Customer pain points quickly become your team's main concern. Just ask your CSMs, who deal with these pain points on a daily basis. But, should they really be a concern?
What is a Customer Pain Point?
Customer pain points can be about anything - from product-related issues to customer service complaints.
They are hard to identify for two main reasons:
They are emotional (Wang, Miao, Zhao, Jin & Chen, 2016).
They can be real or perceived problems (Naredla, Raja, Ramesh & Condoor, 2018).
Joy for Entrepreneurs and Curse for Companies
Customers who experience a pain point will want a solution for it and If they can't find it with their current provider, they will look elsewhere.
Entrepreneurs identify customer pain points and build a product that will serve as the perfect solution.
With a new product, the company meets the customer's initial expectations and fills in the customer's psychological gap.
But that is not the end of the road for you.
Now you have a more complicated job - keeping your customers.
How to keep the momentum (and your customers)
Your product solves a major customer pain point, which is why customers are switching over.
The next step (or challenge) is to keep them.
Identifying your customers' pain points is the first step in the retention journey (Keogh, 2013).
It also sets your employees on the path to success.
Two Ways to Identify Pain Points
1. Qualitative Research
Identify pain points and value by reaching out to your customers and asking them about their experience.
Here are a few ways to do so:
Focus Groups.
Automated Surveys.
Email-Analysis: collect all of the emails sent by your customers to your Customer Support team and find out why they reach out in the first place.
2. User Activity Analysis
This analysis includes all of the user activities - from creating an account to logging in; from learning how to use your product to the “aha” moment.
This analysis allows you to see what customers experience and their pain points.
These would be the moments where your customers:
Get stuck on a page for too long without an action
Receive an error message
Leave your website after failing to do something
Two Tips for Handling Customer Pain Points
By solving pain points, you can boost customer satisfaction (and retention) and enhance your product attractiveness, which will bring more new leads.
1. Use the right language and empower your customers.
Encourage your team to see customer pain points are opportunities and show them how to make the most out of them by:
Using the customer’s language to make them feel like
They are being heard
You are on their side
Then, mention a few possible solutions and let the customer choose the right one - even if it is not the solution they were hoping for.
2. Cross-functional teamwork
The only way to truly solve customer pain points is by having multiple teams work together.
Bring in the developers, the Support Team, the Customer Success Team, and the Product Team, and have them work together on finding (and implementing) the right solutions for key customer pain points.
What are YOUR ways to identify and solve Customer Pain Points?
Resources:
Naredla, S. K., Raja Shekar, P. V., Ramesh Babu, D., & Condoor, S. (2018). Uniquely addressing customer pain points-The case study of AgRITEch app. International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Technology, 9(11), 2306-2314.
Wang, B., Miao, Y., Zhao, H., Jin, J., & Chen, Y. (2016). A biclustering-based method for market segmentation using customer pain points. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 47, 101-109.
Moon, H., Han, S. H., Chun, J., & Hong, S. W. (2016). A design process for a customer journey map: A case study on mobile services. Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries, 26(4), 501-514.
Keogh, G. L. (2013). The listing and categorization methods for simplifying the identification of customer pain points (Doctoral dissertation, Saint Louis University).