How to Identify and Overcome Customer Pain Points | #customersupport #supporticket

Every product or service has been designed with the intention of fulfilling a particular need. Yet, why is it that only a few are an instant hit among the masses and the rest pass by unnoticed? Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, you can excel only when you identify and address your customer’s pain points. 

But what does that mean? How do you find out about your customer pain points? Once you determine them, how do you improve your customer experience? Let’s answer these questions.

Customer pain points refer to the problems experienced by customers across the touchpoints on their customer journey.

Customer pain points that can directly impact the business are also referred to as business pain points. To kick start the process of identifying your customer pain points that may directly affect your business, we have categorized pain points based on the business domain they align to.

What are the types of customer pain points?

Financial Pain Points:

Financial pain points are the most critical of all pain points. Financial pain points occur when customers feel that they are paying too much for a product/ service.

Your customers love choices and they are always on the lookout for cost-effective solutions that offer them more services for the money invested. Businesses need to strategize for budget-friendly options and customer-friendly subscription plans, in a way that caters to customer expectations and is aligned to business priorities. 

Customer support teams and account managers should understand customer expectations, competitor benchmarks, and budget to offer an optimally priced solution that caters to the needs of the customer.

Process Pain Points:

Process pain points may refer to road bumps along the customer journey. Not only does it affect your customers but it also impacts your support team. Businesses need to identify these bottlenecks to make the customer experience seamless across touchpoints and boost operational efficiency for their customer support agents.

For instance, is it difficult for customers to contact support, or receive timely updates? Do they find themselves repeating the same information to different people or across different channels? All of these process pain points will end up frustrating your customers and pushing them to a competitor.

Remember, outdated support software or poor internal collaboration may affect customer service quality in the long run. It may result in longer wait times for customers which can result in frustrated customers and helpless support agents. A single bad customer experience may lead customers to leave and eventually add to the cost of acquiring new customers, resulting in financial pain points. 

Support Pain Points:

Support pain points are often internal issues that may restrict the businesses from resolving customer pain points quickly or effectively.

Customer Support plays a pivotal role in making the customer journey seamless. For any issues that your customers face, customer support agents need to ensure customer expectations are met and each interaction with the team or a chatbot results in customer delight. The easy way to help your support teams monitor their performance and identify support pain points is to leverage an omnichannel help desk software. The integrated unified dashboard can help highlight areas of improvement for the support team and stay connected with customers to assist them along their journey.

Productivity Pain Points:

Has your support agent struggled with rerouting queries to the right team? Did they ever have trouble figuring out customer problems? Did your team miss the SLA in providing a solution? If yes, then you might be encountering productivity pain points.

Your customers expect a resolution from your support team as soon as they raise a query. They expect the experience to be seamless for the services they’re paying for. However, productivity pain points may decrease agent productivity and diminish the efforts behind the customer service offered. As a result of these internal inefficiencies, customers may end their relationship with your brand right away or may have a higher tendency to switch to a competitor brand.

While process and productivity pain points seem similar, an easy way to understand the difference is to evaluate whether the problems affecting performance are because your team has too much on their plate, or if they are finding it hard to take the next step due to inefficiencies in collaboration or communication. The former is a clear productivity issue that can be mitigated by self-service, canned responses, or AI, while the latter is process-related and requires strategic and systemic change. 

Learn more about: 

6 Tricky Customer Service Challenges And How To Solve Them 

Common Pain Points Support Agents Face and How to Solve Them Using a Contact Center Software

How to identify customer pain points?

Providing a wholesome customer experience helps brands to stay at the top of the game irrespective of the size of the business. From concerns around over-priced services, low-quality products to queries raised for broken links or poor customer experience, brands need to be able to successfully alleviate every pain point. If you want your product or service to be the next trend and want to improve customer stickiness, here are 4 ways to recognize those pain points before it’s too late. 

1. Ask the Right Questions

Your top priority is to solve the major pain points cited by customers when given a chance to share their feedback in detail. If you’re already sending out surveys to your customers and waiting for those coveted insights, most often you’d think- Why don’t my customers respond to my surveys? Is there a way to design surveys better? We’re here to provide you with a simple yet effective solution.

Your customers don’t answer your survey questions because of how you ask them about their problems. Your surveys need to be designed to include open-ended questions so that customers can elaborate on their expectations and needs. Only if you ask the right questions will you get the answers and insights you’re looking for. Take a look at this question.

The options make no sense and don’t give any quantitative insights. Now, here’s the same question with different options.

The options provide valuable data that you can act upon.

You can choose to keep your surveys as simple as possible for customers who hate filling up forms, you can save the detailed open-ended questions for customers who volunteer to help with detailed answers or information. Here are some questions you could ask them.

• What problem were you trying to solve when you initially came across our product or service?
• What are the top three benefits that you have received from (product or service name)?
• How could we improve (product or company name) to better meet your needs?
• What other roles or titles besides yours do you think would get a big benefit from (product or service name)?
• What would you likely use as an alternative to (product or company name) if it were no longer available?
• What’s holding you back from using (product or company name)?

2. Get your Sales Team Talking

When it comes to garnering customer pain points, you should focus not only on existing customers but also on the lost prospects. Expanding your customer base is imperative and behind every lost deal is an important pain point that your product failed to solve. This could be a pricing-related issue or a missing feature. You may resort to digital marketing tools for customer data but it’s time to get your sales team talking. Find out about prospective customer pain points and leverage these insights to get them onboarded as your customer. 

The first step is to get your sales reps to write down their observations after every sales pitch that didn’t end up in a deal. These insights coupled with the customer surveys help you decide on the direction your product needs to be moving in. The analysis should include answers to questions like:

• What were the pain points shared by the prospect?
• What did the prospect like/dislike about the product/service?
• Why did the prospect turn down the product?
• What would have kept the prospect from turning down the product?
• Did the prospect compare our product with a competitor offering? If yes, which aspect did they compare?

3. Check Out Online Reviews

Reviews are a great way to fish for customer pain points. Monitor what your customers write about your product on social media. Take it up a notch by browsing through reviews on leading review sites. Peer-to-peer review sites are a rich repository of customer grievances and they provide a great platform for brands to understand and address customer woes. With many users taking to online platforms to write reviews, you can even find and leverage the pros and cons list of your brand and your competitors from the customer’s perspective. Qualitative research goes a long way. Once you accumulate reviews from different sources, head over to community forums. Forums are a great place to find some of these suggestions that could work in favor of your company. 

Pro tip: It is important to ensure the authenticity of reviews. With fake reviews on the rise, a lack of verification leads to false data. Make sure to check the reviewer’s profile, rating pattern, and review date. Here’s a review I found that outlines the pros and cons in detail about software.