How to Identify and Fix Your Customers’ Pain Points

April 6, 2020
James Davis

If your customers succeed, you succeed. So it’s critical for your Customer Success team to work closely with your customers and understand the needs and specific problems they face.

However, that’s easier said than done. You’ll need to develop a keen understanding of your customers and their various pain points.

In this piece, we’re going to lend you a helping hand. We’ll dive deeper into the science of pain points by covering the following:

The exact meaning of pain points
The most common types of pain points
Ways to identify and fix those pain points

Let’s get started!

What Are Customer Pain Points?

Customer pain points are specific problems your customers experience while they’re using your product or service. These pain points can generate friction and (in extreme instances) cause your customers to abandon your product or service.

Pain points come in lots of different shapes and sizes. Just think about your own experiences with the platforms and products you use. We’re sure you’ve experienced these kinds of problems:

Payment or subscription issues
Broken functionality
Poor support or service

Before and after a purchase has been made, there are many potential customer pain points, and they’re often organized into broader categories. While some of these pain points are generic, you’ll encounter customer pain points that relate to your specific product or service.

It’s very important for your business to identify and remedy these customer pain points as effectively as possible. This process helps you reduce churn and polish your overall product or service, in order to attract more customers in the future.

Leading businesses invest significant resources in managing customer pain points. These businesses empower customer-facing teams with appropriate data collection and communication tools, which can be used to remedy customer pain points.

Of course, a keen strategy is also critical. But more on that later.

What Are the Types of Common Pain Points?

Now that we have a more general idea of what we mean by customer pain points, let’s dig a little deeper and look at the most common types.

Broadly speaking, customer pain points will fall into one of the following categories:

Interaction

Statistics from a Gartner customer experience survey show that two-thirds of companies now primarily compete on the basis of customer experience. If you can offer stellar customer support and clear communication, you’ll be sure to beat the competition.

Unfortunately, many customer pain points revolve around interaction. Businesses fail to offer timely and clear communication or use the right channels. Either way, your customers may be frustrated and seek an alternative provider.

In this category, you’ll see pain points like:

Long wait times for customer service
A limited range of communication channels
Conflicting or inaccurate support messaging

Purchasing

After you’ve paid a great deal of money to attract and convert your customer, you can’t afford to fall at the final hurdle because your purchasing process is unpleasant. Since customers are often on high alert during this process, they’re likely to abandon a purchase if they see a glitch or lack of transparency.

To prevent cart abandonment, businesses need to pay particularly close attention to customer pain points during the purchasing phase.

In this category, you’ll see pain points like:

Confusion about payment methods
Lack of security
Issues with pricing transparency

Compatibility

In today’s tech-driven world, businesses selling tech-oriented products or services can’t afford to underestimate how disruptive a lack of compatibility with other products or services can be. Lots of common customer pain points are focused on a lack of compatibility with both hardware and software.

If a business fails to comply with common standards and offer integrations, customers will quickly find a host of critical issues.

In this category, you’ll see pain points like:

A lack of support for certain devices or operating systems
Bugs and other issues arising from compatibility issues
Failure to offer consistent cross-platform performance

Functionality

Functionality refers to the bread and butter of your product or service. If your product or service doesn’t do what it says on the tin, customers will quickly leave to find an alternative. While there are some common functionality pain points, many of them are related to your specific product or service.

To deliver the best experience possible to customers, it’s important for businesses to constantly test and maintain their products and services.

In this category, you’ll see pain points like:

Outdated features
Glitches and bugs
A lack of features

How to Identify and Fix Customer Pain Points

Now that we have a clearer picture of the main customer pain points, let’s explore the strategies and steps you can use to identify and fix them.

In this section, we’ll cover the following:

Methods you can utilize to identify customer pain points
Questions you can ask to uncover business pain points
Best practices for leveraging customer pain points

Methods for Identifying Customer Pain Points

Before you can start fixing your customer pain points, it’s essential for you to learn how to identify them and collect insightful information.

Here are some of the most common methods and channels you’ll be able to use:

1. Online surveys to owned audiences

An online survey is a fast and easy way to connect with your customers and learn more about the experience they’re having with your product or platform.

For example, take a look at this survey from Nintendo. This nice little email asks customers to take a quick survey and share their experiences about a recent purchase. Nintendo has even decided to incentivize participation. Could you do the same?

If you get your customers to complete these surveys, you’ll receive useful insights that can be used to shape your product or service.

2. Live chat

Many businesses use modern messaging platforms like Messagely to instantaneously connect with prospects and customers. Since these platforms offer live-chat functionality and team inboxes, your customers’ voices are always heard.

The best live-chat platforms are able to forge authentic connections with customers and empower them to share their stories. To achieve this goal, these platforms need to offer a range of powerful features and a seamless user experience.

3. Online reviews

Online review platforms can create a treasure trove of constructive feedback for your business. You’ll find that the performance of your business is ranked and rated in different areas for your convenience. And you’ll find some great insights.

If you read some of these reviews, you’ll find some useful anecdotal information about the pain points experienced by your customers. For instance, take a look at the example of Photoshop on G2 Crowd above.

Here are some of the key customer review platforms you’ll want to visit:

Google My Business
Yelp
Amazon
G2 Crowd
Trustpilot
Capterra

Of course, there are more options, and you’ll often find specific review platforms for your industry.

4. Customer interviews

Back in the 1940s, the concept of the focus group was developed as a way to better understand the impacts of advertising and customer tastes. A number of platforms make it easy for businesses to perform customer interviews and uncover useful insights.

