Customer pain points are the problems, frustrations, or challenges that your customers face when they interact with your business. They can affect their satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. To improve your customer service management, you need to identify and address these pain points effectively. How can you use analytics to do that? Here are some tips.
The customer journey is the path that your customers take from awareness to purchase to advocacy. It consists of different stages, touchpoints, and channels. Analytics can help you map out and monitor your customer journey, and identify the pain points that occur at each stage. For example, you can use web analytics to track how visitors navigate your website, or social media analytics to measure how they engage with your posts. You can also use surveys, feedback forms, or reviews to collect qualitative data on their needs, expectations, and emotions.
I often start by thinking about the ‘WALL ‘what amazing looks like’. What would be the best possible experience for the customer. This gives a bench mark to compare the actual experience being delivered to. If there are multiple areas for improvement and limited resources, I would prioritise each experience in terms of impact. For instance if you are great at telling customers about your product, but the process of buying is less than idea (asking for too much information, not providing quick payment options like ApplePay, having less delivery options than the competitors), that could be having a significant impact on your revenues.
Not all customers have the same pain points. Some may struggle with your product features, while others may complain about your delivery time. To address their pain points effectively, you need to segment your customers based on their characteristics, behaviors, or preferences. Analytics can help you create and manage customer segments, and tailor your service accordingly. For example, you can use CRM analytics to group your customers by their purchase history, loyalty level, or satisfaction score. You can also use email analytics to segment your subscribers by their open rate, click rate, or interests.
As with many things, the 80:20 rule often applies, it wouldn’t be surprising if 80% of revenues came from 20% of customers or at least customers type. Spending a bit of time using the data you already have to really understand your customer segments can help ensure that any actions you take are as efficient and effective as possible. If you can solve a key issue for your most valuable segment it’s likely to have a bigger impact on your business. It can also help to analyse those who didn’t become a customer for some reason. This is likely to be harder, but understanding customer segments who won’t buy your product or service can help take more strategic decisions, for instance improving speed/quality/cost to target a particular segment.
To address your customer pain points, you need to know how well your service is performing. Analytics can help you measure and improve your service performance, and ensure that you meet or exceed your customer expectations. For example, you can use service desk analytics to track how quickly and effectively you resolve customer issues, or chatbot analytics to evaluate how well your automated responses answer customer queries. You can also use NPS, CSAT, or CES to gauge how satisfied, loyal, or effortless your customers feel about your service.
Define Key Metrics: Clearly define the metrics that are indicative of customer satisfaction and pain points. These could include customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer churn rates, and sentiment analysis from customer feedback.
In my experience data can be both a blessing and curse. Too much data can affected how focused a business is, while none at all can be like driving without a satnav. There are two things I like to do with data: 1) ask it a question (rather than trying to understand all your data and organise it into the ‘so what’, instead take a key business issue and see what data you have which could help understand and improve it). Eg ‘which product or service has the best service feedback’ can help identify where you are getting things right/which teams are closest to ‘what good looks like’ which in turn can help do more of the things that are working. 2) ensure everyone has a ‘number’. The most important KPI for that particular person or role
To address your customer pain points, you need to know where your service is falling short. Analytics can help you identify and prioritize your service gaps, and find ways to close them. For example, you can use sentiment analysis to detect negative emotions or sentiments in your customer feedback, or text analysis to extract common themes or keywords from your customer reviews. You can also use benchmarking to compare your service performance with your competitors or industry standards.
Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and call your customers. Asked politely and in a way that encourages honesty, most customers will tell you things that might not come through on a survey or KPI. You can ask ‘why’ a customer gives a response and get valuable context. If you are getting similar themes from a handful of customers, using the feedback to create a new quantitive question or measure for your business can give you confidence that it’s a scale trend that needs addressing. Adding an incentive to a feedback survey will likely increase responses. Using something relevant is important - eg a discount code for a cancelling unhappy customer might not encourage action. What you offer should also align with your brand.
To address your customer pain points, you need to know what works and what doesn't. Analytics can help you test and optimize your service solutions, and measure their impact on your customer outcomes. For example, you can use A/B testing to experiment with different service options, such as different website layouts, email subject lines, or chatbot scripts. You can also use conversion rate optimization to increase the likelihood of your customers taking the desired actions, such as signing up, buying, or referring.
Analytics can help you identify and address customer pain points in various ways. By using analytics, you can improve your customer service management, and enhance your customer experience, loyalty, and retention.
Don’t be afraid to challenge/complement data with your own experience and instincts. Why it’s not wise to ignore data, equally the old Ford quote that ‘people would ask for faster horses’ is particularly relevant if you are trying to innovate or find new customer/market for.