Every business wants to deliver a consistently memorable customer experience.
Yet, when it comes to giving customers a great experience, many businesses get lost in the weeds of customer loyalty programs and self-service options.
Even though these strategies are important for keeping customers engaged, you really need to start from scratch to ensure your customers wax lyrical about your business.
Building an effective customer journey map and identifying common pain points are key to creating a personalised, timely, relevant, unique experience that gets more customers flocking to you.
So, without further ado, let’s dive deeper into the world of customer pain points – specifically, main types of customer pain points and best ways to position your business as the go-to solution.
Table of contents:
1. 4 Types of Customer Pain Points and What to Do About Them
Any good salesman can tell you that the secret sauce to driving sales is knowing your customers’ pain points.
But first, let’s skip the business jargon.
In layman’s terms, pain points are specific problems that your prospects and customers are experiencing and which can be solved by your product or service. Plain and simple.
That’s why understanding pain points and focusing on what makes your prospects feel frustrated can help you address their problems, provide the right solutions and, ultimately, deliver a great Customer Experience (CX).
Although pain points can range anywhere from small inconveniences to big challenges, it is common to group them into 4 categories so you can better approach how to fix them.
1.1. Financial Pain Points
When experiencing financial pain points, consumers are looking for a more affordable product or service.
This means they are frequently unhappy with how much they are spending with their current suppliers.
Here are a few examples of financial pain points:
- Expensive membership fees or subscription plans
- High cost of repeat purchases
- Short lifespan of a product that should last a significant length of time
- Hidden costs and lack of price transparency
- Prices going up after a certain time period
How to fix: Start by understanding customer expectations and competitor benchmarks.
Then, put a well-rounded pricing strategy in place to ensure you cater to your customers’ needs.
Warren Buffett once said that “the single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power.”
However, if your prospects often experience financial pain points, it is important to find that sweet spot where you set a competitive price without severe cuts to profit margins.
While there’s no one surefire, formula-based approach to pricing products, you should strike the right balance between not hurting your business by lowering prices too much and not scaring off customers with your high prices.
You can also consider including budget-friendly options and subscription plans in your offering, in a way that meets your customers’ needs and is aligned with your company’s priorities.
1.2. Productivity Pain Points
Most people nowadays have busy schedules. That’s why they seek efficiency, convenience, and comfort, especially when it comes to making purchases.
Productivity pain points occur when consumers are spending too much time using a specific product or service.
A good example is going to a sit-down restaurant with crowds and long wait times. Especially if you’re running late, long wait times can quickly turn you away and become an uncomfortable experience.
Some examples of productivity pain points are:
- Complex buying process (e.g., too many forms that need to be filled out)
- The process takes hours to complete
- Inconvenience in using a specific product
How to fix: Solving your customers’ productivity pain points isn’t so difficult – as long as you prove that your product is the key to saving their time.
For example, you can produce high-quality educational content that highlights (preferably in numbers) all the time your prospects will save when using your product or service.
You can also use images and clear product descriptions that outline how your product actually works and what makes it unique.
Be sure to also streamline your buying process so that customers won’t turn on their heels the minute they attempt to make a purchase – Just keep it brief and trim the fat where you can.
1.3. Support Pain Points
When customers seek help at critical stages of the customer journey, they’re looking for quick and definitive responses.
Nothing turns customers off like a poor customer service experience and lack of support.
In fact, according to a Zendesk report, 80% of customers say they would rather jump ship after more than one bad experience.
Here are a few examples of support pain points:
- The support centre does not know customers’ past inquiries or preferences
- Delayed support response
- Lack of availability of the support team
- Long hold times
- Hard-to-find information
- Inconvenient communication channels
To learn more, spare a few minutes and read this post: 6 Most Common Customer Service Mistakes & How to Avoid Them.
How to fix: Sometimes, small business owners believe that answering their own phones is the easiest and more affordable way to provide support to customers.
They may also think that using the latest technology such as chatbots is enough to please customers seeking after-hours support.
But is it really so? Hate to break it to you, but answering your own phone can make you seem unprofessional. Not to mention, by answering your own phone you risk being pulled in too many directions.
Automating customer interactions by using chatbots can also put customers off as most of them prefer speaking to a human customer service agent.
So how can you fix customer support pain points without spending heaps of money on recruiting, training, and hiring an in-house team member? With the help of a virtual receptionist.
A professional virtual receptionist is a real agent trained to provide support and outstanding customer service. It’s a convenient and affordable call answering service that allows you to immediately fix support pain points and level up customer satisfaction.
1.4. Process Pain Points
Process pain points are similar to productivity pain points. They occur when customers have difficulty when interacting with a business.
Process pain points can be viewed as speed bumps along the customer journey.
Most of the time, poor internal collaboration is the root of process pain points.
Some examples of process pain points include:
- Inability to connect to the right department
- Limited opening hours
- Lack of payment options
- Not receiving timely updates
- Support centre is only open for 8 hours a day
- Hard-to-find information
- Annoying website pop-ups
How to fix: Think if any bottlenecks are preventing you from providing a frictionless customer experience.
For instance, are your customers unable to contact customer support outside of the usual business hours?
In that case, a virtual receptionist (see “Support pain points”) is the perfect call answering service that can provide 24/7 coverage.
Or, do users leave your website due to sluggish load times or interruptive and distracting pop-ups? Then you should ensure your prospects and customers get a fast, seamless, rewarding user experience each time they visit your website.
Put simply, to fix process pain points and get a leg up on the competition, you should show your customers that interacting with your business and using your product is easier than anything else they’ve already tried.
Conclusion: Tackling customer pain points is one of the biggest hurdles in building long-lasting customer relationships.
By putting the right efforts into fixing these four pain points and differentiating your business, you will make your existing customers happier and attract new customers who are tired of experiencing pain points with your competitors.
Looking for easy and affordable ways to fix customer pain points and keep a pulse on what your customers want? B2B HQ brings you live virtual receptionists to answer your calls 24/7, create meaningful connections with customers and give them a good reason to come back to your business.
