How to understand customer pain points?

By working on customer pain points you can improve the customer experience and grow your business into leaps and bounds. But how do you identify them? Here are some steps you can follow: (a) Directly speak with your customers and understand what problems they are facing (b) Make it easier for customers to buy from you (c) Use a tool such as ProProfs Help Desk to track customer conversations and capture valuable customer feedback (d) Implement the feedback and suggestions offered by your audience

The actual pain point motivates the user to seek a solution. However, users face a variety of other issues both during and after the purchase, such as convenience and financial concerns. Once you have created the Buyer Persona, it is essential to survey the buyer with the right questions. Framing these questions is important. You can also check online reviews of your own product or those of your competitors to find out what grievances customers have about the product.

What if to ask customers like: "What is your pain point when you do [process]?

There are tons of articles on the subject, just google it. For example this might be a good starting point: https://goldenspiralmarketing.co... To cut a long story short - collect customer feedback using interviews & focus groups.

It probably depends on the category of the product you are building, but if you are building a social platform the best thing to do is to use your own product a lot with existing customers. Become friends with them wholeheartedly, rather than just thinking of them as users. You'll get so many deep insights yourself that you'll probably never need surveys.

I read this book and it gives you a good frame on how to indentify customers' pain points. Check it out. I use miro as well to collect all the data - https://jobs-to-be-done-book.com

1. Be in love with the problem not your solution 2. Interview and truly try to learn, don't pitch 3. Take a step back post interviews and see what trends have emerged in the problems you have seen 4. Build and test and iterate

That's always a great question, @divya_rajendran. If a deep competition research is behind you, then I'd go for building a dialogue with your users. What I do at Digital Toucan is that I use Intercom not only for support but also for asking users research questions, communicating about feature releases. I'm also actively engaging those users who wrote to us to hop on a call, so that I could get more insights from them and they could get some useful information from me. I'm also gathering all insights in a doc, so that I could see how many customers have a problem with something or a request for specific functionality.

There are a lot of good points others have listed here. One I would emphasize is the intensity of the pain points and need to solve them. Too often we miss the forest for the trees and solve less significant problems or problems that aren't that big of a deal. After determining pain points, make sure to understand how significant they are. This can help in prioritization and next steps instead of spending time solving a problem people don't care enough to pay for a solution to.

Talking to prospective users is the best way so far!

Live one day in a style of your customer!

Ask them! Make a survey (social media, email or by call), interview (call or first person) or just ask on ProductHunt!!

You already have some awesome responses here, I'll try to add something I picked up a while ago...and that is to look at the pain points your competitors are solving for. I'd perhaps go further and find the painpoints they're not solving for and which one of these are the most frequent (in line with what @alexander_moen mentioned in his response) It is super important to understand if you are in an existing category or you are creating a new category. A search on google on what people's biggest complaints are about your competitors are always good ways to getting customers over to your brand

Ask them, find some representatives of your target audience and make an interview to undertand needs and pains

To my mind, it is the case when AI can help. Once you've collected the info about your customers, you may use automated AI solutions to get accurate predictions and evaluate risks based on your customer data, and enhance your marketing strategy. We've launched such a tool today, you may check us out if interested, we're in the top5 products of the day now :)

You have to become their best friend/mom/psychologist =) Just talk to them in a playful manner, create a game and they will tell you about this point by themselves =)

Yes, interview like @julia_demyanchuk said. And then, take it a step further. How often does that pain happen? What do they do with that pain? Do they have any alternatives for handling that pain? And, if your product or service can come up with a way to solve that pain, you need to test how much they'd pay for it. You will strike gold if you can find the pains that are big enough and profitable enough and frequent enough that you are capable of solving and where the customer has no good alternative.

If you have some budget, you can use http://usertesting.com

Specifically on the question how to reach out to the potential users and get them to talk. We did this thing once that worked really great: 1) Identified the location where the potential users frequent AND where there is a coffee bar. 2) Wear some company brand, logo, batch, t-shirt, hanger, something to look a little official. 3) Ask people in the cue whether they might want to participate in return for a coffee on you. 4) While they are still in que, ask a few questions to validate they are indeed in the target group you are selecting for (think of it as 2-3 quick pre-interview questions). 5) If they are, then cue with them. And use this time for a bit of chit-chat, not related to the product yet, but just to create a nice atmosphere and build trust. 6) Sit down and do the interview. Because we humans feel an innate need to reciprocate, the coffee will be well worth a more full-fledged interview, where you not only can ask about pain points, how often they occur, how users deal with them, etc. But CAN ALSO move into a solution-oriented focus and hypotheses-test different solutions. From home your may have imagined different ways to solve the problem the user have, and when the problem has been defined and specificed for the interviewee, then its a good opportunity to test these different hypotheses. Hypotheses = different approaches to solve the users problem. For instance by bringing different low-fidelity templates and walking the user through different ways your service will solve the problem, and get their input on what they like the most. 7) It's good practice to end the interview by not only thanking the interviewee, but remind them how and to what purpose their input will be used. Depending on where you are with the product, the users interest and the chemistry build, consider how you can use the connection to ask for an email, or sign them up otherwise. They might be some of the first real users you'll have eventually.

I have found that it is always better to work on a product whose pain point you can personally relate to. Surveys and focus group can only get you so far and as an entrepreneur with limited budget most us don't have the option to conduct studies on a scale where they would be meaningful. When working on my project, the Butter App, I felt there was a gap in the market and tailored the app to fix the specific pain points I had felt. Then I got representative of different population to try the app and tweaked it to fix their needs, but the core and skeletal structure remains as the one I felt was needed when I started out. I would advice going for personal experiences of pain points. Also have a look at the Butter App and it let us know how we can solve a pain point you can relate to. Thanks !!