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.
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.
First, Do Your Pain Points Research
When it comes to creating and developing products that will drive your business to success, 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Each pain point refers to a specific problem your customers are facing — the outdated processes that take too much effort and time, or the inefficiencies that inconvenience them.
What obstacles do they complain about? What are their unmet needs and wants? What hacks or workarounds are they solving on their own?
However, not all customers will be aware of the pain points they’re experiencing and this might make marketing to them difficult. 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. In fact, 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?
Simply put, the worse problem is nagging them, the more chance you have to sell your solution. The better your solution is, the customers need it more and will pay faster.
Second, Use Live Chat to Find Pain Points
If an email survey seems a little too Stone Age for you, try live chat. It’s a great 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 the 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:
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 with using the help of tools like Paldesk.
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.
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 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 strategy 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 chat robots 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.
3 Tips for Addressing Business Pain Points
Actions to take to identify these pain points and deliver products and services that cure them:
- Talk to your current customers. Ask them these questions. If you know what problems plague their lives, you can help them out with it.
- If you don’t have customers yet, try to metaphorically come up with your customer’s responses. Hop on Quora and Reddit and do a search for threads on your industry. It may not be concrete insight, but it’s better than winging it.
- 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.
- 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:
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. Thus, pain points are important. Find them. Use them. Rinse. Repeat.
