers to spend some time at your office or shop to share their experiences whether good and bad with you openly and honestly.
🠊 Every time a customer who has made a purchase communicates with a representative of your company, ask them to provide some feedback.
🠊 Sending out email or hosting online surveys.
You learned things about your customers’ problems that even the most detailed questionnaire could never unearth, and it gave you the opportunity to discuss those issues within the context of wider problems that your customers are experiencing. This gave you a remarkably detailed view of your customers’ pain points.
Ask questions like these:
√ What annoys you about…?
√ If you could change one thing about… What would it be?
√ What do you think is the most difficult part of…?
√ Where do we have room to improve?
√ What can we do better?
√ Have you had any negative experiences with…?
√ If you were CEO for a day, what changes would you make?
You can encourage responses by offering something in exchange, such as a 20% off discount voucher or chance to win an attractive prize.
This research will help you stay in tune with their needs, analyze what currently annoys them about your products or services, what they would like to see changes, and which aspects attract them to your product the most.
Your customer service and sales teams are on the front line of your business talking to customers every day. This makes them invaluable sources of information when it comes to customer pain points. However, it’s important that your agents understand the difference between their pain points and the customer’s pain points.
As a business owner/marketer, you need to sit with the sales team and ask them the following questions:
🠊 What are the questions that you repeatedly hear from your customers?
🠊 Why do they refuse to buy our products/services?
🠊 What solutions do they need?
🠊 What’s the strategy you followed to close the deal?
🠊 What would be your answer if I would ask you to jot down 5 core pain points of our prospects?
Agents may get feedback from customers like “I liked your product when I bought it last but it’s far too expensive without a discount, so I went with a different company this time”. Or “I was surprised to see extra charges added on at the checkout that I wasn’t expecting so I don’t want to buy from you again”. These would be examples of financial pain points and represent an area of your business where you may be missing out on significant profits by turning customers away with your practices.
Let’s take a look at the pain points we identified, and see how we could address them in our marketing:
➤ Financial: Emphasize lower price point (if applicable), highlight the average savings of your client base, use language that reiterates better ROI.
➤ Productivity: Highlight reductions in wasted time experienced by current customers, emphasize ease-of-use features such as at-a-glance overviews or a centralized dashboard.
➤ Processes: Mention current/planned integrations with existing products/services, highlight how your product/service can make typically difficult/time-intensive tasks easier.
➤ Support: Help the prospect feel like a partner by highlighting your after-market support, use connecting language (“us,” “we” etc.) in your copy.
c. Online Reviews
eCommerce marketplaces and social media sites have become the place for many customers to vent their anger and complain about a product or service. It’s worth paying attention to these reviews and also common feedback about your niche, as these can provide valuable insights in which help to ascertain the frustrating pain points in your niche.
➤ Solve the Customers' Pain Points
Once you’ve identified a customer pain point, then it’s time to come up with a plan on how to resolve it. The solution will vary greatly depending on what the customer’s pain point is and what your company can offer in terms of a solution.
For example, you may identify a “confusing and hard to navigate customer service channels” as a customer pain point. Plenty of consumers will abandon their purchase if they can’t find a quick answer to their question online. They may have searched your website and been unable to find an answer. They may have gone on your Contact Us page only to find that they have to send an email that will only get them a response within 5 working days. Or maybe they have to call customer service, but the times are too restrictive, or they simply don’t want to because it’s not their preferred method of communication.
You choose to switch to an omnichannel platform with a more flexible and well-rounded approach to customer communications. By this you may offer a range of customer communication options that suit a range of preferences such as Chatbots, Live Chat, WhatsApp, Calls, Contact Field Forms, and emails. Chatbots work 24/7 so you can now help customers with any pressing questions they have in the moment.
Next, it’s crucial to make sure your customers understand that you solve this pain point. Your marketing material should include information about how available your company is for communication and the range of options you offer.
➤ Make Use of Social Validation
Social validation is crucial when using customer pain points in your marketing; word-of-mouth recommendations and user reviews become much more persuasive when a prospect already believes your product or service could make their life better.
That’s why you should be using customer testimonials and other social validation tools in your marketing. A great review or glowing testimonial can sell your product far more effectively than even the most silver-tongued salesperson.
➤ Continuous Analysis of Customers' Pain Points
It’s also worth noting that pain points are something that needs to be continually considered and reviewed. Customer pain points evolve over time as their expectations of the market shift. As one pain point is eliminated, another one takes its place. For instance, when Henry Ford began manufacturing automobiles, the automobile solved the pain of slow travel. Once the initial problem was solved, more small business pain points had to be solved. Bad roads created a bumpy ride for drivers, but Ford did not have the ability to fix roads. Better tires and shock absorbers, innovations that came from other industries, eventually solved the bumpy ride.
Identifying customers' pain points and offering a solution to them offers a range of benefits for your business. You will attract new customers who are tired of dealing with the pains and frustrations they are experiencing with your competitors. You will be able to convince previous or one-time customers to come back to your business by letting them know how you’ve improved. You’re also more likely to retain the customers you already have as you continually improve their experience with an excellent service.
The customers' pain points help a business innovate solutions, expand their business offerings and move the business in a new direction. Consumers now care more about receiving an excellent service that exceeds their expectations and is frictionless from start to finish than they ever have in the past.
Edited by: 浪子
Bibliography
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Sayantan Sen. (n.d.). A Definitive Guide to Finding Customer Pain Points. Retrieved from https://surveysparrow.com/blog/guide-finding-customer-pain-points/
Matt Goldman. (n.d.). Pain Points Offer Business an Opportunity to Innovate and Expand. Retrieved from https://www.tenfold.com/sales-leadership/pain-points/
Jared Cornell. (2019.) Customer Pain Points: What They Are, How to Find Them and What to Do With Them. Retrieved from https://www.wordtracker.com/blog/marketing/customer-pain-points-what-they-are-how-to-find-them-and-what-to-do-with-them
Helen Holovach. (2020). How to Determine Your Customer’s Pain Points. Retrieved from https://snov.io/blog/how-to-determine-your-customers-pain-points/
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Customers' Pain Points Are Your Business Opportunities
Reviewed by 浪子
on
April 23, 2020
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Reviewed by 浪子
on
April 23, 2020
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