How to understand customer pain points?

Divya Rajendran
42 replies
Hey guys, If your product is new to the market, what are the strategy and things you follow to understand your customer's pain points and market needs? Thanks!

Replies

Debajit Sarkar
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.
Divya Rajendran
@dsarkar Yes, framing questions are too important. Thanks๐Ÿ™‚
Julia Doronina
Ask them, find some representatives of your target audience and make an interview to undertand needs and pains
Divya Rajendran
@julia_demyanchuk yeah, thats what we trying to do now. Thanks for sharing:)
Alexander Moen
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.
Divya Rajendran
@julia_demyanchuk @alexander_moen Exactly! But do u have any suggestions or tips to reach out the users and make 'em to take an interview?
Mike
@julia_demyanchuk @alexander_moen @divya_rajendran 1. You can try some user testing web such like Userlytics, TryMyUI, Usertesting to find those users, it's a way but not very effective. 2. Go to web community to find them. 3. Use other product such like intercom or canny to reduce user feedback costs, which may helps you get more feedbacks.
Alex Rudenko
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 =)
Alexander Moen
@alex_rudenko1 do you have any examples of this that you could link to that consistently work, or is this mostly just how you engage people yourself and each time it's different?
Inna Proshkina
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.
Alexander Moen
@inna_proshkina great suggestions and thank you for the link as well. Interviews and focus groups work, but one of the cons to them is that they tend to be very qualitatively driven. Some more complicated quantitative models that get slightly better results are out there though (conjoint analysis, for instance). In fact, that's what I built my recently launched software around- taking the best from those complicated quantitative models and merging it with the best from the qualitative models (focus groups/interviews). But, in our case at least, we focused things on the product development process and not the million other times and ways that it might be useful to determine customer pain points.
Divya Rajendran
@inna_proshkina Thank you so much for the article link.
Renzo Brus ๐Ÿ’ปโšก
Ask them! Make a survey (social media, email or by call), interview (call or first person) or just ask on ProductHunt!!
Divya Rajendran
@trakti Yeah, we took a survey but response rate is low. Do u have any idea to increase survey taking rate?
Olu
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
Divya Rajendran
@alexander_moen @oluadedeji Nice,it works well for product positioning, but i got an idea after read your comment. Thank u so much๐Ÿ™‚
Ben Peters
If you have some budget, you can use http://usertesting.com
Benjamin Bertelsen
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.
Divya Rajendran
@ben_bertelsen Thanks for your suggestion ๐Ÿ™‚
Edward G
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.
Divya Rajendran
@edward_g yeah i completely agree with you ed
Gleb Braverman
Talking to prospective users is the best way so far!
Divya Rajendran
@gleb_braverman So, how to make them to schedule a interview call?
Prateek Mathur
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
Sofia Polonska
Live one day in a style of your customer!
Alex Miller
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 :)
Alexey Shashkov
What if to ask customers like: "What is your pain point when you do [process]?
Divya Rajendran
@shashcoffe Yup, but hardly they reply back๐Ÿ˜…
Ankit Choudhary
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 !!
Divya Rajendran
@choudhary_ankit Nice points Ankit, how many individuals you've chosen to try your product on each persona? Sure, will try Butter App ๐Ÿ™‚
Ipek Mazioglu
Reviews on social media, Google Play and App Store makes it easier to understand what is your customers pain points. However, there are millions of reviews available and it is not possible to drive the best insights without automating this process.To analyze them you can use some AI tools such like Pivony, Consumers' perception about your brand tells a lot about the future of your organization. You can develop the best marketing practices by looking from the consumer's point of view. It is one great way to improve customer satisfaction. :)
Weronika Spaleniak
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.
Divya Rajendran
@weronika_spaleniak These all are works for mid level products, how to get target personas feedback before moving into the market as a product/ new arrival to the market?
Vio Vanica
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
Divya Rajendran
@viorica_vanica Thank you for sharing. I've seen your app its simply nice. Curious to know how did u got your first 10 customers?
Vio Vanica
@divya_rajendran 1-on-1 custom approach and discord
Jared Cornell
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
Divya Rajendran
@jared_cornelll Have any ideas/suggestions to make customers to accept interviews?