The success of a business depends on its ability to analyze the pain points of customers and solve them effectively. Customer pain points refer to an unsatisfied need or problem that is yet to be solved.
If your product is able to fix such issues, customer loyalty and retention rates usually increase. As per stats, company profits may rise by 25%-95% even when the retention rates increase by just 5%. Read on to learn how to identify customer pain points to improve your business profits.
Also Read: Customer Experience And User Experience: An Ultimate Guide
5 Ways To Identify Customer Pain Points
The best way to stand out from the competition curve is by effectively solving customers’ problems. Check out how to identify what are customer pain points:
1. Ask Your Customers
The most direct way to customer pain point analysis is by asking them directly. All you need to do is make a call and ask them some questions. Try to ask open-ended questions that would make them speak, like:
- What challenges do you face when using our product?
- Can you describe a recent experience you had with our company?
- Are there any unmet needs or additional features you wish we offered?
- What features do you find most valuable, and which do you find frustrating?
Such questions give you valuable insights into what is missing in your product and how to improve it.
2. Discuss with the Sales Team
Since sales teams spend most of their time with customers, they get to know what problems the customers are facing. Make the same open-ended questioning approach that you have tried out with customers. But this time, you could be a little more specific by asking questions like: How does our product compare to competitors?
Most probably, different sales executives will have various perspectives on customer pain points and solutions. It will let you stay in touch with the grassroots-level trends as well as changes in the customers that you need to know.
3. Analyze the Customer Data
Always keep a close eye on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like retention and churn rates. Analyze the significant changes or updates that you have gone through when the churn rates dramatically increased. For instance, if you have noticed that retention rates have fallen after updating your software, chances are that there are many bugs in your updates. In this case, those bugs are the main customer pain points.
Perhaps one of the best spots to look out for customer pain point analysis is the Helpdesk CRM. Check out the repetitive subject lines in customer tickets and try to solve them immediately.
4. Conduct Market Research
Market research is the best place to get started if you are just entering the market without sufficient current customer data. Consider conducting surveys or door-to-door interviews of your focus groups to study their problems and solve them.
Government websites and trusted marketing journals regularly publish many research reports. Go through them to identify the pulse of your audience. Remember, the actual pain point customer acquisition process always stems from solid data.
5. Monitor Sales Pipeline
Every company has a sales pipeline through which their clients pass through each stage to make a purchase. Outline all these stages, from initial contact to conversion, in your CRM. Now, closely monitor them for weeks and see where your prospects are getting stuck. For example, if most customers don’t wish to go forward after the negotiation phase, a little bit of price deduction could pass the customer pain point.
Types of Customer Pain Points
For better classification, you can break down customer pain points into four divisions. Check out them:
- Financial Pain Points: It is the most common problem in a deal where the customer expresses concern over the pricing. Most companies tackle this with an exclusive discount coupon.
- Productivity Pain Points: Such pain points arise when customers doubt the quality of your product or service. Unreliable servers and service delays are some of the prominent productivity pain points.
- Process Pain Points: It refers to your company’s internal issues that are causing trouble for the customer. For example, lengthy decision-making times may affect the speed of delivery of your services.
- Support Pain Points: These refer to the problems in support guidance from your company. What makes it different from process pain points is that they are caused by team organization issues rather than company policies.
Conclusion
Data management is the baseline of pain point analysis. You must dig deeper into customer data to draw insights into what kind of problems they are suffering. Remember, a business can survive in the long term by solving customer pain points.
Onstro CRM is an all-in-one software solution that can optimize the data management process. You can have a bird’s-eye view of all customer data from a single, unified dashboard. You can even set custom data fields to infer more in-depth insights for service gap analysis. Contact us now!
