Win Over More Customers By Diagnosing & Treating Their Pain Points
There’s an old folktale about a man who wins a lion’s favor by removing a thorn from its paw. The story is a good illustration of how people often react when someone else eases their long-endured pain — with immense gratitude and undying loyalty.
In business, there’s a concept called customer pain points which encompasses the various issues, challenges, and frustrations that customers persistently face in the marketplace, i.e. when interacting with businesses and their brands, products, or services. Some of these points may be widespread across industries or among competitors while some may pertain to specific businesses or industries.
Relieving these pain points in your own business can go a long way in persuading consumers to choose your brand over others, building mutually beneficial relationships, and endearing your brand with them for years to come.
While each customer is different and what is a major pain for one may not be one for another, some pain points are widespread across a target audience. Though you’ll likely never eliminate all pain points, alleviating the most common and significant ones will attract more customers and keep them coming back. Furthermore, you can speak to customer pain points and how your brand avoids them in your own marketing, even in your unique value proposition, which can be a huge boost to traffic and conversions.
Examples of Customer Pain Points
There are a myriad of possible pain points, but they can typically be grouped into a few broad categories:
Process Pain Points
More than ever, consumers expect and demand a smooth, intuitive shopping experience which means every touch point with your business must be optimized. Process pain points are processes that hamper the customer journey, including difficult website navigation, a complicated checkout, prolonged shipping times, and long lines in stores.
Financial Pain Points
Maybe the most painful of pain points, financial ones are those that can adversely affect your customers’ wallets. High costs can put your brand outside of a customer’s budget while low costs can affect the perceived value of your product or service. Poorly made products, hidden checkout fees, and coupon fine-prints are among financial pain points that can turn off customers for good.
Product/Productivity Pain Points
For you to successfully compete in the marketplace, your product or service must meet your audience’s specific need or solve a specific problem as efficiently and satisfyingly as possible. Ease of use and enhanced productivity in their everyday lives is a big reason why a customer would choose your brand over your competition. It’s a real pain when a product doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, is hard to use, has outdated technology, has underwhelming features, or doesn’t match its description.
Support Pain Points
Throughout the customer journey, customers often need assistance with everything from picking the right size to addressing product defects. They demand and expect both knowledgeable guidance and timely, empathetic responses to their questions and concerns. Support pain points are the frustrations that customers have when they don’t receive the support they need from your sales or customer service teams.
Diagnosing Customer Pain Points
A key thing about the man and the lion is that the man took time to investigate what was making the lion moan and groan. Before pulling out your customers’ “thorns,” you first have to take the time to diagnose what and where they are. These are a few key ways to identify the pain points of your particular audience:
Research Who Your Customers Are
Before designing a product or crafting a marketing strategy, it’s imperative to know exactly who your ideal customers are so that you can tailor your product or campaign to them and their wants and needs while addressing their specific pain points. Knowing their preferred communication channels, for instance, is key insight to help you reach your audience when and where you’ll have the most impact.
This can be done through primary research, i.e. through direct contact with potential customers, or secondary research, such as existing customer data and audience analysis reports or studies completed by industry experts. You can even investigate your competitors’ social media posts, visitor comments, and online reviews. Because people tend to leave bad reviews much more than they do good ones, it shouldn’t be long before you find out what irks your target audience about your products or services in your industry.
Examine Key Performance Indicators
Analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs), such as conversion rates, resolution times, and cart abandonment rates, can also help you identify areas of your operations that may not be up to snuff. It may not give you Many platforms feature analytics that can give you real-time results to analyze and measure.
Gather Customer Feedback
You shouldn’t be guessing what your audience is thinking about your brand; there are a number of ways to get direct customer feedback and know for sure: surveys, social media comments, messages, online reviews, phone calls, online forums, and so on. Always keep the lines of communications open between your business and your target audience, not just when crafting your brand or marketing campaign. Because their opinions and preferences can change over time, it’s important to continually seek and address customer feedback.
Get Internal Insight
Sometimes customers have a difficult time articulating their problems. This is where insight from customer-facing sales and support teams comes in handy. They’re more than familiar with customer problems and complaints, having to deal with them day in and day out. Bby interviewing employees, you’ll get valuable, actionable insight that helps you pinpoint frequent issues impacting your business.
Treating Customer Pain Points
After identifying and assessing the most prevalent pain points regarding your product and industry, it’s time for you and your team to do all you can to relieve them. Some solutions are common sense while others may require more creativity. Either way, the faster you treat customer pain points, the more success you should have. Here are a few general solutions to keep in mind:
Process Pain Point Solutions
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- Optimize your in-store and ecommerce experience, eliminating redundancies and evolving processes.
- Do regular, deep-diving audits of your digital and traditional touch points.
- Ensure your website design and copy is clear, concise, and clean.
- simple, intuitive website navigation, checkout, and contact forms.
- Track key metrics and address lagging areas through design, copy, and other elements.
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Financial Pain Point Solutions
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- Emphasize lower pricing or better value compared to competitors.
- Be as transparent with your pricing as possible.
- Avoid hidden fees, bloated disclaimers, and countless coupon exclusions.
- Offer tiered options when possible to allow customers.
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Product/Productivity Pain Point Solutions
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- Commit your product or service to thorough quality assurance and testing.
- Make improvements to your product or service to enhance value or address defects.
- Highlight how your product saves time, is easy to use, and improves customers’ lives.
- Streamline instructions and processes for using your service or product, e.g. easy-to-read manuals and demo videos.
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Support Pain Point Solutions
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- Quickly follow up with customer complaints.
- Increase sales and customer service reps to keep up with communications.
- Prioritize comprehensive customer service training.
- Make it easy to get help by giving customers several simple options for communications (e.g. email, phone, DM, chats).
- Regularly seek customer feedback and address issues.
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Pain Point Tools
There’s a wide variety of software tools available for solving specific issues, such as those pertaining to call centers, customer feedback, chatbot, social media, customer service, and customer relationship management. However, expert knowledge of how to use that software and analyze the data is often a must to maximize the tools and optimize results.
Professional Pain Point Help
At M:7 Agency, we’re experts at diagnosing pain points and helping businesses alleviate them in their own brands, products, and services in order to win more customers and keep them coming back for more. Not sure about the exact pain points plaguing your brand? Reach out to us today and