Customers aren’t always as transparent as you hope they would be. You may hear complaints or issues, but not about the various problems that you can actually solve…if only you knew what they were! Luckily, there are specific means to find out what it is that pains your customers and means, such as CRM tools, to collect and analyze the data so you can solve it accordingly. We’ll look at how best to use CRM tools to fix pain points, but first, let’s take a look at what pain points are and how to find them.

Customer Pain Points, in a Nutshell:

Unlike specific customer complaints about a specific product or service, a pain point is a more persistent issue that can be solved by your particular product or service offering. Pain points often stem from categories such as financial, productivity, process, or support issues. Determining what their pain points are and what category they fall into can help you determine how you can address each pain point. 

How to Determine Your Customers’ Pain Points:

1. Ask 

Simply asking your customers what their pain points are can be enough to get the information you need to solve their problems, but what questions should you ask? The most important aspect to keep in mind is to ask open-ended questions. This can be accomplished with surveys and questionnaires with questions such as these:

• What keeps your business from growing?
• What inhibits you from closing deals?
• What makes you lose customers?
• What does management keep harping on?
• What do you spend most of your time doing every day?

Getting answers to these questions will be a good place to start. 

2. Listen 

Often, your customers may be giving you their pain points, but you aren’t picking up on them. Have your sales representatives listen to their customers and prospects to learn any new pain points that are prevalent among them. Use the information gained from face-to-face conversations, phone calls, live chats, etc. and have them input the data into their CRM tools for later analysis.

3. Look 

Some of your hidden gems in terms of customer pain points can be found in the reviews people give on products and services.  Those specifically geared towards your company or products will help you with problems specific to you, but looking at reviews elsewhere may help even more. Look at other information regarding your competitors as well. Determine what you can do better to differentiate yourself from them.

4. Understand 

Take some time to map your customers’ journey so you understand the process from their point of view. LinkedIn describes the customer journey map as a tool to visualize your customers’ experience of interacting with your brand from their perspective and describe mapping and understanding customer experience as a necessity in order to compete in 2020. Understanding the journey from initial interest to final purchase can help you determine where there are hiccups so you can determine some of their pain points on your own.

5. Search 

A technique that has yet to gain widespread use is to search for terms that your customers search for, similar to searching for a content marketing keyword. To do so, simply go to your Google search bar and start searching for a term such as “music app not working…” and see what pops up in the search results. You’ll find that people search terms such as “music app not working on mac, …on ios 14, …on Instagram,” etc. This will tell you where customers are having difficulty by using terms that relate to your products or services. 

How to Leverage CRM Tools to Fix Customer Pain Points

Implementing powerful, but affordable CRM tools, like Agile CRM, can help you compile all of the customer pain points you have pinpointed with the techniques above. By generating reports that allow you to see and analyze the issues that are consistently occurring, you have a good starting point to begin fixing them. 

Any time your customers’ pain points revolve around customer satisfaction issues that can be dealt with by having better data that is more organized, CRM tools can help as well. CRMs can also allow you to capture all of the interactions prospects have had with your company so you can understand why they don’t convert, or why they do.

Gathering your customers’ pain points in your CRM can also help your salespeople communicate how your business can solve their common problems. For example, determining most of your customers’ issues as to do with productivity, your sales reps will have the opportunity to articulate how your product can help boost their productivity for all of your prospects. It can also help your sales team diagnose issues based on common problems. This can be an invaluable tool for your business.

Plus, with CRMs trending towards augmenting AI and automation, ensuring your customers’ pain points are heard, acted upon, and successfully fixed will become easier than ever before using CRM tools.

Conclusion

Your customers deserve to be heard and doing so will only benefit you in the long run. So, find out if they are struggling with affording the products they are currently using so you can offer it for less. Find out if they are wasting too much time on their particular daily tasks or if their internal processes are bogging them down. Determine if they aren’t being supported like they want to and deserve to be so that you know how to communicate your superior customer support services. 

Once you’ve successfully used these techniques to determine this information, collect it within your CRM and understand what to do with the information so you can convert prospects and increase customer satisfaction and retention.

Using the cost-effective solution offered by Agile CRM will help you solve your own pain points as well, helping you stay within budget and help you with productivity, internal processes, and customer support issues you may have.  Plus, as part of the 500apps Infinity Suite of workplace apps, you’ll have even more ways to help with solving these pain points.