Even if you're not familiar with the term "pain point," if you've been a customer, you've had them.
Customer pain points explain themselves. The term refers to an issue/complaint a customer faces during their shopping journey.
Problems during the shopping experience can occur at any point in the buying stage.
Therefore, identifying where customer pain points exist during the buying journey makes it that much easier to solve them.
In this blog post, we'll cover:
- What are customer pain points?
- Examples of customer pain points
- How to identify customer pain points
- Fixing customer pain points
What Are Customer Pain Points?
Customer pain points describe a problem or challenge someone experiences before, during, or after purchasing from or working with a company.
Put simply, when a customer experiences a pain point, they've experienced a "blip" in their shopping journey.
This can be a small issue or something large. And because these issues may be diverse and different for each person, identifying customer pain points can be challenging.
Examples of Customer Pain Points
1. Spotty customer experience
Customer pain points often arise from inconsistent experiences. If customers begin to realize that your brand isn't efficient, they'll go elsewhere.
And plenty can fall under this umbrella.
Customers may feel their needs are no longer being met by your company.
Or, they may feel they get great service on one of your platforms and poor service on another.
Up to 86% of customers will pay more if they get a better experience. This is why it's essential to create a customer experience strategy that speaks to your audience.
This includes:
- Prioritizing customer needs regularly
- Ensuring proper support is in place
- Understanding how your brand can evolve with consumers
As a result, you’ll experience fewer customer pain points.
2. Poor quality service
This one's pretty basic.
If anything is going to turn customers off, it's having a poor customer service team/platform.
When customers feel they can't turn to your brand for help when necessary, they'll switch to a brand that offers that service effectively.
Improving customer service can encompass many different things, and will give you an outline for pain point analysis.
It often comes down to:
- Taking constructive criticism from customers
- Being responsive to requests
- Designing a good web experience
- Engaging customers
Once these strategies are in place, you greatly reduce the chance for pain points to come up.
3. Difficult purchasing experience
We've all been here at some point, right? Trying to check out with a glitchy site is no fun and can dissuade you from buying entirely.
When a site is constantly taking those about to purchase from page to page, it's a surefire way to say goodbye to that customer!
Throw unnecessary pop-ups asking for memberships in and you've sealed the deal.
And it will cost you.
Studies show e-commerce brands lose $18 Billion in sales revenue each year because of cart abandonment.
Understanding that your consumers want a streamlined purchasing option is essential.
The easier it is to checkout, the more customers will enjoy buying from you.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Pain points for customers can encompass many different complaints. What it boils down to is that something is getting in the way of the customer journey.
How to Identify Your Customers' Pain Points
Now that we've covered more on pain points, let's chat about how we can identify what irks customers.
There are a few first steps you can take to determine their unique frustrations when working with your business.
Check your online reviews
We'll start with the really easy way: doing your research.
Go on a review deep dive to see what your customers are saying about you online. By doing this, you'll be able to gauge how they feel about your services.
Check-in with your sales team
Another simple way to discover pain points is by checking in with your sales team. Much like looking at reviews, your team will be able to directly show you what pain points customers may have.
However, the best way to dive into what your customer pain points are is with surveys.
Identifying and understanding pain points with surveys
Customer satisfaction surveys are an effective way to understand the ins and outs of what people think of your brand.
When partnered with a firm like Drive Research, these surveys will gather the proper feedback promptly.
As you can imagine, these surveys have a huge number of benefits. They allow companies to see where they're succeeding and where work can be done to improve pain points.
Key benefits include:
- Identifying specific pain points
- Learning what customers like and don't like
- Working with a team to correct issues
- Idea generation for marketing/advertising material
Sounds great, but how do they work? Below, we'll briefly explain the customer satisfaction survey process.
Kickoff meeting
Kickoff meetings are important in market research because they cover the main goals of the client. In this case, those key goals would be better understanding your customers and their pain points.
These meetings are also where the research team and client can officially meet for the first time.
Survey design and programming
This is the heart of our process. After the kickoff meeting, your survey will be intricately designed by analysts and programmed into an online survey platform.
The number of questions depends on the specific needs of the client. No matter the number of questions included, we'll ensure the survey is digestible for participants.
Fieldwork
Here's where it gets really interesting. Fieldwork consists of the active period where responses are gathered. During this time, clients will be able to see the responses coming in through our live portal.
Analysis and Reporting
After fieldwork, the data is carefully gone over by the research team. The analysis period will ensure that only the quality responses are counted in the process.
After that, a full market research report is presented to the client.
This report contains all the key findings from your survey, along with our recommendations and other important info. We'll also host a meeting to go over all of these key points together.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Pain points are best identified through a survey. A well-designed customer satisfaction survey will yield actionable data to help get your outreach strategy up and running.
In this blog post, we discussed what pain points are and how to identify them - but, the most important part is solving customer pain points.
Luckily, by conducting a customer survey, you have a clear direction for what aspects of your business you need to focus on first.
Do not waste any time creating a plan of action for improving these problem areas. Each day that passes without resolving issues within the customer experience you are losing money.
That's because 93% of shoppers are more likely to repeat purchases with companies that deliver excellent customer service. So if not you, then your competitor is more likely to earn a loyal customer base.
Take action with the data
Did you find out that customers are having issues with a key aspect of your business? In that case, you'll want to prioritize fixing this pain point.
For example, say you have an email software company.
You discover that a large percentage of customers are having issues with your email services through the customer survey.
Since email is the foundation of your company, this pain point needs to be addressed pronto. The other pain points can be taken care of after this.
Secondly, you'll want to address the issue with your customers
This step can be as simple as sending out an e-blast to them, explaining that the problem will be resolved.
Reaching out is a key step, as it shows you care about your customer's experience. By mentioning the issue and detailing what will be done to fix it, you'll be keeping your audience in the loop.
Continuing surveying customers
Last, you'll want to make a habit of continuously running these surveys.
Only conducting one survey will only get you so far. In order to properly track customer pain points, you need to run customer surveys on a semi-regular or regular basis.
Doing so will help to identify if the changes you've implemented are actually working toward solving your customer's pain points.
Additionally, collecting continuous customer feedback allows you to detect issues as they arise and allow you to work quickly to alleviate the problem.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Targeting the pain points raised in your customer survey is the final step in addressing the problems. To keep tabs on your customer experience, consider running surveys regularly in case more pain points rise up.
Contact Our Customer Satisfaction Company
No matter your type of business, it's likely there are at least some customer journey pain points. While this is normal, what matters most is how you tackle the problem.
Drive Research is a market research company based in New York. Our team will work with you to design a high-quality customer survey to gauge your audience's satisfaction.
If you'd like to learn more about our market research services, reach out to us today!
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
Lark Allen
As a Content Marketing Specialist, Lark has a strong background and passion for creative, professional, and journalistic writing. She is also a self-proclaimed music freak and 90s enthusiast.
Learn more about Lark, here.
