4 Customer Pain Points Businesses Must Address

Even the most loved brands in the world still have to address customer pain points. Those that are customer-centric and consider the customer retain customers and build stronger trust.

Every business and its customers are unique, and so are their pain points. However, some universal best practices can help you uncover and solve problems before they impact your business.

What Are Your Customers’ Pain Points?

If you want to address them, you first have to identify them. It may seem like a simple question, but the answer is usually more complex. To understand your customers’ challenges regarding how you serve and support them, you’ll need data.

You can certainly ask them through surveys you send out at specific times. Additionally, you might send briefer questionnaires after they interact with your contact center. You can’t guarantee that you’ll get answers.

Another way to uncover these pain points is by looking at the analytics of your contact center software. It should be able to highlight the most common problems your customers have.

You can also source data from other customer-facing roles like sales to see what insights they’re hearing. Finally, you can monitor any “chatter” about your brand on social media or in user communities that you host.

Combining all this information should help you pinpoint the most common customer pain points. Many of those will likely fall into the categories below.

4 Common Pain Points You Must Address to Attract and Retain Customers

Again, each company will have varying pain points to address, but here are the most common ones.

Problems with Products

No product is perfect. No matter how much testing and development went into it — whether it’s a steel gasket or software — there will always be lingering problems. Much of the time, you won’t know about this until it’s out in the market and you start receiving support calls.

Once you start to see a pattern around specific problems, it’s time to go from being reactive to proactive. Your product team and customer service professionals need to come together to do two things:

Identify the root cause of the problem and fix it. That’s not always easy and can be expensive. You want to get ahead of it as fast as possible so it doesn’t turn into a catastrophe that can have reputational and financial consequences.

Develop a communication plan to inform customers that purchased the product. You’ll need to advise them of the steps you’re taking to remediate the issue. You need to notify all customers about this, not just those who contacted you.

Delays in Support Responses

No one wants to wait when they need help. Because we live in a digital world, expectations around fast responses are high. A survey found that 90 percent of customers rated an “immediate” response as critical when they have a question. The definition of “immediate” in the survey was 10 minutes or less for most respondents.

So, it seems 10 minutes or less is your window, but how can you achieve this? Improving support responses requires several things:

Providing an omnichannel experience for customers — phone, chat, email, and social media — that all aggregates to a queue for your agents.
Having a properly staffed contact center, which you can optimize by tracking volume trends through contact center analytics.
Working toward improving your queue numbers constantly by digging deeper into why certain calls take longer. The reason could be that your agent needs more training or that the issue is new and requires more research.

The bottom line is that you should be able to easily measure the metrics that matter around response time to understand the why behind the time. Then work to improve it.

Inconsistent or Low-Quality Support

Just because agents quickly close out inquiries with customers doesn’t mean it was a positive experience. Sometimes, customers may give up on support because it’s not helpful. Further, they may receive contradicting responses if they’ve contacted you numerous times. If this continues to happen, you could lose customers.

To assess the quality of your agents, supervisors can use tools to review and score agents as well as provide them specific feedback. Functions like monitor, whisper, and barge allow supervisors to overhear the conversation and provide help.

Evaluating agent performance is no longer a mystery with the right technology tools. With your findings, you can offer more training and upskilling. And, your supervisors can do this from anywhere, even with remote contact centers.

Process Breakdowns

You never want customers to feel like it’s too complicated to do business with you. Barriers may exist that you’re not fully aware of because of breakdowns in the process (or lack thereof). You may hear this sentiment in the channels where you get customer feedback data. It may relate to the selling process, maintenance, or any other contact center interaction. Fixing these is crucial to retaining customers and keeping goodwill.

If there are ways to improve processes with technology, take advantage of these. It may be as simple as improving internal communication between teams. Providing everyone equal access with a UCaaS (unified communications as a service) platform is a wise investment.

How Will You Solve Customer Pain Points?

Customers rely on your business to deliver on the promise of the product or service. That’s just the initial transaction. They’ll continue to rely on you throughout the lifecycle of the product. If you want them to remain loyal, you’ll need to stay on top of pain points and solve them.

Intermedia has solutions that can help. Intermedia Unite offers everything in one place — phone, chat, video, contact center, and file sharing. See how it works today.