One of the most important parts of marketing is to know your customer’s pain points – but doing the work to find those pain points seems complicated. In this article, we aim to help simplify pain points for you and give you an actionable process, even if you’re on a shoestring budget!
Read on to learn more!
What Are Customer Pain Points?
Anyone who’s spent time with small kids or elderly adults will know that they have no trouble telling you exactly what hurts. It often becomes a longer conversation than you anticipated because some people love to talk about what’s bothering them, whether it’s a scraped knee or an arthritis flare-up. By the end of it, you may be wondering, “Why did they tell me? I’m not a doctor…”
A customer pain point is similar, but your company, product, or service can help with the problem! In fact, identifying a customer’s pain point is part of the research that goes into forming your unique value proposition!
The general definition of a customer pain point is a specific problem that your current or prospective customer is facing. They can run into this issue at any point in their customer journey, so the best way to handle customer pain points is to think about the entire customer journey.
Why Are Customer Pain Points Important?
If you look at your business from the standpoint of the medical field, then your prospective clients would be your patients, and you would be their doctor. Even the best doctors cannot help their patients if they don’t know what’s going on with them. This is why they have you fill out a medical questionnaire, ask when the symptoms started and what they are, etc. It’s also why they run tests – to diagnose an issue.
In the same way, you will be unable to truly help your clients (or to attract potential clients) without knowing their specific needs and pain points. However, if you can identify them, you will show that you truly know your customer and care about their journey.
The highest level of relational success is found when one begins to anticipate the needs of the other – this is true in a professional setting as well as a personal one. When you can deliver a solution to a client’s pain point, you improve customer experience and increase your company’s productivity!
Types of Pain Points
According to Wordstream, there are four main types of pain points:
- If your prospective client feels like they’re throwing their money away by spending it on your pricier competitor, that’s a financial pain point. The client is hoping to reduce their overall spend by going with a less expensive alternative.
- This prospect is not a believer in the phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” They are always looking to improve their internal processes and streamline them to work more efficiently. A process example could be finding a more efficient way to nurture leads.
- For prospective clients (especially those who are tech-averse), support is a critical part of their journey. Unfortunately, many will abandon the effort to become clients simply because your website isn’t mobile-friendly. If this is the case, you could be losing money.
- If prospective customers spend too much time trying to work with their current solution and watching their day slip away, they could be looking to boost productivity. The goal of this client is to use their time efficiently by pivoting to another product or solution.
How Do I Find Customer Pain Points?
Now that we’ve covered what pain points are, how do you find them? Turns out it’s a lot more straightforward than you might think! According to HubSpot, there are three good ways to identify pain points:
- Ask your customers. There are great questions you can ask your clients (and yourself, if you think of things from their perspective) to find out where each of those pain points could be. Asking is the most straightforward way to learn a client’s pain points!
- Look for customer feedback. Customers (along every stage of the journey – whether they’re prospective, active, or former customers) leave feedback for you to find. Check out your customer support tickets, look on your social media accounts and online, and see if you’re mentioned in Reddit to discover what your customer pain points are!
- Ask the sales team. Who interacts the most with your clients? Your sales team! They’re experts at fielding questions and can be a huge resource for finding out what a client’s pain points are and how you can solve them. Even if you don’t have a solution now, the sales team can provide great ideas for upsells or additional services in the future.
How Do I Know If My Findings Are Accurate?
Everything in life comes with risk, doesn’t it? Identifying customer pain points is no different – if you’re not careful, you could end up with inaccurate findings that don’t help you or your clients.
Here are some ways to vet or analyze your findings about customer pain points:
- Hand-pick your ideal customers. Instead of asking every one of your clients, find several of your ideal customers – the ones who you most want to appeal to – and ask them what their pain points are. This will prevent you from getting hung up over an issue your clients don’t care about. (For example, if you offer luxury services, a financially-strapped customer would mind the price point, but a high-end customer would happily pay for additional care/customer service.)
- Weigh the results. If you do a deep dive on social media, reviews, and Reddit, chances are there will be some one-off complaints that most customers haven’t dealt with. Take the pain points that are repeated more seriously – especially if the issues are things that your current customers are dealing with.
- Discern between prospects and current clients. While it’s a great idea to ask your sales team to identify pain points, prospective client pain points may not be the same as your current client’s pain points. If your sales team finds a pain point for a prospect who decided not to close the deal, take that into consideration.
- Remember, pain points will change over time as you grow. As we said above, the goal of finding pain points is to provide a solution. The more solutions you create, the more pain points you may encounter. It’s a can of worms, in a sense, but what a win if you can continue to be the solution for your clients!
Examples of Customer Pain Points
Here are some practical examples of pain points that different organizations may encounter.
A Local Church
Financial/support problem: The congregation wants to reach out to the neighborhood, but no one knows about the church, and it has no online presence.
Solution: Pro-bono graphic design work – including creating custom tees for church members to wear in the community during outreach programs.
A Local Recruiting Company
Productivity problem: The company uses a spreadsheet to search for and manage its recruits, but it’s taking too long to add the data from their platform.
Solution: A software integration that immediately adds the info they need to a spreadsheet – or better yet – a custom-made solution for their recruiting team.
A Law Firm Focused On Appeals, Child Custody, Divorce, Domestic Violence
Support problem: Clients of this law firm are mainly women and children concerned for their safety, making it difficult to get them to come into the office.
Solution: Security staff posted visibly throughout the building to help put moms and kids at ease. These security officers have been trained to defuse situations and are prepared to defend law firm clients if needed.
Take the Pain Out of Finding Pain Points
As important as finding pain points are, it can be a pain to look for them. If you don’t have the time, finances, or processes to find your client’s pain points, let us support you.
Here at Matcha Design, we’ve got decades of experience and are happy to help your business thrive – tell us how we can help you today!
