A Pain POINT is any problem that your customer (TARGET CUSTOMER) may experience along their customer journey. Your goal is to create the PERFECT customer experience.
You need to know who your target customers are. That’s the person that’s most likely to buy from you. They have pain points. A pain point is any problem that your customer may experience along the customer journey, from the moment you attract them, to you selling to them, to you providing the product and/or service to them, warranty, re-selling, etc.
Look at the entire buying process. Your goal is to create the perfect customer experience. Look at every point of contact that you will have with the customer and ask yourself, how can it be perfect?
When I think the perfect customer experience, I think Amazon. They pretty much come as close to a perfect buying experience. And I usually think most big companies are too big to be great…
Have you ever called Comcast? You’ll know what I’m talking about.
Try to return a TV to Samsung. I had a better chance of having lunch in 2008 with Osama Bin Laden in a cave in Afghanistan!
I’m going to take you through common critical pain points that customers have.
Information
Can they find you quickly through Google or other forms of search? Can they find the critical information they need to buy? What it is you’re selling? Why should they choose you over over your competitors? Is there free shipping, free returns, chat support, warranties, etc. Is it difficult for me to find the critical information that I need as a buyer like me, this is what I look at, free shipping, free returns. That’s number one. Number two is, What’s your warranty?
Is your information available and is it easy to find?
Contacting Your Company
Hotels.com….I tried to reach them a week ago. Impossible. I went through the prompts and then they were like, “Hey listen, we’re never going to call you back, so if you maybe want to leave your number or go on our website, we might get back with you”. I’m being facetious, but I literally felt as if there were no ability to speak with a human being any time soon. They literally gave up.
Amazon: I have their 800 number. I call them about four times a year. Somebody answers the phone.
Make it easy to connect with your company, whether it’s chat or phone. That’s a very frustrating pain point when I can’t do that.
Buying Made Fast and Simple
The buying should be simple. You’re trying to alleviate this bottleneck in your customer experience that stops them from buying or slows them down.
Additional Products/Services
Do you make additional products and services that this target customer may want a need?
For example, Harry’s Razors now sell skin products for your face, etc. That’s a natural addition to their core product. I would have been selling to the wife immediately. I don’t think they’ve done that yet, but to me, it would have made sense.
Alot of companies make suggestions: If you like this, then you will LOVE that. This is how you grow a company bigger.
Free Returns WITH a Label
How hard is it to get a label? Have you ever tried to get a label from Victoria Secret?
Make it easy for me to print out or include it in the packaging. Make returns effortless, not a project.
Survey
When you’re trying to find all the pain points in your process, survey your customers. You’ll find out what the pain points are, but survey to see more of what they want to need and wish that you can improve on. I have a postcard that we mail out and we still hand address it. Our customers make suggestions and then they tell us how we could improve. Make it simple.
Have you ever just bought from your own company? I did. I called our phone line. It took too long and I adjusted the process afterward.
