By Faith Ocampo
Every brand aims to make the customer journey as painless and enjoyable as possible. They know it’s the key to build trust with their target customers.
However, no matter how sophisticated the purchase journey is, pain points are still inevitable. As customers’ preferences change, your business must be able to cope by making the necessary adjustments. This means you have to be attentive to the voice of the customer so you can meet their expectations. Here are ways to identify the customers’ pain points and solve them permanently.
Listen
When sales reps or telemarketers pitch their products and services, they tend to use the “sell-and-tell” technique. Armed with dazzling smiles and captivating phrases, they mostly focus on what they should say to convince customers to buy. This prevents them from listening to the customer’s story.
This is the most common mistake that brands make. When they find a sales opportunity, they make the whole thing about them, forgetting that the decision to buy rests in the hands of their customers. If you’re not willing to listen to what they have to say, let alone give them a chance to speak up, they won’t trust your brand.
Focus on Your Customers’ Needs
Implementing a customer support approach that prioritizes the customers’ needs will help you iron out their pain points. However, brands fail to do this because they neglect the voice of the customer. They may already be telling you what their issues are, but until you’re willing to listen, this feedback will be useless.
Instead, you should make customers feel special during every interaction. Find out what motivates them to buy, what sales practices drive them away, and what they expect from your company. The next step would be to integrate these insights into your organization’s processes. This way, you can smooth out the rough parts of the customer journey.
Ask Open-Ended Questions
Conducting a market research is an effective way to discover customers’ pain points. However, you must design your research in a way that encourages customers to share their insights. For instance, asking open-ended questions during the customer satisfaction survey will surely elicit more insights, stories, and ideas than closed-ended questions.
To get to the bottom of the customer’s issues, focus on the “how” and “why” rather than on the “what.” Although it’s more laborious to analyze the responses you’ll gain, the benefits are surely worth it. The ideas you extract will be useful in improving the customer journey.
Find the Root Cause of the Problem
Targeting only the secondary or immediate causes of the customers’ pain points is always ineffective. The problem will surely keep recurring, and you’re lucky if your customers still stick to your brand even when that happens.
If you trace the root cause of the issues at hand, you can put a stop to the problems permanently. However, it takes a lot of research to find the root cause, or causes, of a certain pain point, which leads us to the next and last tip.
Always Collect Feedback
Market research is a continuous activity, but often, customer support managers don’t realize that feedback collection is a crucial part of research. Keeping your ears open for customers’ insights will allow you to understand them, their preferences, as well as the deal breakers that drive them away from brands.
It’s also necessary to collect feedback so you can quickly spot arising patterns or trends in the issues that customers face. This way, you can put a stop to them before they become full-blown crises.
