How to Uncover and Solve Customer Pain Points with Ease in 2024

The identification of pain points and the process of solving them plays a crucial role in enhancing your service to your customers. The more you know about what's keeping them up at night, what's bugging them, the better you can speak to their needs.

Today's article will cover this important issue that you can easily fix with enough research, attention, and practice. And walk you through how to uncover and solve customer pain points.

We'll talk about what a pain point means, why it's important for you to find and solve them, and show you a couple of examples to provide a better understanding of the topic.

Here's how you can uncover and solve customer pain points with ease. Buckle up.

What is a Pain Point?

What are your clients having headaches for? What is making them miserable? What problems are they trying to solve that you have the skills and ability to help them do it?

The answer to these questions will define the meaning of a pain point for your business.

A pain point is a specific problem that a customer of your business may experience or is experiencing along their customer journey.

Customer Pain Points may include the process itself, or productivity issues; financial or support problems. They can be about anything.

Put simply, they are your customers' barriers that prevent them to go or see further, disabling them to take the next step to success.

Pain points might result from various symptoms such as lack of adequate knowledge or experience, inconsistent customer experience or lack of proper support system.

Here are some common customer pain points that may occur:

• Poor quality of products
• Complex buying process
• Delayed or insufficient support response
• Not enough sales
• Unreachable support team
• Website Nevigation pain points
• Financial pain points

Now, let's find out why it's super important to find and solve customer pain points like these.

Why should you find and solve pain points?

It's a common belief that people buy for pleasure. Actually, people are more likely to spend money to get out of something that causes them pain.

If you don't know your customers' pain points, you'll never be able to sell them your services or your product, it makes perfect sense!

Finding your customer's pain points is fundamental in understanding how to structure your sales pitch. Knowing what your customers are having problems with on a daily basis and what causes them to struggle could be your ticket to closing more sales. Getting the root cause of their pain is a huge factor that makes them trust you in the first place.

This is because being able to solve a customer’s pain points can be the most influential driving force behind their decision to stick with your product or service. Everybody would want to be around problem solvers because people appreciate the world through their own experiences. And customers are people, too! They would want to see help from you if you give off positive vibes and understanding. And when you do solve their problem, you will have built a trustworthy relationship that makes your customers come back for more.

Most customers can sense what makes them struggle or what bothers them, but they often can’t visualize or practice a solution for their pains. This is where you should step in and create and offer content that answers those needs and make your clients eagerly pay you for your services.

Here are a couple of examples on pain points and how they were solved:

2 Examples of Pain Points and How They're Solved

HelloFresh

A Productivity Pain Point

What do you associate dinnertime with? For most people, it's a very important time of the day, it's about connecting with family members, friends and talking about your day with them. It's time to relax.

Or is it?

I think we have all heard those magical words once or twice, or maybe more: ''So, what do you want to eat tonight?''

''Yeah, I'll take anything.''

Ah! The more people are involved, the more impossible it is not to start a debate on what to eat. Everybody feels like they're in the mood for something different be it Italian, Indian, Japanese you name it.

To see how this specific pain point is addressed in the product world, take a look at this promotion by HelloFresh above. What they're doing with their promotion is creating a better messaging that speaks to a problem and positioning their product (their meal kit) as a solution to it.

Yes, they could've just said ''Welcome to a world where dinner is always planned, simple and delicious'' but would it have the same impact?

By including that familiar same old question ''what do you want to eat?'', they take a step further and explicitly address a productivity pain point that annoys a big part of their audience.

Youtube TV

A Financial Pain Point

Research conducted by Pew in 2015 proved that 76% of today's Americans watched TV via satellite or cable. Less than 10 years later, there was a 26% drop in that number. This was because most people progressively grew away from traditional means of watching TV since they have access to whatever content they like via platforms such as Netflix, Mubi, Hulu, or Tubi.

But this was not the only reason why people felt this way. Cable and satellite services cost a lot of money, which is a major force behind this act. The same Pew researchers later found that people who caused that drop in number thought the price factor was a huge motivator in their decision.

Here's now how Youtube addressed this financial pain point by promoting their live TV streaming service:

YouTube here, creates perfect messaging by including a specific dollar amount in their advert. This is a great tactic for companies that address financial pain points, as it invites customers to think for a second about what they could do with their saved amounts. It's now up to you to imagine what you can do with saving 500 dollars extra. Maybe you think you deserve a weekend getaway? Go for it.

Also, it's important to give YouTube extra credit for showing off that $500 figure by explicitly mentioning five frustrating fees that typically come with traditional subscriptions.

How to Uncover Pain Points - 3 Methods

Identifying pain points is one of the fundamentals of marketing and running a successful, online business.

In both sales and marketing, you have to uncover your customers’ pain points to be able to correctly position your product or service as the superhero that comes to the rescue.

Okay, that's great to learn, but how? I can hear you asking.

Let’s discover the best ways to uncover customer pain points, align our solutions, and consequently succeed in solving these problems.

1. Analyze User Behaviour and Data

One of the best things you can do to uncover the pain points that make your customers suffer is analyzing and studying user behavior and data. By collecting this information, you'll have no difficulty in understanding the customer journey and seeing where your customers are getting stuck or quitting. As a result, you will have a clearer picture of their wants, needs, and problems.

These data analytics will provide insights into the actions of customers when interacting with your business online. They will give you an in-depth comprehension of how your customers are behaving as a result of your efforts and will help you offer better value accordingly.

