How to find pain points with data

Your business exists to fulfill particular needs. Some customers need your product or service to alleviate whatever physical, social, economic or other perceived issue beholds them. Every business sells a solution to solve a problem.

Not all customer problems are equal, however, many businesses that offer stellar solutions to huge, real-world issues fail. Why?

“Cost and marketing” is a frequent reason. The truth is, many intelligent companies find customer pain points and sell their service or product as a solution to them. But how do you identify and act upon customer pain points? By using customer data.

What exactly are customer pain points?

Pain points are problems faced by potential customers which, when reframed, become business opportunities.

In actuality, your company’s leads and prospects experience pain points. Only when prospects decide to pay for your solution do they become customers. For simplicity’s sake, however, we’ll group leads, prospects and customers into a single group.

Successful companies identify pain points and provide solutions to them. They analyze customer experience data to derive the specific pain points driving traffic. You can discern why customers are coming to you and the problems they are trying to solve based on tracked customer behavior.

Frequently, customers don’t even know what their pain points are. If you identify the problem before they do and offer a solution they didn’t know existed, you are well on your way to making a sale.

Pain points are always context and customer-specific. There are two things to consider when determining potential pain points for your customers.

Context variability

The same customers will have different pain points in various places or times. For example, a tourist visiting Yellowstone National Park in August may want to avoid sunburn. This tourist is a perfect mark for a solution to sunburn – i.e., sunscreen or an overpriced hat. The same tourist at Yellowstone in February? Not so much.

Customer variability

Pain points aren’t universal. Different customers have different pain points based on interests and personal needs. Segmenting your potential customer base into different pain-point categories is always recommended. Some tourists will come prepared with hats and sunscreen. For them, the pain point may be “needing to cool down,” as opposed to avoiding sunburn. The pain points have the same root problem, but they are very different issues.

Types of customer pain points 

There are four broad categories of pain points that marketers typically identify. Each one offers an opportunity for you to help a customer and make a sale.

Financial pain points 

There are a variety of common financial pain points. Customers may simply leave problems unresolved due to the prohibitive cost of an existing solution. In this case, you have an opportunity to offer a more affordable alternative.

In a competitive market, the service or product received at a particular price point may be causing buyer’s remorse. You can offer a solution by providing similar goods of higher quality at the same price point, or a similar quality product at a lower price. Opportunities abound once you identify customers with financial pain points.

Productivity pain points 

Many solutions available to customers aren’t efficient. Your customers may be experiencing productivity pain points using an existing solution. Figure out how to offer a more efficient, convenient or user-friendly remedy than the one that currently exists to help them overcome their disappointment.

For example, digital experience platforms (DXPs) overcome the inefficient marketing approach of using separate CRM, CMS and different DevOps teams. Companies are seizing the power of DXP over siloed, traditional options.

Process pain points

Inefficient processes are the root of many customers’ misery. People will frequently opt for convenience over cost. The invention and growth of mobile passport control (MPC) apps are prime examples of this. Your customers will pay to avoid cumbersome workflows or processes.

Support pain points

Successful businesses know that few things pain customers more than subpar service. Make sure you identify this type of pain point in your company’s workflow and eliminate it. Convert the competition’s pained customers by demonstrating or marketing yourself as being responsive to customer’s needs.

Data-driven analysis finds customer pain points

Pain points may be idiosyncratic and dependent upon context and customer, but they aren’t invisible.

Many fledgling businesses originate from gut-level analysis of potential problems that need to be solved. Gut instinct is excellent for identifying and solving meta problems. Unfortunately, intuition is often errant. It typically doesn’t account for marketing context or customer variability. To find customer pain points, you need copious amounts of customer data.

CRMs help with data acquisition, but they are limited. They tend to operationalize customer journeys, focusing on the proverbial marketing funnel at the expense of finding customer pain points and exploring motivations.

Digital experience platforms (DXP) solve data-driven problems

A growing alternative to CRM solutions is digital experience platforms (DXPs). A DXP encompasses the best attributes of CRM, agile CMS and experience management technology under one cloud-based umbrella.

Identifying pain points requires:

• Constant surveillance across every single touchpoint
• Real-time data analysis
• Automated personalization

The best DXPs fulfill all three of the above requirements. Top DPX solutions also incorporate artificial intelligence in a hybrid manner to help you deliver content to customers that contains targeted solutions instantaneously.

Find customer pain points and offer to solve them

Leveraging customer experience data is the easiest way to grow your market with minimal expenditure.

Customer data analysis will help you identify gaps in your marketing strategy. It will help you build better, far more personalized customer journeys. Data-driven decision-making allows you to find customer pain points you would never have known existed.

Many of your competitors already use digital experience platforms (DXPs). DXPs allow you to delineate customer pain points and personalize their journeys more robustly than most CRM solutions. Digital experience platforms (DXPs) provide efficacious companies with a cloud-based, omnichannel personalization and pain-point-solving assembly line.

The best DXP solutions, like Optimizely DXP, are borderline predictive. DXPs will automatically offer your customers resolutions to pain points they may not even know they have. Solve these problems by resolving your customers’ pain-points in every new touchpoint across all channels.