Providing support to your customers often requires you to use some form of foresight. That knowledge will help your startup company to provide a more appropriate service. This is where understanding pain points can help you. Let’s explore how you can better identify these pain points and provide the best action for them.
Understanding Pain Points
In its simplest definition, a pain point is any problem that a customer or prospective customer may encounter in their purchase journey. While the definition encompasses every potential customer problem, what you consider an actual pain point can vary. For instance, you might exclude problems that customers can readily solve by themselves.
The Types Of Customer Pain Points
As you know, pain points can be diverse. It can also be different from customer to customer. However, you can still group them into several broad categories. Such grouping can help you organize the support requests you get and send them to designated agents.
Productivity Pain Points
The first pain point type is when your customer wants to get a more streamlined experience in their purchase. Customers want to make the most out of their time. Any issue that slows them down becomes a hindrance to their successful task.
Productivity pain points can also arise when using the product or service itself. Here, customers might be frustrated if they can’t just the product as they expected or wanted. Or they might need to go through complicated steps to get it working.
Support Pain Point
When customers encounter the above pain points, they will look for help. But getting that support is not always a smooth process. They might find themselves at a loss at where to get that help.
Image from Hubspot.
On the other hand, the customer might know where to go for help. But they end up not finding the answers for their exact issue. That can be a lot more frustrating, as they will need to repeat the whole process of searching. Customers can lose their loyalty to you because of this.
Financial Pain Point
Money is always a consideration for any business transaction. The customer’s goal is typically to get more results without spending too much. Any problem that leads them to spend more is often a strong pain point. For instance, they might have a tool that requires too much upkeep for practical use.
Image from Rewards and Employee Benefits Association.
Many customers also often want more strategic purchase options. Some might prefer to purchase an item in bulk if they expect to use it repeatedly. With that, they want to make sure that such bulk purchases can be done easily.
Process Pain Point
Businesses are the ones mainly dealing with this pain point. Here, they are not the only ones who feel the pain point but also their customers. For instance, customers might have issues purchasing from the business. In turn, this can lead the latter to lose that customer.
Image from Perfect Forms.
Your goal with this pain point is to provide the client business with a means of improving their processes and making it easier for their customers. This type of pain point might not always be obvious. For that, you can take the initiative and help clients identify these.
How Your Startup Company Can Identify Pain Points
One challenge when trying to help customers deal with their pain points is identifying what these are exactly. As mentioned earlier, not all customers have the same pain points. While some might struggle with a particular issue, others can handle it without assistance.
The easiest way to identify these pain points is to ask the customer. When they connect with you for a support request, they will be more than willing to share details. Use this opportunity to ask as many questions as you need to hone in on the specific problem
You would also want to use real-time channels, such as live chat. With these, you can understand their customer issues right when they happen. You can then provide the relevant solutions as they need them.
Doing Qualitative Research
However, if you want your startup company to deliver better solutions to these pain points, you need to be more proactive in knowing them. That is especially helpful for capturing prospective customers, as you already have answers for them. This is where doing qualitative research will come in handy.
To do qualitative research, you need to collect a lot of answers from your customers. While not every customer situation is alike, this helps you determine some similarities and patterns that you can apply. Aside from sifting through the support conversations you got, you can also hold activities like focus group discussions and workshops.
These activities supplement the direct information from customers. Virtua Solutions can help you with the logistics of these activities. Our virtual assistant team can help plan and conduct the actual FGD and workshops. This way, you can focus on other key information-gathering strategies and get more data.
Quizzing Your Sales Team
Another great source of information for resolving pain points is the sales team. Because they are the ones that face customers, the team can catch on to various nuances. Those nuances can hint at pain points that these customers might not even be aware of.
And if you are outsourcing your customer service with us, you can get even better customer insights. Our agents have several years of experience working in different industries. This helped them better grasp customer concerns and determine various pain points. We can then help you develop custom solutions to deal with these.
Providing The Best Solution For Your Startup Company Customers’ Pain
Once you have gathered enough information, you can start developing solutions for the various pain points. Note that the pain point can have different varieties. You need to provide different solutions for these. Make the selection process easy for customers so that they can implement these immediately.
You would also want to provide as much information to customers as possible. That way, they can use the same solution themselves should they encounter the same issue again. With that, your team should be ready to respond again.
Virtua Solutions is prepared to help your startup company provide more assistance to customers. Contact us today for appointments. We will help you develop a comprehensive pain point strategy that will benefit customers and you.