Popular Customer Pain Points

⏱ Reading Time: 10 minutes

People mostly spend money on two things: to reduce pain and to increase happiness.

Imagine your ideal customer is a watermelon lover, but at the same time, he doesn’t like having sticky fingers after cutting the watermelon. Or, even worse, he doesn’t like to spend the time to slice through the thick skin. This is a pain point — a specific issue that drives customer nuts  and is as diverse and varied as your prospective customer. 

 🚀Read Customer Service: A Guide for Successful Business Growth  🚀

Sometimes, just acknowledging a pain point can lead to an entirely new product. Hence, you definitely want to position it as a solution to their problem to make them happy.

So, in this case, enter a giant watermelon slicer.

Picture 1. One cut watermelon slicer

What are Customer Pain Points?

A customer pain point is a specific problem that prospective customers of your business are experiencing during his buying journey. In other words, you can think of pain points as problems.

When it comes to creating and developing products that will drive your business to success and make your life easier, start by identifying customers’ pain points. Each pain point refers to a specific problem your customers are facing — the outdated processes that take too much effort and time, or the inefficiencies that inconvenience them. 

Picture 2. Customer pain points

Not all customers, however, will be aware of the pain points they are encountering, and this could make marketing difficult for them. You have to effectively help them realize they have a problem and convince them to use your product or service.  

Once you nail down their pain points, you can attract a core group of people who crave for what you’re selling. The only touchpoint in their trek through your sales funnel is when they realize you can provide them with a solution.

Related: How to Improve Sales Funnel with the Help of Live Chat?

The worse problem is nagging them, the more chance you have to sell your solution. The better your solution or product is, the customers need it more and will pay faster.

How Do I Identify My Customer’s Pain Points?

Now when we defined what pain points are, we need to find a way how to identify them.

Have in mind that not all your pain points are the same within every customer. Pain points can be various in different types of customers or industries. This is the checkpoint where you need to be focused on qualitative research as a fundamental part of identifying customer pain points.

There are two primary sources of the information you need to identify customer’s pain points, customers and your sales and customer support team.

Let’s take a look at how to get more feedback from your customer.

Organize Qualitative Customer Research

Worldwide brands are aware of the importance of customer feedback, but do they listen to their customers? It is essential for research to listen to your customers and hear their experience no matter good or bad, honestly, and openly.

Recently, Paldesk has developed inhouse new feature – feedback form to have better insight into our customer pain points in our new dashboard and onboarding process. The feedback form was available to all users who made full registration. We have collected more than three months of all responses from the customer and got essential feedback from them. The results showed that our dashboard was too complicated for them, and they were lost at the first touchdown.

We noticed that the bounce rate that was higher than we expected- almost 20%. After data that we collect from our customers, we prepared new UX and UI for our dashboard and implemented them after A/B testing.

The results?

Paldesk User delivered a 57% lower bounce rate and more than 39% more installations.

Picture 3. Paldesk new dashboard after testing

Organize Qualitative Sales Research

Including your sales team in customer pain points research is very important. The first line of the customer’s battlefield is always your sales team, and you can gather amazing feedback data from them and at the same time hear the voice of the customer.

It is crucial to divide operational challenges from specific customer pain points. For example, your sales results are lower than the lost quarter. Listening to the reasons for your sales team can be different; the time of the year, bad sales leads, new competition, etc.

These complaints can be legitimate, but they don’t have any touching point with your customer’s pain points, and you need to filter out the noise to the actual problem.

Use Live Chat to Find Customer Pain Points

If an email survey seems a little too Stone Age for you, try live chat. It’s an excellent tool for both email opt-in lead generation and collecting real-time customer feedback.

The amazing thing about live chat is that it allows you to communicate directly with a customer and fix the problem instantaneously. Another amazing thing? Recent studies show that website visitors are 82% more likely to convert to customers if they’ve chatted with you in real-time.

By using live chat and walking your customers through different transactions and processes, you ensure their memorable experience. At the same time, by helping your customers to complete the purchase, you have an opportunity to collect some valuable information regarding their pain points.

For example, when they land on your site, they might ask you something like:

Picture 4. Address customer pain points in live chat

Their pain point? They want a specific item and perhaps, don’t have time to waste on scrolling down your site. With that information in hand, you can better address and advertise your product in a way that reaches directly to their needs. You can take it even a step further by using the help of tools like Paldesk.

Go Through the Customer Journey

Mapping out your entire customer journey is crucial to understand the bigger picture. So, when you’re trying to find and understand the pain points, start from the very beginning and the way your customers find out about you.

Ask yourself everything – from how they find out about you all the way to the post-purchase process and the way your customers feel about your product when they make the purchase. This will move your focus from the purchasing part exclusively, which can often be misleading and it will give you a wider picture.

4 Pain Point Types

Although you can think of pain points as simple problems, they’re often grouped into several broader categories. Here are the four main types of pain points.

Picture 5. Pain point types

1. Financial pain points

This type includes the problems that consumers face regarding money:

• Subscription plans and membership fees
• A short duration of the product primarily made to last a significant length of time
• The high cost of (repeating) purchases

Many customers overpay for the products and services they use, which results in financial strain. Although you might think that high-end product should have high-end price tags, try to listen to your customers first. They might be spending too much money on their current product provider or solution, so they want to reduce their costs.

