Transforming Customer Pain Points into Competitive Advantages

Anyone aiming to thrive in today's hyperconnected marketplace needs to stay laser-focused on one thing: understanding what frustrates their customers.

It's easy to imagine that customer pain points are minor annoyances. A lot of them might even be minor annoyances.

The problem is that a few of these together add up to friction points that can make or break your relationship with customers. Left unaddressed for long enough, they'll eventually become the reasons customers start looking elsewhere, increasing customer churn and damaging customer loyalty.

This guide will help you identify, prioritize, and resolve the types of pain points that matter most to your customers, helping you build long-lasting customer relationships while meeting customer expectations.

What exactly are customer pain points?

Customer pain points are specific problems your customers experience during their customer journey with your product or service.

They're the "sneaky little pinches" that sour the relationship with your business, leading to customer dissatisfaction and negative experiences.

They can:

• Create negative emotions (frustration, confusion, and disappointment).
• Hinder customers from achieving their goals.
• Lead to poor experiences that customers remember and share through online reviews and social media channels.

Pain points are often the reasons that customers stop recommending you, damaging customer trust. Eventually, they might actively look for alternative current providers or publicly share their frustrating experience through negative reviews.

Most businesses fall into the trap of focusing on the loudest complaints—the ones that frustrated customers vocally express—while missing the subtle friction points that affect the silent majority of their customer base.

For every customer who complains, there are typically dozens experiencing the same common issues who simply walk away without explanation. Only 1 in 26 customers takes the time to complain to a business.

This creates a huge blind spot for business owners relying solely on explicit feedback mechanisms.

The most revealing actual pain points often exist in areas individual customers can't easily articulate. They might not have the technical vocabulary to describe what's frustrating them or recognize the root cause of their difficulty. Instead, they experience a general sense of friction that gradually erodes their loyalty, affecting customer retention rates.

How many times have you struggled with a product and thought: "Maybe I'm just not tech-savvy enough" or "I must be missing something obvious"?

Your customers experience the same thing. These moments of self-doubt are actually valuable signals of underlying design or communication problems in your offering, highlighting potential issues in your user experience.

Four types of customer pain points

Here are a few overarching categories of common types of pain points that you can think about when identifying customer pain points.

It's usually a good idea to categorize them like this so you can have a clear picture of their importance and how to tackle them as part of your effective strategy for exceptional customer service.

1. Financial pain points

These happen when customers question whether your product or service is worth what they're paying. Financial pain points are among the most common customer pain points, especially for big-ticket items or subscription services.

These might stem from:

• Subscription fatigue (too many recurring payments).
• Having unexpected or hidden fees, such as credit card processing charges.
• Increasing prices without a corresponding value improvement.
• Seeing comparable solutions available at lower price points from current providers in North America or globally.

Say you run an online kitchenware store and notice a pattern in product return data.

Your premium chef's knife set has a return rate of 23%, with customers consistently citing "not worth the price" as their main reason.

But interestingly, it's not about the quality of the knives—customer reviews confirm they're excellent.

After analyzing customer interactions, you discover the disconnect: prospective customers and current customers expected professional-level instruction with their purchase, since competitors include access to online knife skills courses with similar sets.

The point here isn't to lower your prices and impact your marketing budget, but to question where their perception of value is coming from.

You could bundle a free 30-day membership to your cooking class platform—something that costs you little to provide—to dramatically improve the perceived value while maintaining your price point, thus addressing this financial pain point.

Solving financial pain points is all about understanding what your customers are looking for when they make an online purchase of your product.

2. User experience (UX) pain points

UX issues are probably the most common type of customer experience pain points.

Almost everyone can recognize when just using a product is difficult or confusing. Maybe it takes you a long time to figure out how to get started. Or maybe you try to change something simple and find that it has totally unexpected effects on every other workflow.

This is typically separate from the actual feature set of the product. It might do all the things you want it to do but the learning curve required feels steep for customers. A few examples of this high-quality customer experience challenge might be:

• Complicated onboarding processes requiring identity provider credentials.
• Excessive steps to complete simple tasks during the buying process.
• Inconsistent experiences across platforms, including broken links.
• Features that don't match how customers actually use the product based on customer behavior analysis.

You can often identify these by tracking adoption or conversion metrics and then seeing exactly where customers bounce at the interaction level and journey level.

A practical example of this one could be:

• An online clothing retailer has a cart abandonment rate of 78% during the appliance package purchase process.
• Looking into that data in depth, they can see customers are dropping off specifically during the checkout process.
• They required creating an account, navigating a five-step payment flow, and manually entering shipping information even for returning customers—all major pain points in the customer experience.
• A solution here might be implementing a guest checkout option, reducing the payment flow, and enabling address auto-complete to create a more personalized experience.

They can cut their cart abandonment rate significantly without changing anything else about their product offering, demonstrating how addressing customer experience pain points directly supports business growth.

3. Productivity pain points

These occur when you create unnecessary friction through redundant or overly complex processes in your internal processes.

Examples of productivity pain points might involve:

• Multiple handoffs between departments.
• Requiring information you already have.
• Long wait times for simple actions.
• Bureaucratic approaches to problem-solving.
• Inefficient customer service representative workflows.

You might offer custom adjustments to your online clothing store—which is a great customer experience, and can drastically reduce return rates.

But rather than including that information already at the point of purchase, you reach out manually to each customer after they've made a purchase to ask about alterations, affecting agent productivity.

This creates a back-and-forth email exchange that delays shipping by 3-5 days and frustrates customers who expected their items to ship immediately via delivery vehicles.

