How To Identify Pain Points?

We published an article about what are pain points in customer journey last week. This week, we will focus on how to identify pain points.

The first thing you should do is listen to your customers and collect feedback. Even though we will talk about many methods, they are all different ways of listening to your customers. One of the fastest ways to increase customer satisfaction, increase conversion rate and increase business income is to listen to your customers and solve the problems they experience in their customer journey.

Further, this Deloitte research shows that customer-centric businesses are up to 60% more profitable than product-centric businesses.

Identifying a pain point is the first step to solving it. The more you research them, the better you’ll be able to identify and solve them in your own products. 

Identifying pain points is an ongoing process that should continue in every part of the workflow but there are some specific ways to search for them. Some of the ways are here:

• 📄 Creating a customer persona.
• 🌟 Product reviews and feedback.
• 👥 Running qualitative customer research. 
• 👀 Open-ended questions.
• 🔎 Usability testing.
• 📝 Interviews and surveys.
• 👂  Social listening.

Research and at least attempt to answer the following questions:

1. What do users find confusing?
2. What do they find frustrating?
3. Where are they not reaching their goals?
4. What causes them to abandon your site or application?
5. Are there any areas where users are getting lost or stuck?

Creating A Customer Persona

📄 Creating a customer persona might assist you in determining the value you provide. Your customer persona, also known as a buyer persona, is a fictional character that represents your ideal customer. You can break down your customer persona into four parts: demographics, goals, challenges and objections.

Demographics: Where does this person live? What’s their job? What’s their marital status? How old are they?

Goals: What does this person want to do? What are their motivations for buying from us?

Challenges: What obstacles are they facing on their path to achieving their goal? How are they currently addressing these challenges?

Objections: Why would they not be interested in our product or service?

Get more information about persona creation here.💡

Product Reviews And Feedback

🌟 Product reviews and feedback are the best sources of information on what your users think about your product. They use expressions that are common among people who have that particular problem, which makes it easier for you to find out if they’re already experiencing pain points or not.

You also need to determine if these pain points exist in other products similar to yours. If you come across a social media app with a good rating but many users complaining about the same thing, you can use that as a starting point for your own product. The same goes for competitors.

The best way to do this is to compile all the customer feedback you’ve received from different channels like emails, support tickets, social media, etc. into a single document for easy review.

Running Qualitative Customer Research

👥Running qualitative customer research is one of the essential ways to identify customer pain points. Well-conducted qualitative research lets customers express themselves, and explain their own problems in their own words. It includes customer journey mapping. It also may include focus groups or customer workshops.

This process will help you to map every step of the customer journey from finding your product to buying it and becoming a loyal customer. Through qualitative customer research, you can identify the most common pain points across all your customers, as well as any unusual issues that only affect a small percentage of them. For example:

• Recurring problems with delivery dates.
• Complicated returns policy.
• Issues completing payment.
• Lack of information about how to use the product or service once it has been purchased.

A better understanding of AB tests can offer a better mindset for any online research.💡

Open-ended Question

👀 Open-ended questions are key to getting the required details. They can ask by using different tools such as online chat, social media comments, etc. The important part of getting valuable data about customer pain points is asking the right questions. 

If you are not sure how to ask open-ended questions, that’s OK. You can use various methods to extract data from your customers. Do this by allowing them to leave comments on social media, send an email with a questionnaire or by using online chat.

Try asking these questions:

• Why did you choose us over other businesses?
• What made us stand out?
• What do you wish we could do better?
• What was your experience like dealing with our company?
• How does our product/service help you?
• How do we help ease your pain points?

Usability Testing

🔎 Usability testing is another method for identifying pain points. Especially pain points that can be solved with better UX design are identifiable by usability testing methods. Usability testing is the practice of evaluating a design’s usability with a set of users who are representative of the target audiences.

Observe your users to gain insight into their behavior, strengths, and weaknesses. Observation is one of the most powerful methods for finding out why people do what they do, and gives you evidence about what’s needed in your design. Observation involves watching people as they perform tasks on your website or app to determine areas where the user experience needs improvement. 

The end goal of usability testing is to assess how well the user experience of the website or app meets their goals and needs, while simultaneously helping them accomplish their tasks as easily and efficiently as possible.

Interviews And Surveys

📝 Interviews and surveys are other great opportunities to learn about things like how often people use certain features or how long it takes them to do something. You may notice the tasks that take the longest or have the most steps during interviews and surveys. You should record participants so you can monitor their reactions and observe pauses or other indicators that something is wrong.

For digital efforts, you can use tools like Clarity or Hotjar for this mission. There are dozens of tools available on the web that allow you to collect information through monitoring and analyzing quickly.

Once you’ve done all your research, put together a summary of what you learned. It should include patterns you noticed, trends in the data, and quotes from users that illustrate specific pain points.

If you plan to do any type of survey research, make sure you ask actual questions instead of asking people to rate their experience on a scale of 1-10 or some other meaningless number. Asking subjective questions like this is a bad idea because it tends to be unreliable and can also affect the way people answer subsequent questions. If you want people to rate their experience, give them concrete criteria they can use. For example: “How easy was it for you to complete this task with our product?” followed by a list of possible answers ranging from “Very Easy” to “Very Hard”.

Social Listening

👂 Social listening is an easy way to identify pain points. The process of discovering and analyzing what is being said about a company, business, product or brand on social media is known as social listening. It provides useful insight that can help identify pain points. 

Social media sites are the ideal place to analyze what customers are saying about your business or industry. Customers frequently use social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to express their thoughts on anything from products and services to industry trends and news.

By regularly monitoring these conversations, you can gain useful insights into customers’ pain points, allowing you to develop solutions that will improve the customer experience. Social listening also helps you stay on top of current trends that may impact your business.

Start here by learning everything you need to know about Facebook Pixel (Meta Pixel).💡

Conclusion

To sum up, pain points are the things that bother a person when using a product, service or solution. They can be deficiencies in features, usability, compatibility, pricing, and so on. Finding them is essential for digital products and services because the good ones are the ones that solve an actual need. And by finding pain points and suggesting suitable combats we can encourage customers to keep using a product or service.