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Austin BlackFeb 17, 20232 min read

How to find your customers' pain points

Why is it essential to understand customer pain points?

As a Competitive or Market Intelligence professional, understanding your customers' pain points is critical to developing a winning strategy. Identifying the key challenges and frustrations that your target audience faces can help you to gain a competitive edge by developing products, services, and messaging that meet their specific needs.


How to find customer pain points

1. Conduct Surveys and Interviews: Conducting surveys and interviews is one of the most effective ways to understand your customers' pain points. By asking your target audience specific questions, you can get valuable insights into their needs, preferences, and pain points. Surveys can be conducted online, by phone, or in person, and can be tailored to your target audience's specific needs.

2. Analyze Customer Feedback: Analyzing customer feedback is another way to gain valuable insights into their pain points. Look for common themes in online reviews, social media comments, and customer support inquiries to identify areas where customers are experiencing pain. This may inspire new features or a whole new product.

3. Study Competitor Offerings: Studying your competitors' offerings can help you identify gaps in the market that they may be missing or areas where they may be falling short in meeting customer needs. This can help you to develop a competitive advantage by offering products or services that meet your target audience's needs more effectively.

4. Attend Industry Events: Attending industry events, conferences, and trade shows can provide a wealth of information on your customer's pain points. Take note of the questions and concerns that attendees raise during panel discussions, presentations, and networking events. By participating in these events, you can gain valuable insights into your target audience's needs and pain points. The afterparty is not a bad place to glean insights on your customer's pain points either.

5. Use Customer Journey Mapping: Customer journey mapping is a visualization of a customer's steps when interacting with your company, from initial awareness to post-purchase follow-up. By mapping out this journey, you can identify areas where your customers may be experiencing pain points, primarily based on what content they consume and in which sequence they consume it.

6. Engage with your Sales and Customer Service Teams: These individuals are the most customer-facing within your organization and will likely have insights into your customer's pain points. Try to ask them open-ended questions and listen to their stories. The goal here is not to obtain information on feature enhancements, so much as to understand the customers' emotions and their overall pain points, regardless of your current feature set. Keeping your mind open here is key.

 

Summing it up

In conclusion, finding your customers' pain points is critical for developing a winning strategy as a Competitive or Market Intelligence professional. By using a variety of tactics you will obtain a holistic view and can gain valuable insights into the challenges and frustrations that your target audience faces. These insights can then be inputted into your competitive analysis matrix and used to develop more effective marketing messages, content, products, or services that better meet your customers' needs and improve the overall customer experience.

With the Wide Narrow intelligence platform, you can collect this feedback, analyze it, product insights, and share those insights with your colleagues who may benefit from a deeper understanding of your market and customers. If you'd like to see how we can help,  book a demo and one of our solution experts will be happy to help.

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