This joke is funny for everyone except customer support managers and executives. Even the mention of a single wrong churn brings nightmares to stakeholders. The only thing worse than a leaving customer is a customer who leaves without feedback. When a customer leaves without telling the brand why they’re leaving, a lot of things are lost:
- You lose a customer.
- You lose all the efforts and resources to retain that particular customer.
- They leave you without giving feedback which means there’s a loophole in your support that you’re unaware of. And guess what? Maybe you’ll never find it!
Scary, isn’t it?
In the land of customer service, we often hear and talk about the importance of finding customers’ “pain points.” Brands should know the specific problems that businesses face every day and issues that they may encounter while interacting with your brand. When you truly understand your customer’s pain points, you will better know how to position yourself. You’ll know how to communicate the unique benefits you can offer through your services.
However, discovering customers’ most pressing pain points is easier said than done. But it doesn’t have to be (and isn’t) as hard as you might think. So, if you’re wondering where to start, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the concept of customer pain points, how to find them out and what to do to overcome them. So, if you too have that intense need to find a rational solution to this problem, tag along! I’ll talk about:
What Happens When Customer Pain Points are Not Addressed?
So what happens when brands fail to understand customer pain points? Here’s what:
Top Side Effects of Bad Customer Service:
- A Damaged Reputation
- Leads Don’t Convert
- Your Customer Lifetime Value Drops
- You Lose Your Best Employees
- You Enter a Profit-Sucking Cycle
Customer support is arguably the most important thing for any business. Brands need to get it right! Excellent customer service is not just to entice customers, but it can overcome poor marketing, faults in your services, and loopholes in your support.
OTOH, it is incredibly difficult (nearly impossible) to replace bad customer support with even the most exceptional, delightful marketing. Of course, “good customer support” is often up for interpretation. It is normal for small mistakes to happen that are impossible to deal with. These mistakes are usually small bumps in the road and don’t constitute bad customer support. Following situations, however, are usually considered universally unacceptable:
- Poor attention to detail
- Long wait times and response times
- Support reps with a lack of experience and knowledge
- Unempathetic and impersonal interactions
Brands guilty of these traits often face negative consequences. Many of these are difficult to overcome and can lead to the company’s failure. The good news is that even the worst customer service habits can be corrected without detrimental damage to your brand. This can happen if you take action quickly. Here’s a quick analysis:
What Are Customer Pain Points?
Customer pain point is a specific problem that your current customer or prospective customers experience. Just think of customer pain points as problems, plain and simple. Like any problem, customer pain points are diverse and varied as your customers. However, not all customers will be aware of the pain point they’re experiencing. This can make marketing to these individuals difficult as you effectively have to help them realize the problem and convince them that your support team is capable of helping them solve it. You can think of customer pain points as simple problems, but they’re often grouped into several categories. Here are the four main types of customer pain points:
Types of Customer Pain Points
Four Types of Customer Pain Points
1. Financial Pain Points
Financial pain points mean that your customers are spending a large amount of money on their current business, which ends up with financial strain.
2. Productivity Pain Points
Sometimes prospective customers waste too much time using their current provider/solution and want to use their time more efficiently. Customers want to make the most of their time to avoid frustration. Some examples of productivity pain points are:
- Inconvenience in using the product
- Redundancy and friction in the buying process
Potential Solution
As a brand, you can convince your customers that your product is the key to saving their time and effort. Use product descriptions that explain how your product helps them practically.
3. Process Pain Points
It refers to how businesses interact with customers by choosing different methodologies and processes. This includes your customers wanting to improve their internal processes (like assigning leads to sales reps or nurturing low-priority leads.) These pain points include:
- Connecting to the right department
- Application submission
Potential Solution
Make sure that your team meets customer queries faster and persuades your prospects that your products/services are easier to use.
4. Support Pain Points
Customer support is one of the most important business functions. If customer support of any brand is improper, most of the crucial areas will be impacted. Your customers will not receive the support they need at critical stages of their journey. These queries would generally be product-related, and most of these customers will expect a prompt response. Some common support issues are:
- Late responses
- Lack of product knowledge
- The customer’s preferred channel of communication is not available
If not addressed correctly, support pain points impact customer retention and loyalty to a larger extent.
Potential Solution
One of the best ways to overcome this particular pain point is to help them in real-time with tools like live chat, co-browsing, and AI chatbots. Lastly, use the latest support tools and keep up with the trends.
See the situation from your customer’s perspective. DeskXpand’s customer support software can help you.
How to Identify Customer Pain Points?
Identifying customer pain points are so crucial. Conducting an analysis is an essential stage for any business to improve the experience of different types of customers.