After all the information you expose yourself via user behavior and data, you will be in a better position to maximize your performance.

You can be sure that there’s no better way to solve your customer pain points than showing that you understand them and their problems.

It was stated by IBM that 78% of customers don’t feel understood by brands and product owners. This is, for sure, upsetting news.

And also exactly why you should step in and show your customers that you do study what you learn from their behaviors and, thus, understand their pain points.

In addition to analyzing user behavior and data, you can also conduct surveys, researches, have personal phone calls, and go through online reviews to uncover more.

2. Watch People Interact with Your Product

Observing users interacting with your product can be an excellent way to understand the usability of your service as well as its shortcomings or possible flaws.

In an industry committed to offering great value for people who use products, services, and apps, usability testing is an essential and helpful way to pay close attention to this interaction.

Session recording is one of the most influential methods that you might want to try.

Session recording will help you understand the major problems that users encounter when they interact with your product. The data collected by session recordings help you understand what features are the most captivating for the users as well as what problems users face in terms of interaction while they experience your product.

To conduct a session recording, you can use a special tool like HotJar.

In addition to sessions recordings, you can use products like UserTesting to help you understand what exactly is wrong with your product that bugs your customers.

UserTesting also will let you:

• Identify how long it takes a participant to complete certain tasks.
• Find out how happy participants are with your product.
• Identify alterations required to enhance user performance and contentment.

3. Ask Them

Sometimes some pain points might be too deep for you to uncover by yourself and in those circumstances, avoiding any kind of assumptions and asking your customers would probably be a definite way of uncovering their pain points more accurately.

When you think about it for a second, pain point discovery is all about asking the right questions.

What I mean by that is, let your users be your guide as you try to invent a venture that will get them out of the pain they're suffering.

Through customer insight questions, you can get a larger view of your customer’s negative experience. These questions are not only perfect conversation starters, but they also allow you both to have a mutually beneficial conversation.

The key is to ask open-ended questions that require an in detail answer, giving you a broader view of the issue. This allows you to collect as much information as possible.

Open-ended questions are the type of questions you can ask when you want to avoid yes or no answers, on the contrary, have a deeper connection instead of practicing small talk.

Here are a few examples of questions that you can ask to collect more valuable info:

• What is it that you think is preventing you from achieving X?
• Why isn’t your current solution working for you?
• What is the biggest struggle you’re currently facing?
• What is preventing you from achieving your goals? 
• What’s holding your business back from growth?

How to Solve Customer Pain Points in 3 Steps

1. Adress the Pain Point

To begin solving a pain point, what you need to do first is address the specific pain point of your user.

At this point, communication is key. You need to be transparent to your users and make sure they understand why the pain point exists and what you're doing to solve it; use the same language with your prospects and show them how your solution can relieve this pain.

Be a good listener and be reliable. Nobody would come up to someone that they don't trust about their problems. Be that trustworthy person for your users because it will help you understand the pain point better and consequently, you can do your best to take action to do something about it.

Again, remember to ask the right questions that will provide in-depth answers, and give detailed information in return. This will create optimal communication between you and your customers, and make it easier to solve their pain points.

2. Guide Your Customers Around the Pain Point

While you're working on removing the pain point from the customer journey, you should have a makeshift solution to help your users guide around it.

Helping them with guidelines when you were reaching out to them during the first step, or guiding them through on the spot can be effective.

Here's an example of how UserGuiding achieved this:

Igus is a plastics manufacturer that supplies teams with custom-built plastics. Represented in 35 countries and known as a leading manufacturer of energy chain systems, Igus' website naturally has hundreds of products and a lot of information to enable people to understand these products.

However, it was later found out that the more advanced the website gets, the more complex it becomes. This was bad news because the website was no longer comprehensible for the customers and that was the very important goal in the first place.

As a result, they were suffering from a lack of communication skills with their users due to their website being hard-coded. This situation even created a need for a new instructive tool to help users understand along the way.

What does this sound like to you? Yup. A pain point. A big one.

UserGuiding was the perfect solution for Igus, in that it does a great job helping users gain more information instantly.

What could UserGuiding do for Igus?

Here's what:

• interactive product tours,
• tooltips,
• hotspots,
• user onboarding checklists,
• in-app resource centers, 
• and NPS surveys.

So it was perfect for what they were aching for: A simpler website that walks through its users.

Long story short, Igus used UserGuiding's hotspots feature to help users understand some features of their web product while they were changing their website to eliminate these points. A happy ending.

3. Eliminate the Pain Point

Eliminating the pain point may take time, as the product or your processes might need some overhaul. But, even if you're guiding users around a pain point effectively, you should find a way to eliminate it from the root.

So look for the pain. Think of things that people find frustrating or even uncomfortable. Then, with the pain clearly displayed and in mind, switch gears and provide cures. Focus on healing.

By Fixing pain points you can reduce friction, which will allow you to find more time, energy, and money. And in doing so, you'll offer a better experience. Turn annoyed employees that feel trapped into excited entrepreneurs who know you care about improving their experience.

Of course, as your business grows, things will change. Pain points will always be there and impact will be felt. It's only natural for growth.

BUT you can uncover and solve pain points and the disturbance associated with them. The key is to listen and offer personalized solutions to each customer, find common ground and put your clients at ease.

So, that was how to uncover and solve pain points step by step. I hope you found it useful and clear to understand.

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