Ensuring that your customers have a good experience with your brand is paramount to achieving return revenue, growth, and customer satisfaction.
However, many audiences don’t have great experiences with other brands, leading to the creation of pain points. When a customer is suffering from an issue, it’s a chance for you to step in and solve their problem.
Each of your buyer personas have their own customer pain points, and understanding what those are can give you leverage to create targeted messages that address those problems and position your brand as the solution to their issues.
That gives you a great chance to take market share and improve your brand reputation.
In this article, we’ll take a look at what customer pain points are and how you can figure out what the pain points are in your industry.
What are Customer Pain Points?
Pain points are the specific challenges and problems that customers experience in your industry or within your market.
There are an endless number of pain points that your customers could be experiencing, but they are all persistent problems that drive customers to seek out solutions.
While a pain point could be something like physical pain or emotional pain, they are most commonly struggles or inconveniences that they face when dealing with other businesses.
When a customer has pain points, what they really have are unmet needs that need to be satisfied in the form of products or services that your brand can provide.
Pain points are commonly broken up into four categories, which are:
Financial Pain Points
Issues a customer has that involve money, like overpriced products and services or unclear spending.
Process Pain Points
Issues a customer has that deal with the processes within their daily lives, like time-consuming tasks and complicated methods.
Productivity Pain Points
Issues a customer has that come from a lack of streamlined experiences or efficiencies where time and resources aren’t utilized properly.
Support Pain Points
Issues a customer has that make them feel like they don’t have the help they need, like confusing tasks and processes or a lack of guidance.
How Do You Find Customer Pain Points?
As mentioned earlier, each of your buyer personas will have unique pain points that need to be addressed.
For example, one of your personas might struggle with paying for a service they need, while another persona might be looking for more guidance on how to use a product.
Identifying these pain points is key to building solutions that address customer needs.
There are a few ways you can go about determining what your customer pain points are, including:
1. Conduct Customer Research and Surveys
One way to discover customer pain points is to ask them directly through customer research and online surveys.
This method allows you to get to the point and engage with your audiences about the problems they might be facing now or have faced in the past that lead them to your brand solutions.
2. Apply Social Listening Tactics
Many customers take their pain points public in order to find solutions or vent about their challenges.
Social listening, or tracking what customers say about brands online, can help you get to the core of their problems and discover trends in the industry that many customers are facing together.
You also can get an unchecked opinion from customers that tells you how they really feel.
3. Set Up a Live Chat Feature
Live chat features on your website can help you collect information about customer pain points directly from your website visitors.
You can either let a customer ask about specific issues or have prompts that appear to help narrow down what the pain point might be.
You can also start to provide solutions through live chat and build up your brand reputation as a problem solver.
What are the Most Common Customer Pain Points?
While there is a wide range of diverse pain points, there are some common challenges that many customers face across industries and businesses.
These can be a good starting point for your marketing messages, as you can address these issues and position your brand as a solution to those problems.
Some of the most common issues include:
Delayed Support Responses
Have you ever called a support line and was told that the wait could be hours?
When a customer can’t get a support response in a reasonable time frame it can lead to further frustration and stress. That creates a negative experience and can make them unhappy with a brand.
Inconsistent Experience
If a customer has a good experience the first time they buy from a brand, then a bad experience the next time, it can lead to frustration and distrust in a brand.
You want to make sure the buyer journey is consistent and information is the same across channels and platforms.
Lack of Communication
When a customer can’t get an answer or doesn’t have a clear line of community with a support team, it can be challenging. Customers today expect 24/7 customer service, and when brands can’t provide that, a customer might look for other solutions.
Poor Quality Products and Services
It’s hard for a customer to trust a brand when they don’t receive quality products or services.
Customers spend money on a brand and want to know that what they receive for their investment is worth the cost. Otherwise, they will turn to another solution for an answer.
Lack of Knowledge and Experience
When a customer contacts a support team, they want the team to have the answer to their problem.
If a support team bounces them around to different team members or has to constantly refer to other sources for answers, it can lead to distrust in the brand from the customer.
Complicated Buyer Processes
A customer doesn’t want to have to struggle to purchase a product or service. If a checkout process is too long, has too many steps, or requires too much information, customers will abandon their carts or find other solutions that are easier to navigate.
Customers today want easy and engaging buying processes.
How Do You Solve Customer Problems?
Now that you understand what customer pain points are and what some of the common challenges might be, let’s take a look at some of the solutions that you can provide to solve customer pain points and improve your own brand’s reputation among key audiences.
#1. Ask Customers About Their Needs
One of the best ways to solve customer pain points is to ask the customer what solution they are looking for.
This helps the customer feel important and valued by your company and gives them a chance to discuss their needs and talk about what solutions will work for them.
It also gives you valuable feedback about the customer experience.
#2. Offer Solutions and Give Options
It’s important that your brand is prepared to offer solutions when a pain point arises.
Whether a customer is coming to you from another brand or is having an issue with your products or services, having options ready can help turn every interaction into a positive one and create a better customer experience.
#3. Follow Up with Customers
If a customer has come to you for a solution, make sure to follow up with that customer to see if the solution fixed the pain point.
You can try sending out an email with a survey attached, or have a salesperson or customer service representative give them a call to discuss their levels of satisfaction with your brand.
#4. Align Your Solutions to Customer Needs
Once you’ve identified what the problems are that your customers and individual buyer personas are facing, you can work to align your solutions to customer needs and provide clear alternatives to their challenges.
This will increase customer satisfaction and help your brand stand out from the competition.
Wrap Up
Customer pain points are the issues that customers have that they are looking for solutions to solve.
When you understand what the common pain points are in your industry or market, you can leverage your own brand solutions as an alternative that brings in new business and establishes your brand reputation.
Solving customer pain points is just one step in the customer journey, which is the process that a lead takes in order to become a customer of your brand.
To learn more about it, take a look at our customer journey checklist!
You’ll be able to create your own customer journey maps and see if you have what it takes to convert leads to customers efficiently.