Here are some proven ways to figure out customer pain points:
I. Don’t Make It Complicated: Ask Them
Discovering customer pain points is not all that complex. After all, if a friend was feeling down, you wouldn’t hold a board meeting with the rest of your friends to find out the problem. You would simply ask them what’s wrong.
You should do the same thing with your customers too. Speak with both your happy customers as well as unhappy customers. Ask questions that go deeper than “What do you think?” Ask questions like:
- What was your biggest challenge when you contacted us?
- Was the solution to your problem met instantly?
- What inconveniences did you have while finding a solution?
- How is it going now? And what can we do to improve your experience?
The more stories you can collect from your customers, the easier it will be to discover their pain points.
II. Listen To Their Answers
You have to listen. It’s the only way to discover what your customers actually need. You can’t just focus on what you think they need and try to make their answers line up with your own preconceived notions. You have to accept that you don’t already know everything.
CEO, Perfect Image
Irrespective of how you collect your feedback, you have to take the listening approach. It all depends on how your process it. Learn from all this and apply it to make things better for your customers. This includes when you’re not listening in a face-to-face conversation. Online options (like forums, reviews, and social media comments) are all good ways to get the answers you need. People are usually more comfortable giving feedback from beyond their screens than face-to-face.
III. Live Chat For The Win
You can effectively manage customer pain points by developing trust and confidence before offering solutions to customers. Adding a live chat to your support is a great way to find out customer demands and the issues that they’re facing. Here is how live chat helps discover customer pain points and offers effective solutions.
- You can enable instant connection with customers through live chat.
- You can immediately find out what they want and provide services that best suit their needs.
- Your agents can understand every issue to the best of their abilities and offer timely solutions.
IV. Conduct a Keyword Research
If you want to take a macro approach to your industry’s pain points, start with keyword research. You can find a good search volume through keyword research tools like Google trends. More often than not, your prospective customers will be Googling their pain points in their own time. You can find search trends overtime to get a better idea of the rise and fall of a particular customer pain point.
V. Put Your Knowledge Into Action!
Now that you know your customers’ pain points, it is time to use this knowledge to your advantage. This knowledge should play a big role in your future business strategies, be it updating your website, changing how you communicate with customers, or even altering your services.
You’ll only gain loyal customers by addressing pain points and helping clients feel understood. It’s ultimately a win-win for everyone. Here are some tips on how to address customer’s pain points:
4 Tips To Address Customer’s Pain Points
Once you identify pain points, you can determine solutions for your prospects. This is an incredible tool to leverage as a customer support executive. Here are four tips to start positioning in this way:
1. Use Your Customer’s Language While Addressing the Pain Point
This is a psychological technique that all customer support professionals should practice. It can take you a long way in building trust with your prospect. If you use their language and terminology, you can show your customers that you’re taking them seriously. This also portrays that you care about serving an empathetic response.
2. Right Agent to Solve Relevant Queries
The main part of your strategy to address customers’ pain points should be that the queries must be diverted to the right agent. If the right agent solves the query, the resolution rate will also improve. There is little point in making customers spend time with agents who cannot ink a deal.
3. Keep Up With the Latest Support Trends
A significant part of addressing customer pain point involves keeping up with the latest trends. This is because customer support is becoming more and more tech-oriented. New trends will help you solve those customer pain points. The key to lucrative customer support strategies lies in combining the latest tools, trends, collaboration, and workflows. When you keep yourself updated with the trends of industry standards, you’ll be able to serve your customer better. And your brand tends to become authentic.
A single data point can help teams work together by realizing the rising trends and roadblocks and then solving them or benefiting from them. Only the right tools will help you bring your data and strategies together. Try DeskXpand’s customer service analytics features and see how analytics can work in real-time.
4. Frame Your Offering to Reflect the Customer’s Dilemma
As you build trust with your customers and listen to their perspectives, you must personalize the solution for their specific needs. Tell customers about the detailed features that’ll speak to their problems if your product serves multiple purposes. Listen to your customer’s pain points while asking for information, and it’ll be easier to make your pitch meet everybody’s requirements. Customer support is all about empathy. To retain more customers and become as helpful as possible, start asking the right questions to the right customers.
4 Common Customer Pain Points (and How to Resolve Them)
As a brand, when you have a fair idea about their customer pain points, it becomes easier to approach them in the right manner. By using the right tools and tech, you can deliver a consistent experience across customer touchpoints. I have narrowed down some common client pain points that brands usually face:
1. Delayed Support Response
Nobody likes waiting in long queues to get their queries solved. Your customers are already dealing with the problem. At this point, even the thought of waiting would frustrate the customers. Besides, unsatisfied customers are more likely to share their experience with bad word of mouth. Here are some tips to overcome this problem:
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