Of all the prospects who convert into leads, only around 10-15% go on to actually make a purchase. There are several issues on the customer journey—from cost to convenience to points of contact—that can cause someone to decide against buying.
Customer pain points can be specific problems with a product or service, or unmet needs waiting to be fulfilled. If you know how to identify customer pain points and address them effectively, you won’t just turn more of your leads into customers—you could start capturing your competition’s would-be buyers too.
Table Of Contents
Types Of Customer Pain Points
Before you learn how to identify customer pain points, you need to understand how they are classified. This way, it’ll be easier to know where to start looking and even form a skeleton of how to deal with them. There are four main categories of customer pain points.
Process Pain Points
Process pain points are issues in the internal processes through which a business interacts with prospects. These refer to cases in which it takes too long to get a response, causing people to lose interest.
Customer pain points examples:
- Complications in submitting an application
- Ineffective communication between teams
- Difficulty in connecting to the right department
Financial Pain Points
Financial pain points come from the customers’ desire to reduce the money they’re spending on a product/service. It can also be the financial strain from using a product over time.
Customer pain points examples:
- Expensive subscription plan or membership fee
- Overpaying for equipment, software, or tools
Support Pain Points
Support pain points arise from a business’ failure to help consumers with their product-related queries throughout the customer journey. Simply put, they concern the customer support services of your business.
Customer pain points examples:
- Delayed response to a customer support ticket
- Lack of product knowledge of sales rep
- Customer’s preferred support channel is not available
Productivity Pain Points
Productivity pain points are caused by the customers’ unfulfilled need for a more efficient or streamlined experience in using their current product/service. As much as possible, they want to maximize the efficiency of their purchase or have a more productive experience in buying it.
Customer pain points examples:
- Redundancies or friction in buying processes
- Ineffective operation of product/service acquired
Identifying Customer Pain Points
Looking into your customer experience can help you identify customer pain points. While many prospects are likely to experience the same or similar customer pain points, you need to look into the root of the problem to solve it properly.
Here’s how to identify customer pain points:
Conduct Research And Surveys
A reliable way to pinpoint target audience pain points is by conducting studies to get customer feedback in detail. You can use different methods such as:
- Qualitative market research – generates in-depth, individualized responses from customers by asking open-ended questions about their experiences. This method is preferred in identifying business problems since customer pain points are highly subjective.
- Quantitative market research – generates numerical data from customers by asking standardized questions, usually answered by yes or no or a 1-10 scoring system. While it’s an easier way to get information from your customers, especially for topics with gray areas, it can be too restrictive to find detailed customer pain points.
- Online surveys – generate specific information from current and potential customers by asking targeted questions through online platforms. You can use platforms such as Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or WPForms’ survey add-on. They are cost-effective and easy to use in proportion to their strong response rates.
Keep in mind that asking the right questions will give you answers and insights from your customers. It’s also important that you keep them simple enough to encourage people to submit their responses, especially those who hate filling up forms.
Practice Social Listening
Ultimately, whether you can close a deal or not is up to your customers. This means you should always be open to what they have to say. You have to understand where they’re coming from to relate your business to them better.
Social listening is the process of monitoring and analyzing customer feedback, any direct mentions of your brand, or discussions about relevant topics on social media to find areas of improvement. It’s a useful tactic to enhance your customer experience while also reinforcing it through the use of brand identity and personality.
Since you get access to your target audience’s sentiments, experiences, and expectations, you can find customer pain points easily. Listening to your customers is not just a vital factor in how to identify customer pain points but also shows people that you do care about them.
Collecting feedback and online resources like industry benchmarks and relevant studies also allows you to identify patterns and trends to better understand the cause of customer pain points. With it, you can tailor your business to meet their needs and create content relevant to their interests.
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Check-In With Your Sales, Marketing, And Support Teams
Your teams should collaborate with each other to gain a holistic understanding of customer pain points. Keeping in touch with the sales, marketing, and support teams can help properly categorize customer pain points, as well as identify which team is most suitable to address them.
Aligning sales and marketing data can create a unified operation and integrated approach to streamline common pain points. On the other hand, the support team can facilitate different methods of collecting customer feedback.
For example, your support team can set up a live chat feature for your customers. It is a great way to quickly determine customer demands and issues, as well as try to offer timely solutions for customer pain points.
The marketing team can expound on the resolution by publishing useful and engaging content related to customer queries. Moreover, the sales team can address these pain points head-on while reinforcing why your product or service can solve these.
Resolving Customer Pain Points
The main point of learning how to identify customer pain points is to effectively solve them so customers are more inclined to buy from your business than other competitors.
Focus On Common Pain Points
In the course of identifying customer pain points, you’ll come across issues shared by many customers. Some common customer pain points examples are complicated purchasing processes, delayed support response, and rude customer service reps.
Starting with these common pain points allows you to improve your customer experience with minimal effort and cost. For example, you can research what customers perceive as offensive and develop a customer support dialogue using positive scripting. You can also train your CSRs to handle tricky situations using escalation management.
Resolving common pain points first also allows you to provide a more personalized customer journey. With minor issues resolved, you have more time to focus on more specific and substantial issues your customers want to be solved.
Provide Omnichannel Communication
The faster you identify customer pain points, the faster you can provide a solution. Omnichannel communication, which uses different platforms like social media and web pages, makes it easier for customers to reach you.
Automate internal processes to improve productivity and efficiency and reduce costs. A unified dashboard can give you a comprehensive view of customer data that can help your sales, marketing, and support teams to collaborate better. This way, your business can deliver a consistent and customized experience across various touch points.
Educate Customers On Your Solution
Of course, identifying and addressing customer pain points without effectively communicating how you’re going to solve them won’t lead to a sale. So, you have to show your customers that you understand their problems and you want to help them solve these.
To do so, use the same language your prospects use when talking about their pain points. This psychological technique makes the conversation feel more genuine and human which shows that you take them seriously.
Moreover, you can utilize your knowledge about customer pain points by tailoring your solution to their needs. This can be done by making your sales pitch more personable, offering product training, and emphasizing the strengths of your product in making their lives easier.
You can also educate your customers through blog content with topics relevant to their pain points. Showing different case studies, reviews, and feedback from other customers as social proof can also provide hands-on accounts of how your product solves your target audience’s pain points.
Tackle Customer Pain Points With A Magic Assistant
Knowing how to identify customer pain points and providing effective resolutions for them will make you stand out from the competition. While there are many common pain points, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy to address them so it’s important to get to the root of the problem and deliver a personalized solution.
Hiring a Magic Assistant to gather and analyze customer data can speed up the process of identifying common pain points. Magic provides a hassle-free process to delegate business tasks to college-educated remote workers so you can focus on what matters most.
A Magic Assistant can perform research work and data mining to identify customer pain points. They can also assist your sales, marketing, and support teams in implementing strategies to resolve these pain points. Additionally, they can act as the bridge for all departments for better collaboration and project management.
Book a discovery call now and find out how Magic can help you scale your business.
