How to Leverage Customer Pain Points to Improve Revenue

Customer experience is directly proportional to revenue. It can influence the financial health of your company and deserves your attention. If you choose to understand and resolve the struggles of your customers, you can decide how your customers’ pain points can be used to your advantage.

A customer’s pain point is a problem that the customer or prospect faces in the marketplace. It could be a problem with finding a product or service that they need desperately, or a problem with your products or services after they’ve purchased it from you. Discovering what the customer needs and realizing the urgency to find a solution can help you refine your product or service to meet your customers’ prerequisites.

Customer pain points can be problems experienced at any point in their customer journey. If you identify these problem areas and come up with corresponding solutions, you’re likely to generate more customers and retain the ones you already have.

There are four different types of pain points:

• Financial - These include issues related to money. The most common is having to buy a product they need, but which is expensive. An interesting example would be how most businesses are concerned with the rising costs of making calls through landlines. A good solution to use would be a small business VoIP system that can make those calls and reduce costs. 

• Productivity - These are problems that arise because products or services are not user friendly and are a waste of time. The customer finds them lacking comfort and convenience.

• Process - Customer concerns with internal processes of your business, like how your sales team collaborates with your digital marketing team. The workforce management process and related software are the best way to handle pain points related to internal processes. ‍

• Support - This is perhaps the most critical type of pain point. These occur towards the end of the customer journey. You’ve managed to convert a prospect into a customer, but they remain dissatisfied with their purchase. Perhaps the purchase itself or the after sales support is the issue. This is a customer service pain point.

So, now you know a little more about pain points, how can you leverage them to improve revenue? 

Identify pain points

You need to listen to your customers to be able to identify and categorize their pain points. The process is multidimensional, and there are a number of ways you can get information on what the customer really wants. The process is layered and complex, and issues that are highlighted might be from several of the categories listed above.

You need to provide your customers with open lines of communication. Create an atmosphere where they are willing to share their feelings. Social media is a fascinating window into the minds of your customers. Identify your target audience and look for issues being discussed that they find urgent and frustrating.

Consumer surveys are another great way to get information on what troubles a customer the most. One-on-one structured interviews are another option. This kind of qualitative research is fundamental in identifying your customers’ pain points and characterizing the buyer persona specific to your business. An insight into a customer’s dilemmas can help strategize what part of the sales funnel needs the most attention. This is part of conversion rate optimization and helps avoid customer abandonment for online focused brands.

Ask the right questions

To get an in-depth understanding of the problems that customers suffer from, you need to ask them the right questions. Questions that help in developing solutions that take away the pain. Eventually, you would be able to predict how to alleviate the pain-causing problem before it even exists.  

Consumer surveys and interviews need to have open-ended questions so they can gain insightful responses. The multiple choice questions that might be asked in customer focus groups should also have reasonable options that provide data for improvement of processes. The whole point is to discover underlying issues, and unless the right questions are asked, it is very hard to delve into the heart of the matter to tailor your outreach and win more business.

Once you’ve identified the different areas for improvement, use Google to find how users are searching for solutions. From there you can target the issues and the problems your business is best suited to solve. Once the research and surveys have helped gain some metrics on your customers and the KPIs needed to satisfy them, you can create a marketing dashboard. This can help visualize the data and provide a real-time window of your performance with your customers. 

Online reviews and testimonials

Ninety-two percent of people say that they read testimonials when considering a purchase. Customer testimonials build trust and confidence because they show prospective customers that your products or services actually work. Testimonials improve traffic and conversions, and drive revenue. Using your current customer base as advertisers for future customers is the best way to tackle any pain points.

A good example would be a communication software provider’s customer testimonial page. It could help those customers who are looking for the best virtual phone service and list the advantages of VoIP, for instance. It just goes on to show that customer pain points can be addressed by other customers through their testimonials. 

Leveraging current customers is a genius idea because they understand your lead’s problems and speak their language. Having customers speak on your behalf about your solutions can result in a significant ROI. Invest in developing customer success stories and help people resonate with them, so that they will then come to you to resolve their problems.

When you talk to customers who have made a purchase about their experience, you may find that there is enough room to grow to make their post sales experience comfortable, too. Testimonials also help improve problems in product quality or customer service standards. If feedback is provided on time to senior management and done so regularly, they can learn what works and what doesn’t, and can help improve the customer experience.

Empathize

The pain point has been identified, so it’s time to address it and provide a viable solution. The success of the solution depends on how well you are appealing to your customer’s emotions. To truly create a solution that works and alleviates pain, you need to empathize with the customer and work towards providing relief.

The journey started with pain, the next job is to communicate the emotional outcome of identifying their pain and using your product or service to resolve it. You need to be able to tell the customer that you delved into their pain and worked hard to create a product or service that is the exact solution to their problem. How you communicate this emotion is dependent on how well you empathize with the customer in the first place.

Making a purchase is an emotional activity. Every business has pain points, and the likelihood of you landing a customer’s business depends on how well you addressed them. So when you next review your marketing strategy, make sure you’re appealing to human emotions and meeting the concerns of your customers.

Once the pain and its corresponding solution has been segmented into a specific customer journey path, it is time to sell the emotional outcome of your product or service. Your communication to every customer, old or new, needs to show them that you empathize with their difficult situation and that you have a solution that can improve it. 

Design your strategy and solutions

Buying anything is an emotional act. How well you can make a sale and land someone’s business depends on how well you understood and addressed the buyer’s pain points.

Appealing to a prospect’s emotions is a winning marketing strategy. Start with the most disruptive pain point and work towards making the entire journey meaningful. Inform the customer that pain points have been identified and are being worked on. This will make them react favorably.

By now, you’ve established pain points by mapping the customer’s journey and have reviewed the entire process. To provide a compelling solution, you have to conceive that solution through the prism of the customer’s experience. Their challenges need to dictate your marketing and sales strategies.

An example of a solution tailored to a customer pain point can be found with virtual receptionists. They deal with customers on the phone and not in person. Many customers still do not have easy access to email or computers, but would like to correspond with your company and keep informed of all new services and promotions. Your solution can be fax by computer. You can fax newsletters, promotional content, and all your regular email marketing content to them.

While management identifies areas of improvement and prioritizes projects accordingly, they need to also work to reengineer the customer experience to increase customer retention. What’s worse than having a lead that doesn’t convert, is having a customer who abandons you because of poor product quality or inadequate support. 

Close the deal

When your products and services cater to their pain points, customers do not need any other reason to do business with you. The pain sparked the need to look for you. Your effort in recognizing the pain and addressing it means that you are the solution they’ve been looking for. You will give them relief. Your interest in helping them must be as real as their pain while looking for you.

To be the ultimate authority in the marketplace in your niche, you need to make an effort to understand the customer’s value in resolving their pain points. Focus your marketing strategies on appealing to a customer’s emotions. If the customer’s journey with you started with a pain point, it should end with relief from the problem. Solutions that target customer pain point’s help build stronger, longer lasting relationships. Nurture your customers so that they find you to be indispensable!