How To Identify Your Customer's Pain Points

As a business, your relationship with your customers is based on trust. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how to make your customer experience fine-tuned to achieve the best possible outcomes for the sake of your customers.

Regardless of where your company currently stands in terms of customer experience (CX), you should always be ready to innovate and expand beyond your current state. That is a necessary tenet for growth.

Customer journey pain points: four different kinds

The exact answer to this question will vary based on the customer, but it encompasses the problems that potential and current customers face concerning your business and the marketplace.

All customers can't possibly face the same pain points. Everyone exists within specific demographics, and some may be more affected by certain problems than others.

However, it is possible to generalize to some extent, and it is typically understood that pain points fall under four common 'themes':

• Financial pain points
• Process pain points
• Productivity pain points
• Support pain points

Financial Pain Points

Financial pain points are usually related to budgeting and resources. Not every customer can be equipped to pay for your service on demand, even when they need it. As a business, it isn't enough to write off customers who do not presently have the ability to pay. Doing that alienates a large pool of potential customers.

Instead, addressing the pain points of a prospective customer can be integral to your expansion. When addressing the financial pain points that arise, you'll need to look at what makes customers unwilling to pay.

The nature of your CX design may be the key to understanding financial pain points. Ask essential questions such as whether or not there is a clear breakdown of fees or if your services seem overpriced compared to the competition. These questions can help you narrow down areas of concern and then improve upon them.

Process Pain Points

This pain points have more to do with your actual product or service. This could be manifested through constant delays, server downtimes, and other points where customers could easily get fed up and begin to search elsewhere.

When customers feel like they're up against a lot of friction constantly, your process may not well thought-out.

If your UX design is subpar, it's worth looking into. Customers should never feel like their tools are clunky while utilizing them. If they feel unsatisfied with the quality of your process, it could reduce customer retention rates.

Productivity Pain Points

Similar to process pain points, productivity pain points exist when your customers consistently find friction along their customer journey.

To some extent, these encompass all pain points because the main reason a client wants to engage with the service of your SaaS Company is to boost productivity. Whether you have cloud services or CRM tools, the ultimate goal is to save time and resources by employing the use of your service.

As a provider, you owe it to these customers to have little to no friction and redundancy during the customer journey. Creating good CX and promoting retention are based on this foundation.

Your services should optimize productivity for your users. Their time is valuable, and you'll need to treat this as a focal point.

Support Pain Points

It's easy for this particular class of pain points to fall by the wayside, but the truth is, good customer support is crucial – especially in 2023, when many businesses are facing an uncertain future due to the economic downturn. Your support is essentially the final lifeline and may be the last thing preventing them from churning.

Customers need to be able to communicate with agents and get solutions to their issues using any channel they prefer.

Good customer support can be leveraged to build customer loyalty. When customers have specific issues that need to be addressed, your support is what lets them know if you're serious about prioritizing their needs.

What are some examples of customer pain points? 

As we've discussed, most pain points can be fit into one of the four themes above. Some specific examples of pain points drawing from all four themes are: 

• Your pricing plans are too high
• You pricing is not flexible enough
• The information on your website is unclear or confusing
• Your website navigation is
• There is too much friction in the signup process
• There is too much friction in the renewal process
• Your UI is clunky and unappealing
• Your UX is unintuitive
• You have too much bloat or too many irrelevant features
• Alternatively, your feature set is too limited
• Your onboarding is poorly designed
• Your self-service resources are lacking
• Your customer support agents aren't well trained
• You haven't hired enough customer support agents
• Your customer support agents are taking too long to resolve queries
• Alternatively, your customer support agents are resolving queries quickly but not adequately or thoroughly
• You haven't implemented proactive support practices to catch users before they churn and prevent them from doing so

How to identify and solve customer pain points

Your CX probably isn't perfect. These pain points have likely manifested themselves within your customer journey in one form or another. Yet there isn't a way to instantly tell what is affecting your customers.

Luckily for you, we have some tips on fishing them out and identifying some customer pain points in your organization.

Get direct feedback from your customers

With the use of various insight-gathering tools, you can be better equipped to address the pain points faced by your customers. To remedy the issues faced by customers, you'll need to gather some data. There's no better way to get factual information than through qualitative research. Tools like questionnaires, interviews, customer satisfaction or customer effort surveys and focus groups can give you a good idea of the pain points within your customer journey.

Once you've received the information from customers, it's time to pair it with some data. By having the data accessible to corroborate the pain points from surveys, you'll have a better time addressing them. For example, if your CES scores for any particular interaction or feature are unusually high, it may be time to examine how you can make that particular feature or process easier to use.

Show empathy in your responses

Within your customer service solutions, empathy must be prioritized. Taking the empathetic route is highly important in the world of customer service. When you can show an understanding of a customer from a relatable and human standpoint, they will feel valued. In your customer journey, personalized support is something that can take you on the very satisfying road of customer retention.

Showing compassion through support agents may be enough to brighten the day for your customers, so your agents should be able to respond with a good amount of respect and patience. To maintain a good level of continuity, you should consider providing the same agent to a customer after positive interactions; that way, you'll maintain a solid relationship with the customer.

Having empathetic responses also relies on the amount of previous data accessible to your agents. If your agents have instant access to previous support interactions, they'll have a better time knowing how to deal with requests.

Use the right customer service technology

It isn't enough to have the latest and greatest tools to equip your customer service teams. Instead, you should clearly understand your team and their needs. A customer service team is likely to have a good idea of why churn occurs. Reports have shown that customers are more likely to spend 140% more after a positive customer experience, so equipping your customer service teams should be high on your list if you want to maximize profits.

With the best customer support tools in each category in your arsenal, your team will finally have access to insights that can show the problems customers face.

Keep tabs

While it pays to look towards your own unique goals, you should also have a strong sense of how your brand is being received by people outside of the spaces you have direct control over. Being hands-on helps address pain points.

To do this, you should be aware of online reviews and social media discussions related to your company. According to research conducted by Harvard Business Review, reviews can have as much as a 5-9% effect on revenue.

Knowing this, you must acknowledge the power reviews can have on your business and success. 13% of customers who have a negative interaction with your brand will tell up 15 or more people about it. That can quickly turn into a PR wildfire that is hard to douse. So make sure you have your finger on the pulse, respond in a polite and professional way to online reviews — even negative ones — and work to continually improve your product and processes.

Improving customer pain points in SaaS business

As a SaaS business, you know that customer success is key to your success. It can be hard to track all of your customer's interactions and pain points, especially if you have a lot of customers.

By understanding your customer's pain points, you can focus on creating a customer experience that meets their needs and exceeds their expectations. And the best way to get this valuable feedback? Ask your customers directly! Show empathy in your responses and use the right customer service technology to keep track of what's happening in your industry.

Wrapping things up

In the world of business, building trust with customers is an essential part of creating a successful enterprise. By understanding and solving customer pain points in your SaaS business, you can create a better customer experience that meets the needs of your clients. This will lead to increased customer retention and higher profits. It's important to remember that customer pain points can differ from customer to customer, so it's essential to gather feedback and data to create a personalized experience. With the right tools and mindset, you can create a SaaS business that is built on a foundation of customer satisfaction and success.