Identifying and solving problems of customers is one of the keys to running a successful business. Doing so is not an easy task, as it requires communication efforts, data analysis and quite often can add complications to your business processes. However, it is absolutely crucial for customer satisfaction and retention.
Before the IT age, discerning the issues a customer has experienced with your product or service, as well as ones that they may experience in future, was a Sisyphean task. Although it is still a difficult aspect of running a business, it is now made more manageable by powerful tools like CRM software that can do all the heavy lifting.
Following the steps below will help you detect problems with your customers and promptly come up with workable solutions for them.
Table of Contents
Get Familiar With Pain Points
Customer-related problems can broadly be distributed into four general categories, also known as “pain points.” Knowing which pain point is a problem for every particular case, as well as your business processes as a whole, is critical for being able to provide a satisfying product and a sustainable business plan.
The first type of pain point are the financial Pain Points. These include problems related to your product’s cost and your customers’ dissatisfaction with said cost.
Another critical type of pain points are the Productivity Pain Points. Any factor that causes the customer to expend undue time and energy to deal with the product can be added here.
Process Pain Points are especially tricky, as they relate to a customer’s dissatisfaction to a company’s business process.
Finally, there are Support Pain Points. As the name suggests, any issues related to the support that the customer receives are added to this category.
Adding both systemic and individual issues into one of the aforementioned categories is a key step in nailing them down and resolving them.
Review Customer Data
Customer data is accumulated on any platform that you use in your business. It can come from a variety of places, and then be quickly processed and analyzed via a good CRM solution. The results you get when you do that will be invaluable for identifying recurring customer pain points that need to be addressed.
Gather More Data Via Feedback Emails
Another way of clearly establishing what your customer’s problems are and how you could solve them effectively is by simply asking them to tell you via email. Gathering customer feedback is, surprisingly enough, one of the best ways to do so – the engagement rate is astoundingly high, and the quality of data this method provides is nearly unparalleled. Sorting through and making sense of the feedback you’ve received may be time-consuming, but using a good CRM tool to do the job will make it a manageable task.
Get in Touch on Social Media
Social media is a hallmark of modernity, and most of your customers probably have a presence on one or more platforms. Use this potential for connecting with people to reach out to customers and ask for feedback that you can use to improve your product. This may necessitate that you yourself establish and maintain a presence on multiple social media platforms, but that’s is a necessary part of marketing anyway. Using social media affords you to its fullest potential.
Get Busy Solving the Issues
Don’t delay getting on track to resolve customer problems. Many of them are linked, and some may be more pressing than they appear. Review the gathered data, identify the pain points and then work with your employees, management, and customer service team to resolve the problems.
