5 Common Customer Pain Points and Tips to Solve Them

If there’s one aspect every sales representative needs to get right, it’s understanding their audiences' needs. Customers have a variety of challenges that need addressing, and as a sales rep, it’s your job to respond to those challenges in satisfactory ways. Understanding customers' journeys and identifying their pain points helps build your business credibility and establish long-term relationships.

Did you know that 75% of companies believe that their top objective is to improve their customer experience strategies? Knowing how to remove customer pain points can also help you implement and deliver the right customer experiences.

Before we delve into how you can identify and solve your customers' pain points, let’s look at what customer pain points are.

Customer Pain Points - Complicated or Easily Correctable?

In the context of business, customer pain points are the specific problems that your customers experience. These problems can be diverse. There are even customers who are not even sure of what their problems or pain points are, making it difficult for marketers to focus on what needs to be solved.

Typically, pain points can be divided into the following categories:

1. Financial: Customers looking to reduce their expenses or spend

2. Process: Customers looking to improve internal business processes through streamlining or automation

3. People: Customers looking to improve workforce productivity and efficiency‍‍

4. Support: Customers looking for better support during their sales process or customer journey

5. Productivity: Customers looking for more efficient ways to conduct business

Let’s take a deeper look into each of these customer pain points and understand how they can best be solved.

Identifying Customer Pain Points

Understanding customers' pain points is key to your business’ success. As a sales rep, it’s your job to help the customer understand how you can solve their problems. It will likely make them more engaged and interested in what you have to offer.

But before you jump on the bandwagon and start providing customers with solutions, it’s prudent to identify their pain points. Here are some ways you can do this:

• Conduct Surveys: Interest your customers in online surveys where you ask them for specific information. During the surveys, asking targeted questions is a great way to understand customers and their challenges better.
   
• Use Social Listening: Social listening helps track customer needs and wants and determine what your potential customers are looking for. It is usually how brands and businesses get to know what customers are looking for online, on search engines, and on social media channels.
   
• Use Live Chats: Many businesses and brands have a live chat feature on their website where customers can interact with a chatbot. The bot captures information about the problems customers face on a regular basis.

Identifying the customer pain points is a prerequisite to solving the challenges they face. This, in turn, has a positive impact on customer loyalty and retention.

Solving Customer Pain Points

1. Financial pain points

Customers generally undergo financial pain when their expenditures increase, spending is high but not as ROI driven or ROI efficient, or spending leads to financial strain on the business. Examples of financial pain points can be high subscription plans, payment of membership fees, repeated purchases, etc.

In this respect, a customer looks at a business to help cut down on the financial strain, reduce spending, and find a way to make more efficient expenditures. Following are some of the common pain points your customers might be facing:

• Our revenue is high, but the company is making low profits.
• We could be overpaying our resources and don’t know how to cut down the expenses.
• We are looking for expert guidance in making financial decisions.‍

How do sales reps achieve this?

The best way to attract a customer and solve their financial pain points is by emphasizing how your product can help them. You need to highlight a lower price point and tell the customer about your product’s features. This will help them understand why using your product can benefit them commercially.

A great way to do this is by using testimonials or success stories to underline the average savings that you have helped your client base make. When communicating this across to the customer, make sure to help them understand how your product delivers higher ROI.

When looking to offer a great customer experience, pricing plays a vital role as any customer wants to get a fair value for money. Some ways to do this is by comparing the price of your offerings with your competitors, keeping a check on the subscribers/members, consultation fee, service cost, or monthly in-app purchases using tools and spreadsheets.

Pro Tips

• Take qualitative feedback to understand the response data. Offer your customers value for money by offering simple and new features to make them understand if your product or service is worth their investment.
• Use featured landing pages, webinars, and testimonials to display product features, so your customers understand the quality of services offered by you.

2. Process pain points

Business processes determine the smoothness and seamlessness with which the business interacts with its customers. Operational problems are a regular feature of any business. All businesses try to streamline their internal operations so that their employees and customers can be managed efficiently.

Process pain points are the ones that your customers are forced to endure. Customers prefer convenience over costs. An unorganized process can affect a customer’s purchasing experience. Some process related hurdles maybe as follows:

• We are struggling to respond to customers’ queries faster. This is leading to a higher customer churn rate.
• We need a system that will help us qualify leads.
• Although we are unhappy with the current system we are working with, we are not sure how we can change to a new one.

