When you own a business, it’s crucial for you to understand customer pain points. You may be thinking, “how is it my concern?” Well, wouldn’t you want to know what can potentially improve your brand and its relationship with your consumers? If you do then read on and let’s go through everything you need to know about customer pain points.
Source: Freepik
Surely, all businesses want to aim at providing excellent products or services. Therefore, knowing, understanding and learning from customer pain points play an important role, especially when your business thrives on how consumers feel about you. It’s not just about solving problems that are only on the surface but it takes a deep look into emotional difficulties and practical challenges that customers face. Thus, we’ll start with:
What Are Customer Pain Points?
Customer pain points involve the issues or concerns people face when they interact with either your products, services or processes. As mentioned, it’s not just about the problems you see on the surface. They include emotional discomforts, inconveniences or even tiny annoyances that occur. As an example, when a consumer receives the wrong product from an online order, it doesn’t just mean they got the wrong item. It also includes confusion, annoyance, frustration and the fact that they’d have to deal with customer service due to the error is also an inconvenience. Let’s give you another example and break it down into points.
Diving A Little Deeper
Situation: The air-conditioner in my house shuts down even when it’s still new, but that’s not the point. I also experience:
Discomfort: Now it’s hot, and I’m getting sweaty and uncomfortable.
Inconvenience: I have to seek alternate solutions to my discomfort.
Frustration: Having to deal with an unexpected problem.
Financial Concerns: Now I’m worrying about the costs to fix this problem.
Now that is a customer pain point. Understanding these concerns and putting in the effort to fix them or improve will not only positively affect your brand but it’ll also make your customers happy, leading to improved customer retention and attract new customers.
Why it is Important to Identify Customer Problems
Aside from the aforementioned improvements for your business, understanding customer pain points allows you to understand your target audience better. You’ll be able to learn their purchase motivations and cater to them better. Plus, showing your target audience that you are constantly improving will tell them that your brand puts in the effort to meet their needs. All this contributes to your brand’s perceived value, customer loyalty and customer retention.
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Types of Customer Pain Points
Financial Pain Points: As its name suggests, this is basically when a customer feels as if they are spending too much money on any product or service. This includes, high subscription fees, hidden fees or high shipping fees, low quality products that need to be repurchased often and so on. They’d feel like they’re wasting money instead of making it worth the purchase.
Source: Freepik
Productivity Pain Points: This goes hand-in-hand with the efficiency of a product, service or process. Whether it be ineffective operating systems, long processes and manual work or whatever inconveniences the customer’s time or life in general.
Process Pain Points: Whether your customer struggles to find any additional information about your business, product and services or need to sit through an hour-long demo to be able to use a product, then there’s your process pain point. Similar to productivity pain points, it’s simply redundant or takes up too much time.
Support Pain Points: This one is pretty direct as well, it’s when customers aren’t receiving or are struggling to receive the help and support they need from a business when they’re facing issues. This could easily deter them and push them towards your competitors with better support systems.
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How to Identify Customer Pain Points
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Do Customer Surveys
Prepare and conduct surveys or testimonials to learn about your strengths and weaknesses. Remember, weaknesses don’t matter as long as you are putting in the effort to improve.
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Analyze The Feedback
As mentioned before, keep an eye on how consumers react to your brand and what you offer. This may be through any platform on social media or newsletters.
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Customer Interviews
When you’re directly communicating with your consumers, they can better explain their pain points and you can better understand them as well!
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Competitor Analysis
Ever heard of “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”? Well, getting to know your competitors will not only give you insights into what they offer, you can find out what pain points they cause as well to give yourself a competitive edge.
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Customer Support Interactions
Analyse and review any, or better yet all, interactions, inquiries, frequently-asked questions, so on and so forth to better pinpoint customer pain points and possibly satisfy a general need.
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Empathy Mapping
Develop empathy maps to understand customer emotions and motivations. This visual tool helps identify pain points related to feelings and experiences.
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Observational Research
Observe and watch customers in action, either in real-world situations or while they interact with a product or service.
Wrap-Up
To sum it up, as a business owner, you should always look out for customer pain points, dissect them and improve based on those analyzed pain points. Whether it’d be through surveys or simply keep an eye on how consumers react to your product, service or process. Plus, improving your business is always a good thing and effort should be poured in, no?
However, if you’re having trouble finding those customer pain points, our seasoned experts are always ready to analyze your brand and target audience. Just give us a call! We’ve got your back.