As a lead generation specialist or digital marketer, it’s essential to acknowledge the distinctive and evolving needs of your targeted audience. How effectively and timely you respond to their expectations or requirements can improve or exacerbate your lead generation strategy.
Although determining and resolving your customer pain points can be a bit challenging, it’s much easier than you think. There are different ways to identify your customers’ pain points and offer relevant solutions by providing valuable content.
This blog post will cover customer pain points, their importance, and how to find & resolve them. Then
What are customer pain points?
Customer pain points are defined as specific problems, confusions, roadblocks, or challenges your customers or prospects experience during their buyer’s journey.
Customer pain points also determine the types of products or services that serve as a solution to their problems. For instance, consider that you are offering a POS platform to help your audience seamlessly handle their inventory, and manage sales & finances. But, first, you need to figure out the issues or challenges they’re experiencing now.
Secondly, do they find it too hard to manage their inventory, multi-channel sales orders, and purchase orders? In the said scenario, you can offer a solution that is easy to use and seamless integration of various sales channels and inventory management.
Thirdly, Is the business owner struggling with the management and transparency of finances while handling payments from different customers or vendors? To resolve this pain point, you can offer a general ledger in your POS service’s chart of accounts and an interactive dashboard to manage different credit or debit payments from different sales or purchase orders.
Some of the key benefits involve in finding and addressing customer pain points include:
Improve Customer Experience
Over 70% of businesses consider improving CX as their primary goal. An engaging customer experience is a determining factor when it comes to customer satisfaction. To satisfy your customers and address their challenges, you need to know the pain points that keep them awake at night.
Businesses of all scales need to figure out customer pain points to attract, engage and retain customers by offering something valuable that they are most likely to consider as a potential solution to their problem.
Improve Sales & Marketing Strategy
Identifying customer pain points can enhance your sales & marketing strategy to a significant extent. The sales team identifies the customer pain points to showcase your business products or services as the most appropriate solution to their problem. At the same time, your marketing team needs to assess these pain points to market your business and its offerings as an effective way to attract & nurture prospects.
Brand Awareness
You can craft an effective brand awareness campaign by responding to the customer pain points. You can showcase your brand as an industry leader having the right solution to resolve all the problems and conflicts of individual customers or B2B clients.
Main types of pain points
The customer pain points can be of different intensity or types, but they usually lie under the following generic categories:
Financial
Financial pain points are the most pivotal of all customer pain points when your prospects or customers feel that they are investing too much in a particular service or product.
All customers prefer a range of choices to opt for the most budget-friendly solutions that offer more value for money. So you need to rethink your pricing strategy and offer more budget-friendly solutions and premium discount offers. It helps you meet your prospect’s expectations and win their attention.
You should evaluate your customer’s budget, the pricing models of competitors, and the capacity to offer smartly or even aggressively priced solutions that help you win more customers without worsening your ROI.
Process
Process pain points involve all the potential roadblocks along the buyer journey. This is where you can lose most of your customers. It not only impacts your customers but also impacts your sales process. You need to identify & eliminate the potential roadblocks in your sales process to shorten the buyer’s journey, make your CX seamless & engaging across different stages, and boost the functional efficiency of your sales process.
For instance, Can your customers contact customer support 24/7 for different queries? Is your customer support continuously pushing the same information to prospects across different mediums? All such process pain points are enough to push your potential customers to your competition, and you will face poor conversion rates.
The use of a traditional customer support approach or poor synchronization of sales and marketing teams cast a devastating impact on your customer service. It may cause prolonged wait times and delays on the customer end, irritating your customers.
A poor customer experience leads your customers to leave the sales process and it eventually reduces your conversion rates and increases customer acquisition costs. In the end, you will be translating this cost burden towards the customer’s end, resulting in financial pain points.
Support
Pain points related to customer support are often internal conflicts and deadlocks that limit the companies from addressing any sort of customer pain points instantly and efficiently. Around 80% of customers claim that the utmost factor determining customer service quality is its capability to resolve issues quickly.
Customer Support is the primary driver of a smooth and hassle-free customer experience throughout the customer’s journey with your brand. For any potential roadblocks in the buyer’s journey, customer support must address all issues on the customer end by ensuring a timely response to all customer queries and concerns.
The efficient way to assist your customer support evaluate their performance & eliminate all sorts of support pain points is to use a shared support platform. The dedicated support dashboard can help outline key improvement areas and aspects and help your customer support team stay in close collaboration with prospects to lead them further in their buyer journey.
Productivity
Is your support team struggling with forwarding customer queries and concerns to the relevant team? Are they facing problems in figuring out customer pain points? If you can answer these questions in the affirmative, you need to focus on the productivity pain points.
Your prospects or customers need instant response and resolution from your support team. In addition, they are expecting the overall sales process to be frictionless and smooth for the services they’re investing their time and money for. Otherwise, all of these internal lackings will push customers to end their journey with your brand and switch to your competition which is more likely to offer a seamless experience.