Process-related pain points may vary from submitting applications to ensuring a customer connects with the right department or get their queries answered with the lowest response time. Typically, every customer wants to undergo the least amount of frustration to get in touch with a business and make sure that their time is utilized in an efficient way to get the job done.

How do sales reps achieve this?

A great way for sales reps to help businesses solve process-related pain points is by highlighting how well their product is integrated with advanced technologies and is able to deliver results in a time-efficient manner. Highlight how your product can make tough tasks easier for the customer, so they can reach out to their customers better and create smoother customer experiences.

Pro Tips

• Analyze your customer needs to understand their pain points and start connecting to the processes. Educate your sales teams about what they are selling; connect to prospective customers quickly for making purchases.
• Make it easy for your customers to find information on your website or app, with business hours mentioned along with FAQs and tutorials.‍

3. People pain points

People are the most important part of any business as it needs to find talented employees, staff, and the best people to work with. Solving people-related pain points in a business is when you need to find ways to derive maximum turnover out of your employees’ efforts.

Typically, people-related pain points include:

• Our employees are not invested in the company's success.
• Employees are not used to organized workflows.
• Our employee turnover rate is very high; it’s costly for the business to keep training new employees to get them integrated into the system.

These problems leads to a discrepancy in performance, which could lead to a dent in the company’s productivity.‍

How do sales reps achieve this?

Since people form the core of every business, it is important to pay attention to their morale. As a sales rep, focus on how your product can help a business organize, manage, and retain its employees better.

Pro Tips

• Train employees using organized workflows to enable them to derive maximum profits and achieve holistic business goals.
• Train employees and teach them how to get customers on board while ensuring maximum retention.‍

4. Support pain points

Your customers expect you to be always there for resolving their queries quickly with utmost support quality. For alleviating your customer’s support-related pain points, you need to offer customer service and multi-channel support. Most of the customers' time is wasted when they try to contact a business to get the support they need or solve a query. Some support issues customers face are:

• Our client rep team is unable to handle queries fast enough which is affecting our customer base.
• Although we spend a considerable amount of time on marketing, we are unable to retain customers.
• We don’t know how to effectively follow up with our existing customer base.

How do sales reps achieve this?

Support-related pain points can be overcome using certain tools and techniques that streamline the process. Make sure customer support is available across all the possible customer communication platforms such as email, live chat, phone, social media, etc.

Sales reps often help their prospect or client feel like an equal or a partner by highlighting the support they can offer. In your communication as well, use words like ‘we’ and ‘us’ to help your clients feel like you are hands-on about helping them achieve their business goals.

Pro Tips

• Use real-time tools such as AI chatbots, co-browsing, and live chat and document the critical procedures that customers need to face.
• Monitor customers’ feedback, their overall rating on the experience and the quality of the support offered.‍

5. Productivity pain points

In a business, it's the managers that help remove challenges and roadblocks for the team so that business goals are achieved in a timely manner, productivity remains high, and the business witnesses high profits. However, it's easy to fall prey to inefficiencies or wastage of time. Some inefficiencies customers commonly come across are:

• We are constantly missing deadlines set by clients.
• We are losing a lot of our precious time in internal meetings.
• Our employees are not able to complete their tasks on time.‍

How do sales reps achieve this?

Your job as a sales rep is to identify what is keeping a company and its employees from delivering high efficiency in terms of their work. You need to position your products as a solution to help them become more time-efficient, cost-efficient, and money-saving.

Pro Tips

Make better use of your time by offering the products and solutions that align with the customer's expectations.

Customers always look for convenience more than the money they are about to spend. With positive customer experiences, you get better conversion of customers into brand advocates.

Resolving Customer Pain Points with Proven Strategies

When it comes to identifying and solving customer pain points, you need to be on top of your game. From hearing your customers to reading about their requirements, you need to go all out to find ways to solve their challenges in a cost and time-efficient manner.

Outplay helps you engage with prospects and customers on multiple sales channels. The sales engagement platform that helps your sales teams increase their pipeline while providing insights that can drive your business. 

The product is the right combination of automation and genuine conversations that optimize outreach across all sales channels. Click here to find out more about Outplay.