Everyone keeps talking about pain points and using these as a basis for all your marketing copy and sales messages.

But what are the pain points? Do you know your customer’s pain points? Should you care? 

Learn everything you need to know about discovering your customer pain points and putting them to work.

An Introduction to Customer Pain Points

Pain points refer to specific challenges or problems that customers (or prospective customers) experience. These can be quite diverse and can range from mild to severe difficulties.

What’s more, pain points determine what types of solutions customers seek.

There are two primary sources of the information you need to identify your customers’ pain points – your customers themselves, and your sales and support teams.

Although many of your prospects are likely experiencing the same or similar pain points, the root cause of these pain points can be as diverse as your clientele. That’s why qualitative research is a fundamental part of identifying customer pain points.

The reason you need to conduct qualitative research (which focuses on detailed, individualized responses to open-ended questions) as opposed to quantitative research (which favours standardized questions and representative, statistically significant sample sizes) is that your customers’ pain points are highly subjective.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to encourage your audience to try out some new financial software. You’ll first need to find out what they’re currently struggling with.

Do their finances take too long to manage? In that case, you can emphasize that the solution you’re promoting is quick and simple to use.

Are they business owners juggling payments from multiple clients? In response to that pain point, you might showcase how robust the software is, and how it offers a centralized dashboard that can organize dozens of accounts.

Depending on the pain point you will offer a different solution. You may have one product that offers multiple solutions. 

Your business should have a clear understanding of your target markets and the problems/solutions you are providing. 

8 Ways To Identify Your Customer Pain Points

1. Read Reviews

Reviews help you see exactly what your customers are saying about your business and its products or services. When scouring the internet, it’s helpful to look through review websites and social media.

Performing thorough social listening can help you see what problems your customers solved with your product or service, and what problems or pain points they still have.

Some review websites even have a pros and cons section that allows you to identify immediately how your product or service addressed your customers’ needs.

If the review site you’re looking at includes a section where your customers can upload photos, check those out. The results provide a lot of information about how customers use your product.

For example, you may notice that a lot of customers wear the scarf your business makes incorrectly. This can help you identify gaps in customers’ understanding and provide you with the opportunity to create content that educates and helps your customers feel good about what they wear.

2. Conduct Surveys

Surveys allow you to generate feedback on your products and services. This can help you see how they’ve benefited your customers or how they’ve fallen short of expectations.

When creating surveys, ask questions that provide you and your team with quality information. That means including only the most relevant questions and providing multiple-choice answers when necessary.

For example, let’s say you ask, “How often do you use our product or service?” Good multiple-choice answers to include would be “once a week,” “once a month,” “every few months,” and “rarely.” This gives your team quantitative data to better improve your business and its marketing. Some other helpful questions to ask include:

• What problems are you trying to solve with our product or service?
• Are there ways we could improve our product or service?
• Are there ways we could improve your sales journey?
• What’s stopping you from using our product or service?

3. Talk With Your Sales Team

Your sales team is a great resource to help you understand your customers because they interact with them so often.

Every time a member of your team can’t complete a sale, there’s almost always a pain point or problem there that you can solve.

Talk to your team and learn what your customers say about your products and services. Do they dislike them? Did they mention a competitor? Did they mention the price?

Then, ask your sales team to ask your potential customers more questions in the future. Most notably, if someone is uninterested, have your team ask, “Is there something specific that’s stopping you from trying our product or service today?”

This can help you learn where you need to improve the goods you sell, or where you can improve your marketing.

Because your sales team is the closest to your customers, they can provide you with a lot of information about customers that can further your marketing efforts. For example, you can realize that a product FAQ guide can be useful or that case studies on how your services have benefited others can secure the sale.

4. Talk to Your Customer Service Teams

Who knows your customers best than those that deal with them every day?

Your customer service and sales teams are at the frontline of your business, battling customer pain points. Tap into the valuable insights they have by asking the following questions:

• What are some of the most common questions you repeatedly hear from customers?
• What is the most common objection from prospects?
• What types of solutions are prospects or customers typically looking for?
• What would you say your customer pain points are?

These questions will also prompt your sales and customer service teams to ask the right questions of your buyers.

Every member of your team will be forced to dig a little deeper into the needs and wants of your target personas, and as a result, gain a better understanding of the pain points standing in their way.

5. Create a Library of Helpful Content

Using the information you have gathered about your customers, consider how you can ease any pain points by creating content that they can read on their own when they’re looking for information on a topic or a solution to their problems. 

Once you’ve created a library, use Google Analytics to discover the most popular posts and the articles people tend to spend the most time on.

This gives you even more information about your customers so you can make sure your web visitors see the content that is most relevant and important to them, which helps customers and clients feel understood.

6. Conduct Market Research

Market research allows you to see how your competitors are marketing their products and services to the same target consumers. It’s possible they might discover different pain points you didn’t consider and market their products or services to customers a little differently or more effectively.

But conducting data research on your target audience is so much easier said than done. That’s why it’s helpful to have tools that make it easy.

7. Analyse your Social Media Channels

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat….

Whether we like it or not, social media has become a significant part of our lives. It provides a platform for customers to engage directly with brands (positively and negatively).

Analyse your social media channels to understand the common pain points customers are encountering with your products or services.

Even look at the social media channels of your competitors – what are people saying about those brands on social media? Could your customers be experiencing the same pain points?

8. Be the Customer

What better way to understand what your customers go through than by actually experiencing their journey first-hand.

Immerse yourself in the customer journey and document any notable findings. This approach leverages the design thinking mindset, a human-centred methodology focused on understanding the customer before solving their problems.

Consider some of the following questions to help identify pain points as you immerse yourself in the journey:

• What was difficult about the journey?
• What part of the journey was unexpected?
• What part of the journey could be better?

9. Map out the Customer Journey

By not mapping out the journey it is easy to fall into the trap of only focusing on the obvious customer touch points (such as purchases).

Analyse the complete customer lifecycle, from awareness (how do your customers find out about you?) all the way to post-purchase (what happens after the customer has bought your product?).

This will allow you to identify current pain points that your customers face that you can rectify immediately.

10. Gather Insights from Live Chat

If you have a live chat tool on your website, this is an excellent way to discover customer pain points. Not only does live chat offer a way to establish trust and confidence with customers, but it’s also a great tool to help collect real-time customer feedback.

A live chat tool can help you walk with your customers through each stage of the buyer’s journey.

It’s a way to almost “hold their hand” through different transactions or processes and will help keep you in the know of any friction throughout their experience.

And by sticking with them through each step of the journey, you’ll also collect some valuable information about the pain points they experience in each lifecycle stage as a prospect or customer.

The best way to understand your customers’ pain points is to listen, get feedback and act upon the feedback.