Customer pain point is a constant buzzword among businesses, and especially among marketers, who almost seem to be infatuated with it. And it’s not without reason – understanding your customers’ pain points is the first step towards offering them products and services they are really looking for. More often than not, it’s these pain points that prevent prospects from turning into customers.
In case you ever wondered what caused all those customers who put something in their shopping carts, abandon their carts at the last moment, the answer lies in “customer pain points.” It’s likely they came across a hurdle in their customer journey that they couldn’t overcome. In other words, a “pain point” that stopped them from completing their purchase.
For example, your website visitors might be facing issues with making quick and secure online payments, or perhaps they had a question and could not speak to an agent when they wanted to.
In this article we take a closer look at customer behavior and their pain points – and how you can use a live support chat software to identify these sources of “pain” along the customer journey, so that you can develop products and set customer service standards tailored to the actual needs of your customers. Let’s start, however, by taking a closer look at what customer pain points really are.
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What Are Customer Pain Points?
A pain point is a specific hurdle that prospects might come across as they explore your company’s products and solutions. And as it happens, customer pain points can be of a very diverse nature (almost as diverse as your clientele), making it difficult for you to market to these prospects. Worse, the customers may themselves be unaware of the problems they are experiencing, making your task as a product marketer even more arduous.
While it is difficult to keep track of every single pain point that every prospective customer might be facing, you should still be able to track down the most common of these pain areas. More importantly, you should be able to classify these problems into certain broad categories. Typically, there are four common types of pain points:
Financial Pain Points: Your prospects may be spending too much money on their current service/solution provider and may be looking to whittle down the costs.
Productivity Pain Points: Your prospects may be wasting more time than necessary while using the current tool/service and may be looking for something that helps them manage their time more efficiently.
Process Pain Points: Your prospects may not be happy with their existing systems/process and may be looking to streamline them with a better solution.
Support Pain Points: Your prospects may be unhappy with the support they are receiving and hence looking to change their current service/solution provider.
Whatever be the case, identifying these pain areas is the first step to offering the perfect solution to your prospects’ problems. And what’s the best way to identify these problems? Simple, just ask them!
Using a Live Support Chat Software to Listen to Your Customers
Checking out market trends and product research is a great idea, but you probably need to know how to solve your customers’ specific pain points. This is where qualitative research (which focuses on comprehensive, personalized responses to open-ended questions) comes in. Remember, your customers’ pain points are highly subjective and even when two customers appear to have the exact same problem, the underlying reasons for it could vary dramatically from one person to another.
Besides the intel gathered from your sales and support teams, one of the best sources for the information you need to identify your customers’ pain points happens to be – well, no surprises here – your customers themselves! And this is what makes a live chat software such a handy tool:
Conducting qualitative customer research
While quantitative research seeks to find answers to the what, when, where and who of decision making, qualitative research help with answers to the why and how. A live chat software can be an effective tool to ask your prospects (or even an existing customer) a series of unstructured questions and follow ups to understand what could motivate them to try/buy your product/service. While you should go into a discussion like this with some preparation ahead of time, it shouldn’t feel like sticking to a script.
Start by asking questions like:
- What is the main cause for frustration for the customer when it comes to [your product/service]?
- What does the prospect desire the most?
- What causes them to lose sleep over at night?
- Have they bought/used [your product/service] prior to this?
- If yes, what motivated them to buy it?
Qualitative research is a good first step to take when trying to understand your customers better. It’s about getting them to talk their opinions and frustrations, so you can understand their motivations and feelings.
Create an emotional connection
In order to create solutions that resonate with your customers, the focus should be on connecting with them at an emotional level, and then tapping the primary motivations that drive buying decisions. As per a study by the Harvard Business Review, the fundamental “emotional motivators” of consumer behavior include:
- Having confidence in the future
- Standing out from the crowd
- Feeling a sense of belonging
- Enjoying a sense of well-being
- Feeling a sense of thrill
- Feeling secure
- Being the person they want to be
- Succeeding in life, and
- Feeling a sense of freedom
By employing emotionally connected chats with your customers to address the their pain points, you will be able to attract and retain them in the long run.
Simplify customers’ online shopping journey and reducing cart abandonments
There can be several reasons for shopping cart abandonment, such as the website not mentioning shipping & handling fees until the checkout (which the customer may feel is too high), not being able to complete a purchase without first creating an account, a broken, or complicated checkout process, a slow website, lack of suitable payment options, or having a cluttered mobile experience.
Armed with a live support software, however, you have the ability to interact with your website visitors directly and in real time as they initiate the checkout process, offering them instant support along the way in case they face any issues. The fact that a live chat doesn’t require any external media or device, like a phone or email, it blends seamlessly into the customer’s shopping experience.
Co-Browsing, another feature of a capable live chat solution, lets you enhance your support experience effectively eliminating any pain points as the customer browses through your website. Co-Browsing is an extremely impactful feature to implement, especially during the checkout process, to help out the customer with instructions on where to click, how to navigate and how to complete the purchase.
Improve service expectations
A very common pain point for many customers shopping online is the quality of personalized service, or lack thereof, and missing in-store experience. This is one pain point that many shoppers have mentioned time and again – a desire for personalized support – a throwback to a more traditional service model where the sales staff is able to offer a more humane service, anticipating and fulfilling customer demands.
With a live chat software, your agents are able to answer customer queries on the spot and in real-time, providing customers with the instant gratification they crave for. Besides, your customers receive almost instantaneous responses, way faster than the traditional communication channels, such as phone and email, without the need to wait in long queues or for emails that may take days to arrive. No wonder that customer satisfaction rates for live support chats tend to be as high as 73% – where email and social media fare with just 61% and 48% respectively.
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Reduce wait times
We briefly mentioned this before – your customers want you to respond instantly to the question they directed at you. Waiting around for a resolution is a very pertinent pain area for most customers seeking a resolution to their problems. Unusual delays with traditional support channels can be frustrating for customers.
Fortunately for customers, the live support technology is there to reduce, and, at best, completely eliminate the need to wait for an answer. With robust features like chat monitoring and chat routing, you can distribute the incoming chat requests in such a way that all your resources are efficiently managed, without delaying the customer’s facilitation process.
Also, integrating a pre-chat survey system with the live chat software application can lead to fast and prompt facilitation, without the customer being exposed to the vagaries of response lag time.
Conclusion
Brands that do not make an effort to identify and resolve customer pain points risk losing their market share to competitors that have a reputation of addressing consumer problems positively. A live support chat solution can help you identify and resolve these outstanding pain points and help soothe disgruntled customers. With a focus on positive emotional connect, gathering consumer insights, and personalizing service delivery, a live chat solution goes a long way in setting a high bar when it comes to addressing customer pain points.
Remember: nobody understands your customers and the problems they face like you do. So, take a plunge into the world of qualitative research and start helping your consumers accomplish what they set out to achieve.
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I’m Jimish Shah, the person who started SkyZ Infotech, a Powerful and Result-Driven Most Reliable Digital Partner. I’m a professional blogger, digital marketer, and content marketer also with over 8 years of experience. My focus is on providing the most researched information to new startups, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and bloggers. My objective is to educate the youth of today on a broad range of subjects.
