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Do you want happy customers who are loyal to your brand?With 54% of customers moving to a competitor after a single negative experience, addressing customer pain points is the way to go.
While identifying these issues may seem intuitive, assumptions can lead to repeated mistakes and disappointed customers. Therefore, it’s important to know where to look.
Welcome to a guide that will teach you how to solve customer pain points to smash sales targets and boost retention.
What are customer pain points?
Customer pain points are specific issues customers experience with a product or service. These issues range from minor hiccups like fiddly packaging to full-blown disasters that ruin brands in the long term.
Pain points arise when brands don't meet customers' needs, such as affordability, ease of use, and good value for money.
Customer requirements and pain points vary across industries, but you must meet them better than your competitors to retain business, reputation, and customers.
Why are customer pain points important?
You must tackle customer pain points to ensure a good customer experience. It's vital because even minor issues can build up to drive customers away from your brand.
While a single bad experience causes 54% of consumers to abandon a brand, multiple issues persuade 73% to switch to another provider.
Yet, the impact extends beyond just losing one customer. Unhappy customers often leave bad reviews, which puts off potential customers. If they post a poor review on social media, it could go viral and damage your reputation long-term.
Above all, pain points lead to lost sales, which disappoint managers and shareholders and also make a business unprofitable.
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What are the four types of customer pain points?
Understanding the categories pain points fall under helps you better identify the key problems for your customers.
However, keep in mind that each customer experiences these problems to different degrees depending on their own life, habits, fears, and challenges.
For example, a busy executive may struggle with productivity or time-related pain points.
On the other hand, a student with little spare money will be sensitive to financial pain points.
Financial pain points
Financial pain points spark questions like: Am I paying too much? Is this product worth the price? Can I afford this now that it costs more?
These pain points are more common for brands that advertise as budget options. However, if a brand increases prices, it can affect any customer.
Here are some common triggers for financial pain points:
- Sudden price increases in membership plans.
- Products that break and need frequent replacements.
- Added costs in the checkout total.
Process pain points
Process pain points occur when a business's internal processes are inefficient and affect the customer. They often make the company appear unprofessional and disorganized.
Process pain points include:
- Slow internal processes that result in out-of-date products or resources.
- A long-winded sales process.
- Unlabelled out-of-stock items.
Productivity pain points
Productivity pain points occur when a product is unexpectedly hard to use. This is often described as friction, which is anything that prevents a smooth flow when a customer uses the product.
These pain points result in customers wasting time trying to work the product or subpar results.
Busy customers and those who pay more for a better service are more likely to experience these pain points.
Many common problems cause friction, including:
- Vague product instructions.
- Creating a product that requires expertise.
- Product glitching or breaking products.
Support pain points
Support pain points arise when customers seek help before, during, or after a purchase.
Before and during the purchase, the problem may arise due to a sales assistant. Once the customer owns the product, it is likely a customer support problem.
Support pain points are the most influential.
When customers experience other pain points, they reach out to customer support for solutions.
This is when a top customer support response will solve the customer's problem and make them feel heard.
On the other hand, if the customer support team then lets them down, they experience two pain points one after another. This makes them likely to leave the brand.
Many problems can arise due to customer support staff, including:
- Misunderstanding a customer's problem or query.
- Over-engaging customers who simply want space.
- Brash, unpleasant support team members.
- Customer support failing to respond.
How to identify customer pain points
Brands need to understand their customers to identify their pain points. Yet, that can be difficult when just a few customers complain after a bad experience.
That's why brands must proactively identify pain points using the following methods.
Ask for customer feedback
Customers often have a good idea about their challenges with a product. Unfortunately, they rarely take the time to supply feedback.
Give back to those who do by offering perks, such as discount codes.
Before sending out a survey, decide which type of data you want to collect:
- Qualitative research: This type of research uses open-ended questions to provoke in-depth, detailed responses, which allows you to gain deeper insight into customers' challenges. These surveys take longer for customers to fill out, so you may need to offer stronger incentives.
- Quantitative research: By giving customers yes/no or sliding-scale answers, you can transform answers into numerical data and reports that identify trends and prioritize problems. It's essential to use standardized questions that are precisely the same for each customer and recorded consistently.
Study reviews
Check your customer reviews for common trends and phrases. If customers repeat the same complaints, it's likely a common pain point that you need to fix.
Analyze the number of poor to positive reviews, but remember that they tend to skew positive. Customers may encounter pain points they don't share in reviews, and many businesses find that reviews take extremes of either 1 or 4-5 star ratings.
If possible, access review sites with pros and cons. These platforms invite users who like your products to share what disappoints them, even if the review is positive, making a nuanced answer more likely.
In addition, search your brand name on social media sites such as Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok to understand the current conversations around your products and services.
Use analytics
Website analytics can help you understand pain points in the customer journey. These tools can identify where customers drop off during their journey.
In addition, many businesses, such as those providing subscriptions, can use data to analyze customer churn. This will tell you whether customers left your business due to an update or pricing change.
Ask support and sales teams
Your support and sales team will notice trends in customer complaints. Start by surveying them for their insights. Ask them:
- Which pain points arise often?
- When do they happen?
- How serious are they for the customer?
- How do you address these pain points?
While speaking to the entire team is beneficial, pay special attention to your best performers. Your high-performing sales and support team members will likely have the strongest customer understanding.
In addition, ask customer-facing team members to log data about customer pain points after every interaction. Include sections for key data, such as the pain points each customer noted, whether the customer left your business, and mention of competitor's products.
Consistent logging will help you understand trends without any bias.
Competitor analysis
Look at how your competitors market their products. Are they promoting them as solutions to specific pain points? Any benefits they highlight are clues to the pain points they hope to address. For example, if a product or a company promotes a product as "never tarnishing," it suggests that tarnishing is a common concern among consumers.
