Types of Pain Points

Levels of Pain Points

Interaction Pain Points: These refer to issues and challenges faced by customers while interacting with a specific product or service. Usability issues are interaction-level acknowledgment pain points. Some examples are unclear labels and instructions on forms, no feedback or acknowledgment when a button is pressed, and delayed response times. Journey Pain Points: These refer to broader issues and problems than using a specific product or service. These issues can occur at the start of the customer journey such as inconsistent branding or false marketing, in the middle of the customer journey such as long waiting times for the product or service, or after delivery such as ineffective customer support and troubleshooting. Interaction-level: These are issues that are attached with the relationship between a customer and the brand. Customers have a perception of a particular brand, which is influenced by actions — or inactions — by the brand. Issues with the acknowledgment of the quality of the product or servicesto, inconsistent service, negative experiences in after-purchase support, or no transparency in policies are some of many issues that can change the relationship between the customer and the brand....

Types of Pain Points

Financial Pain Points: These relate to all about purchase of product and service. These issues involve the customer’s experience of paying too much for a service. Some examples include high monthly subscription costs, repeated purchases, lack of transparency in pricing policy, or sudden jumps in fees. Productivity Pain Points: These are issues about efficiency. Usability issues are productivity pain points since they inhibit customers from being productive. Other examples include onboarding a customer, if the service has a lengthy onboarding process the customer will be delayed to actually using the service. Process Pain Points: These are issues with fractured processes marred by bureaucracy, delayed responses, lack of transparency, and unavailability of feedback. Customers will abandon purchase if the actual sale process is too long and cumbersome. Support Pain Points: These are issues when customers can’t find support or have to deal with fractured, incomplete, and inefficient support. A Journey-level pain point such as being stalled and diverted over and over is a Process type of pain point....

How to find pain points in your system?

Pain points are abundant and can arise at any stage in the customer journey. There are some techniques and practices to find these pain points before they do serious damage:...

Conclusion

Pain points are problems faced by customers in their journey from discovery of problem to delivery of solution. Pain points can occur at any point and at any level of the customer journey. Some techniques like customer feedback, talking with internal teams, and observing users in natural environments will help to discover pain points. Pain points can then be grouped into financial, productivity, process, or support categories to organize them and better tackle them....