A better approach would be integrating alteration options directly into the product page where customers can select their preferences alongside size and color choices according to individual preferences. 

You could eliminate the delay and even highlight this convenient feature as a competitive advantage in your marketing messaging.

Process pain points often masquerade as necessary complexity, but they're frequently legacy workflows that haven't been looked at critically on a regular basis.

Every time you ask a customer to wait, repeat information, or navigate between different systems, you're creating friction that erodes their experience and your competitive edge, potentially damaging the emotional connection with your brand.

4. Customer support pain points

Unsurprisingly, these customer service pain points are all about customers struggling to find help when they need it in a critical situation.

This might be due to:

• Difficulty finding support information.
• Long wait times for assistance rather than instant responses.
• Unhelpful support agents lacking proper training to handle complex issues.
• Support options that don't match customer preferences for communication channels.
• Frequent outages in customer service software.
• Lack of an easy-to-embed chat widget or online SMS chat capabilities.

A fast-fashion retailer might notice their customer challenges include a difficult returns process requiring customers to email customer service, wait for a response, print a specific label, and then ship items back—taking 7-10 days before refunds are processed.

Implementing a self-service returns portal where customers can generate their own return labels and choose between refunds or store credit creates a more efficient customer support experience and addresses these customer service pain points directly.

Six ways to uncover hidden customer pain points

Of course, solving customer pain points will help your business growth. That's so much easier to say than it is to do.

What if your customers aren't explicitly reporting pain points through customer emails or during customer service interactions?

You need to look for signals in the challenges customers face.

1. Get meaningful customer feedback

As a starting point, open communication channels with your customers through surveys and feedback tools across various customer segments.

The trick is asking the right questions and leaving space for customers to flag issues you hadn't anticipated, giving you valuable insights into customer concerns.

Customer feedback provides great initial insights, but remember: customers don't always know exactly what they need.

As Henry Ford reportedly said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

The truth is that customers don't always understand the root cause of their frustration. They may suggest features or solutions that don't actually address their real issue, which is why conducting user research is crucial for gathering actionable insights.

2. Talk to your customer-facing teams

A resource often overlooked is the one you have access to all the time—your sales, customer support teams, and customer success teams.

Since they regularly interact with customers, they'll have valuable insights into:

• Market expectations in your industry.
• Potential pain points driving prospective customers to seek current solutions.
• Common objections and hesitations during the decision-making process.
• Recurring issues that existing customers experience.
• Feature requests that might signal unmet needs in the B2B customer journey.

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These teams are on the front lines daily, gathering invaluable insights about what matters to your customers, including frustrations customers experience with inconsistent messaging.

These key insights can guide product development, improve sales processes, and enhance the overall customer journey, turning feedback to impact.

3. Examine behavioral data

Behavioral data reveals paths and actions customers take within your product. It shows which features are popular and where users might be struggling.

But it’s important to keep in mind that behavioral data alone won't tell you customer intentions. 

If users repeatedly toggle between reports, it might mean they find those reports valuable when used together—or it could indicate they can't find what they need in a single place.

The solution could either be a missing report that combines that information or fixing the navigation issue that forces unnecessary switching. Data alone can’t tell you what the right answer is. 

4. Leverage AI for deeper insights

Feedback and qualitative insights from sales and support teams are valuable smoke alarms, but they don't paint the whole picture. 

While they provide important context, they're limited by sample size and human bias, so they might miss critical patterns affecting customer experience.

AI can help you close that gap. 

You can use AI to analyze thousands of conversations and touchpoints can help you:

• Find trends across large volumes of customer interactions.
• Identify pain points that might be bubbling beneath the surface.
• Make predictions about emerging issues before they become widespread.
• Move beyond relying on squeaky wheels and confirmation bias.

This is exactly what Siena Insights is built for. It can help you organize feedback automatically, clustering similar issues and highlighting the most impactful trends—while analyzing 100% of the things your customers are saying about you. 

5. Prioritizing which pain points to solve first

As every product team knows, not all pain points deserve equal attention. 

These are some of the factors that you can take into consideration: 

• Impact severity: How deeply does this issue affect the customer experience?
• Frequency: How many customers encounter this problem?
• Business impact: How is this pain point affecting retention, acquisition, or revenue?
• Strategic alignment: Does fixing this pain point align with your broader business goals?
• Resolution difficulty: What resources would be required to address this issue?

You can create a simple scoring matrix for these criteria to objectively rank pain points rather than relying on gut feelings or the loudest internal advocate.

6. Building a customer-focused mindset

Organizations that excel at addressing pain points share a common trait: they've built a customer-focused mindset throughout the company.

When you cultivate this perspective, you can better anticipate customer needs, from product development to support. Everyone understands how their role impacts the customer experience.

This means you'll not only address current pain points but potentially prevent new ones from emerging as your product and market evolve.

See customer pain points as opportunities

Every customer pain point represents an opportunity to differentiate your business. 

While competitors might ignore these friction points, addressing them can become your advantage.

Resolving pain points isn't a one-time project. It’s an ongoing process of discovery, prioritization, and improvement. 

Organizations that systematically identify and address customer pain points can build deeper customer relationships and stronger brand loyalty.

Ready to transform your approach to customer pain points? 

Siena Insights helps you uncover hidden friction in your customer journey by analyzing feedback across all channels. Our AI technology turns thousands of customer interactions into clear, actionable insights so you can focus on what matters most. Talk to our team today to learn what your customers really think.