How to address customer pain points
Once you've identified the issues that deter customers, the next step is to prioritize them.
Consider which pain points impact your business the most. In addition, are there any quick wins or "low-hanging fruit" that you can resolve swiftly? Prioritizing these will help you make impactful changes fast. An organized list will help you combat problems more efficiently.
The following are the best ways to solve customer pain points.
Remove friction from the buying journey
Once you've pinpointed where customers exit the purchasing journey on your website, use that data to improve the user experience and generate more sales. This may mean removing steps from the checkout process or removing duplicated web pop-ups.
Alternatively, if your brand is offline, ensure that sales teams are friendly, understand the customer, and are accessible quickly.
Be honest about the product and price
Don't overpromise. While exaggerating the benefits of products or services may increase sales initially, it will cause problems later. This applies to promising better availability, wider ranges of services, or lower costs than possible.
The same goes for hidden checkout fees. These surprise costs disappoint customers and cause them to lose trust in a brand.
Overall, it's best to remain honest and clearly explain why your product is valuable.
Offer support documents, instructions, and FAQs
Most customers today want to be able to shop and use products independently. Keep them on board by making the entire customer journey intuitive and self-driven, even for complex products. This also removes friction and pressure on your customer support team.
Ensure the product is intuitive to use
Creating a great user experience is vital. Once you have found common issues with the product, inform design teams and engineers to iron out the difficulties. This will require multiple teams and departments to come together as it is more of a long-term strategy than quick fixes.
Enhance staff training
Ensure your customer support or sales team has an in-depth understanding of your product and customer's needs. Offer regular training to keep customer-facing teams delivering the best possible service.
Streamline processes
Many brands lack the customer service employees needed to provide an excellent customer experience. Yet, the cost of hiring and onboarding new staff is typically high.
Using a live chat can help.
It will automatically engage with customers on your website to direct them to relevant products, answer common questions, and start a chat thread that links to their preferred messaging platform.
They'll also free up agents' time by summarizing long messages and offering AI responses, allowing them to help more customers more effectively. In addition, live chats provide actionable analytics that help you improve your customer support to boost loyalty and sales.
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Five common pain point examples
One of the best ways to truly understand how to solve pain points is through examples. Here are five common customer pain points:
Financial pain point example
Pain point: A subscription service is increasing its fees from $7.99 to $10.99. While this may seem like a small increase, it actually ups the cost by 40% or $36 a year.
Solution: To solve this customer's pain point, the brand must clearly explain why it is increasing its costs and detail the improvements to its service. Alternatively, it should explore whether there is another way to increase profits.
Support pain point example
Pain point: A customer emails customer service after the company overcharges them for their product subscription. However, there aren't enough support staff, and the customer waits for over a week. Eventually, they call the company, but the support team places them on hold for over 30 minutes. Frustrated, they cancel the subscription.
Solution: Avoid this pain point with a well-trained and active customer support team. Alternatively, use tools like live chat to streamline customer service and send automated responses showing customers they are valued.
Process pain point example
Pain point: The marketing team emails customers to announce the company's release of a software update to fix common bugs the following week. The team informs customers before speaking to the software engineering team.
When the engineers hear about the announcement, they inform marketing that they can't meet the deadline due to other commitments, leaving customers disappointed.
Solution: Avoid this problem by enhancing internal processes, boosting team communication, and establishing clear pipelines.
Productivity pain point example
Pain point: A customer tries to set up a piece of flat-pack furniture. While the instructions are clear, they spend five hours making it rather than the suggested one hour. Despite liking the table, the customer doesn't want to buy more products from the company.
Solution: Solve customer pain points like this by remaining honest about the skills and time required to use a product.
Buying journey pain point example
Pain point: A customer finds a laptop that fits their requirements and budget, places it in the basket, and goes to checkout.
However, when the customer arrives at the checkout, the company charges an unexpected $10 packaging fee and a $20 postage fee. This frustrates the customer, and they exit the purchase.
Solution: This situation could have been avoided by clearly signaling on the product page that postage and packaging were extra costs.
Who should take on identifying customer pain points?
Who should work to pinpoint a pain point depends on where the problem arises:
- Sales teams spot pain points in the buying journey.
- Support teams notice challenges that come up while customers use the products.
- Marketing teams will know prospective customers' pain points and identify where they drop off in the buying journey.
These teams, along with UX, web development, and product design specialists, should collaborate to address problems. However, the marketing and sales teams will also benefit from understanding common customer pain points.
Using customer pain points in your marketing communication
Once you've uncovered and addressed key customer pain points, you can use them to level up your marketing.
While a customer pain point is negative for the customer support team, it is positive for marketers.
How does that work?
Often, a customer's pain points are similar to a prospect's. You can directly address prospective customers' hesitations by showcasing how your product or service has resolved these problems.
- Content creation: Develop blog posts, case studies, and videos that detail how your solutions overcome specific challenges.
- Landing pages: Design landing pages that specifically mention how your product addresses and resolves pain points. Using clear, problem-solution-driven messaging that resonates with your target audience convinces potential customers of your product's value.
- Targeted communications: Design your email marketing and social media campaigns to emphasize how switching to your service or product will rid them of pain points your competitor's products cause.
Ensure customer satisfaction every time
Addressing customer pain points is not just about solving immediate problems—it's a strategy to demonstrate your long-term value and boost sales.
Don't let another customer slip away due to unaddressed pain points!
Using a tool like LiveChat makes providing empathetic and effective customer support easy.
In addition, it provides insights and analytics that help you spot trends and understand customer behaviors without needing a data analyst.
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