Having the lowest prices isn’t always the best strategy either. However, try to showcase how spending more money now will save your customer later. If you can, break down the costs of purchases on your competitive products and explain how long it will take for your item to pay for itself.

2. Productivity pain points

Productivity pain points hinder your customers’ ability to perform activities in an optimized way.

They might be facing problems concerning:

• Productivity  
• Comfort
• Convenience

Your job is to show them how your product will resolve their everyday issues. Use your images and product descriptions to showcase the products in real-life situations. Explain how they could make their life more convenient.

3. Process pain points

There are also issues with a business’ systems and processes. Additional pain points, like productivity issues, also stem from process challenges. Your customers want to improve their internal processes. Such as assigning leads to sales representatives or nurturing lower-priority leads. In marketing, discovering customer pain points can dramatically improve how marketing messages and outreach strategies are developed.

4. Support pain points

Your customers aren’t receiving the support they need at critical stages of the customer journey or sales process.

Nothing turns a customer off like an impersonal support experience – basic form letters promising to answer their questions in a few business days, off-putting chatbots that skirt questions. Or lack of support center knowledge regarding past inquiries or preferences.

Thus, enable personalization services and smart support routing. For instance, an omnichannel approach allows support representatives to answer questions not even asked yet by anticipating – and resolving – customer concerns before they become a problem.

Questions That Can Identify a Customer’s Pain Points

To provide true value to your customers, it is important to ask the right questions. Avoid any assumptions. Whether you are aware of it or not, your preconceived notions influence your interaction with customers. For example, if you assume your client’s primary pain point is poor time management you may ask questions differently, inadvertently leading the conversation.

As a result, you will not gather relevant information into where your customers will actually need help.

So let’s look at three great examples of questions that can identify customer pain points.

What are your gripes?

Not all questions need to be labeled with your prospects or customers. It’s essential to take the pulse of the rest of your sales and customer support team’s pipelines. It is crucial to understand what your prospect questions are not uncovering.  Sometimes issues that are not directly connected to the problem can lead you through the solution.

Why are we losing deals?

If you offer more features at a lower cost than Competitor X but are still missing sales to them, you’ve uncovered a business pain point: budget. It’s essential to determine whether you need to get better at selling your product, qualifying your leads, or trimming unnecessary features from specific pricing or business plans.

Defining price for your product can be challenging but at the same time can give you information for the market and your customer – are they willing to pay your product.

Picture 6. Pain point – budget

Why are customers churning?

If you closed the deal, you have done a great job. But don’t think that is the end of the sales process or missing pain points.  If you’re losing business because your customer service wait time is too long or you have bad customer service, that’s a business pain point for both parties. For your customers, it’s an obstacle to them using your product or service to solve for their business. And your company can’t continue to grow in this manner either.

Read: Customer Churn & How to Reduce It?

What are your biggest challenges?

Sometimes the easiest and most obvious solutions are right under your nose. So start from the biggest challenges you’re experiencing and then narrow the way to smaller and more particular problems which this challenge is made of.

In this way you allow for more questions which will surely pop up along the way.

What is your biggest obstacle to growth?

This is a question not many actually think about, at least not in specific. And it can be tackled from many standpoints. 

So try and figure out the broader picture first – is it the revenue, employees, product, marketing or somethign else and then dig deeper to find out the exact issues. After detecting the problem it will sure be much easier to find a solution and work towards it.

Tips for Addressing Business Pain Points

Actions to take to identify these pain points and deliver products and services that cure them:

1. Think about the productivity in your company. Are your meetings too long? How complicated is your onbloarding? Is your administration under control? Do you meet the deadlines? This is a great starting point.
2. Talk to your current customers. Ask them these questions. If you know what problems plague their lives, you can help them out with it.
3. If you don’t have customers yet, try to come up with your customer’s responses metaphorically. Hop on Quora and Reddit and search for threads on your industry. It may not be real insight, but it’s better than winging it.
4. Take your efforts to Google. Find Frequently Asked Questions related to your industry. This is a good starting point. FAQs arise because they address common concerns of a general audience. However, they are surface-level, so use them to dig deeper.
5. Another great place to analyze pain points is through reviews and feedback. Reviews are valuable for your business as you can see what people value most about your company.

Take a look at some of the ones we’ve collected:

Picture 7. Paldesk review

Notice that it highlights the fact that we have a quality product and provide a great service. However, we also now know what to pay attention to regarding the development of the new features.

The same thing goes for you. Take a look through your reviews and look specifically for any common threads. It may not be an easy exercise or a quick endeavor, but it’s vital to the success of your business and the livelihood of the people you serve.

In a Nutshell

What have we learned? If you take time to learn the specific challenges your customers face, you’ll be able to help them address them head-on. That’s a win-win for everyone.

We hope that you have a better idea of what your customers are trying to do when they’re looking for brands or products like yours. Although many customer pain points are similar, there’s no one solution to solving your customers’ pain.

Fortunately, nobody knows your customers as you do, so dive into your research and start helping your customers achieve what they want to do.

What other tips do you have for helping customers overcome pain points?

Thus, pain points are essential. Find them. Use them. Rinse. Repeat.