These interviews give businesses the opportunity to connect with power users on a deeper level and understand their preferences and pain points. Again, you could use a number of prominent customer-interview platforms.

5. Customer support tickets

Many businesses make it easy for customers to log their pain points by using support tickets. Businesses will offer up a simple, clear portal that customers can use to log their issues. Then these concerns are fed into a ticketing system like Jira.

Support tickets are great ways to understand the most prominent issues your customers have. For instance, these tickets are often associated with categories, so you can quickly analyze common pain points.

Support tickets create a great system because they help customers feel like they’re being heard. And no customer pain point will go unnoticed if you have sophisticated service desk software.

6. Sales calls

Sales calls aren’t just great opportunities to pitch your product and converse with your potential customers. They also present an ideal way to collect valuable information and insight from your prospects.

Your salespeople operate on the frontlines of your business. As such, they play a critical role in helping you understand the way customers perceive your business and product/service. So your salespeople should regularly take notes and pass their observations along to the marketing and product teams.

7. Social media threads

Social media is another trove of useful insight for brands and businesses. To understand customer pain points, curious businesses and marketers can quickly hop onto the main social media platforms and engage in social listening.

A number of great tools for social media listening allow marketers to carefully monitor their brand perception and mentions. With these tools, you can automate the process and even produce rich reports that provide additional insight.

8. Product usage analytics

Saas businesses will collect vast volumes of data to understand exactly how customers engage with their platform or service. Those usability statistics hint at which features are used, which are neglected, and which cause issues or confusion among customers.

For data-driven organizations that leverage usage statistics to better understand customers and their pain points, data scientists are worth their weight in gold.

9. Knowledgebase and website analytics

Businesses should also dig into the data to understand how customers use their website and/or knowledgebase. A quick browse through Google Analytics can reveal a great deal about customer intent, including where they direct their attention.

You can dig into the data to explore KPIs like time-on-page and bounce rate. Then you can learn what your customers want to know about, as well as whether they’re satisfied with the information you provide to them.

Questions to Use to Uncover Business Pain Points

If you’re going to interact with your customers to understand their pain points, you’ll need to ask the right questions.

Here’s a look at the most important questions to uncover pain points…

Interaction

Are you happy with our customer support?
When you have questions, do you receive accurate support?
Are you satisfied with our response times?
How could we improve our customer support?
Are you satisfied with our follow-up process after your issue has been resolved?
Do we offer support on the channels you use?
What could our customer support agents do better?
Do you have any general feedback about our customer support?

Purchasing

Did you think it was easy to buy our product/service?
Were you happy with the checkout process?
Are you satisfied with the payment options we offer?
How does our pricing compare to our competitors’?
How heavily did our pricing factor into your decision to purchase our product/service?
Would you say our product/service is priced fairly?
Would you consider purchasing more or less of our product/service in the future?
Are you satisfied with the discounts/offers we provide our customers?

Compatibility

Is our product/service compatible with the rest of your tech stack?
Have you noticed any specific compatibility issues with our product/service?
Would you like our product/service to work with a specific tool?
How do you see your tech stack developing in the future? Does our product/service have a role to play?
Are there any new integrations you’d like us to offer?
Do your colleagues use our product/service?

Functionality

How often do you use our product/service?
What would you change about our product/service if you could?
What is your favorite feature of our product/service?
What is your least favorite feature of our product/service?
Would you recommend our product/service to your friends and colleagues?
Has our product/service met your initial expectations?
What prevents you from enjoying our product/service as much as possible?

Best Practices for Leveraging Business Pain Points

Once you’ve collected useful insights about your customer pain points, it’s important for you to make that information work for you.

Here’s a look at the best practices you should use to leverage your customer pain points…

Catalog your customer pain points.

First thing first: It’s very important for you to maximize the impact of your research by cataloging it. So you should monitor the following key information:

The pain point itself
Which customer provided the insight
When the feedback was given
Potential interventions you could make

Ideally, this information should be hosted in a space that your team can access. For instance, you might decide to use a knowledge base tool, or even a simple Google Sheet you share with the rest of the team.

If you catalog your customer pain points in this way, you’ll improve transparency and make sure that everybody on your team benefits from this new information.

Make the right interventions.

Once you’ve catalogued your customer pain points, you’ll want to think about the interventions you can make.

It’s very important for you to think about actionable, measurable solutions. Then you can accurately assess the impact of your intervention. In the next section, we’ll offer some examples of pain points that will help you with this step.

You’ll want to get inventive here and give your customer support agents a suite of potential interventions they can make to remedy customer pain points.

Record the impact of your interventions.

Once you’ve chosen which intervention to make, you need to record its impact and assess whether it resolved your customer pain point.

Let’s imagine that multiple customers complain that it’s taking your customer support representatives too long to get back to them. You might decide to invest in a live chat tool and use it to expedite your response time.

After you implement your solution, you’ll want to carefully monitor how it impacts your response time. The best tools will offer the use of a range of data, and you could also launch customer surveys to make sure you’ve improved.

The measurability of your intervention is critical, as it can help you guide your strategies and interventions.

Here Are 5 Examples of Pain Points (and What To Do About Them)

Now that we’ve covered ways to identify and fix customer pain points, let’s put our strategy to work and take a look at five examples…

1. Prospects receive inaccurate information.

After interviewing your customers or digging into your data, you might find that your customers are being given inaccurate information. This problem could affect their willingness to sign a contract or further pursue your solution.