The process & productivity pain points sound similar. However, the easiest way to find the difference is to determine if the problems are exacerbating the performance of your sales & support team as they possess a range of responsibilities to deal with, or if they are struggling with moving to the next stage due to poor collaboration or synchronization.
The first one is obviously a productivity issue that can be resolved through internal reforms, instant responses, or automation (Like chatbots). The latter is a process pain point and needs strategic & structural reforms.
How do you identify and resolve customer pain points?
The following solutions and examples of customer pain points can help you better understand and resolve the conflicts and troubles of your customers.
1. Customer surveys
Businesses can not engage and retain customers if they fail to understand what their customers really want. Customer surveys are the most cost-effective ways to learn and understand your customer needs at the different stages of the buyer’s journey. Once you have a clear understanding of your customer needs and priorities, you can use it to revamp your buyer persona and engage your potential customers more effectively.
2. Customer interviews and focus groups
A focus group is a research methodology that involves inviting customers or clients to answer different questions and shared discussions. It’s an effective way to find and resolve customer pain points by having your loyal customers for interviews and panel discussion sessions.
You can ask them to give honest reviews about your products, services, or sales process, suggest necessary adjustments, and add value to your business model. In addition, it will give you a broader and different perspective to critically analyze and question your existing service model and solutions.
3. Review customer complaints
Entertaining customer complaints by resolving the known errors or issues in your products or services at the beginning can save you from a lot of trouble later. It is better to clearly understand the quality and downsides of your products or services as soon as you lunch them. By doing so, you can fix these issues before your services reach the massive target market.
Deliberately neglecting the early complaints can devastate your brand reputation and increase the cost of operations if you opt to recall your products too late.
4. Improve your lead nurturing process
The lead nurturing process involves nurturing and improving your leads’ quality to push them further down the sales funnel. As we have discussed the support and productivity pain points are the primary driver of poor ROI, increased customer acquisition cost, and reduced conversion rates.
You can identify potential leakages and roadblocks in your sales funnel and optimize your lead nurturing process. It helps you give a seamless customer experience to your prospects throughout their buyer’s journey and refrain them from abandoning your brand and moving away to your competition.
5. Prioritize resolving issues
You need to prioritize the customer journey pain points before solving them. Evaluate the issues under the umbrella of the important vs. urgent model.
It helps you resolve the most critical issues first and schedule or delegate the least important or least urgent issues. Always remember, you must determine the customer journey pain points in the order of the buyer’s journey. For instance, you cannot expect instant improvement by fixing the issues in the sales stage while totally neglecting or delaying the amendments in the awareness stage of your buyer’s journey.
6. Complicated Sales process
A complicated sales process is another troubling factor that fuels customer service pain points. Incorporate automation and rich collaboration among the marketing and sales teams to optimize your sales process. Smaller sales cycles mean a better conversion rate and improved ROI for any business.
Automate the repetitive tasks in your sales process to spare your customer service representatives to address the customer service pain points more efficiently.
7. Improve your customer support
Customer support and after-sales services are the most vital factors that can either build or destroy your brand reputation. An ideal customer support process starts with the customer-first approach.
Design engaging templates and CRM forms to help customer register their feedback and complaints. Answer FAQs and make your sales policies like return & exchange policy, privacy policy, etc public to ease the burden on your support team.
Finally, train your customer support representatives to acquire a perfect combo of hard and soft skills. By doing so, you can ensure a trustworthy relationship with your customers, win customers’ loyalty, and enjoy the perks of word-of-mouth marketing by your satisfied customers.
8. Revise your offers and sale pitches
A perfect sales pitch doesn’t sound like a sales pitch. You can lose your customers by appearing too greedy or quick to make a sale. Instead, train your sales team to identify the quality of leads and determine whether the leads they are dealing with are SQLs or MQLs. An MQL cannot be offered a sale pitch.
Similarly, it would be best if you pushed compelling offers like promotional discounts or limited-time offers to your SQLs to persuade them to finalize their purchase decision with your brand. Adding value to each stage (including the sales stage) of your buyer’s journey can produce promising results and ensure better conversion rates.
9. Use analytics to track how customers are interacting with your website
Another proven and modern way to identify and solve customer pain points is to use analytical tools to track how your potential customers interact with your website. For example, evaluate the product pages or blogs they are frequently visiting. It helps you determine what your prospects are up to, and how you can engage them more effectively, resolve their pain points, answer their queries, and push them towards the sales.
10. Create a library of helpful content/resources that customers are facing
Create a library of informative and valuable content, resources, and FAQs to help customers navigate throughout their purchase journey. Try adding answers or solutions to all the potential questions or issues that your customers might face in their journey. It helps you create a seamless customer experience and portray your brand’s image as someone who cares for its customers or clients.
Conclusion
The examples mentioned above of customer pain points and their solutions can help you engage and retain your customers more effectively. Think of yourself as a customer and consider which areas of your business, products, or services need improvement. It helps you deliver a seamless customer experience throughout the purchase journey of your potential customers or clients.
