Understanding where your customers feel the most pain?

If you want to run a successful business - you need to focus on solving an existing challenge that your customers face - better than your competition does.

Logically - if you are able to do that successfully over a period of time, you'll have a great business which will most likely grow.

But what might those challenges be that your customer faces?

The obvious way to find out - would be to ask them. You could do some formal research through questionnaires, or a statistical analysis, or you could just spend some time on the phone talking to them or in-store (if you find yourself in retail).

There are a few types of pain points your customers might experience - these include:

• Productivity: Customers are wasting too much time.

• Financial: Customers are wasting too much money.

• Process: Customers are failing to make progress / struggling to get things done.

• Support: Customers aren’t receiving the quality of support (in product and service) that they need.

To solve these problems and ensure that you are offering the perceived value that customers will be willing to pay money for, it is worth investing time and money in innovating solutions to these pain points that enhance your offering.

Customers pain points are never static, they shift and change as technology changes and competitors comes and go - researching where their pain is is not a one-off project, it's an ongoing conversation which needs to be continuously had.

HINDSIGHT | INSIGHT | FORESIGHT

There is value then in continuous developing knowledge of the customer and their pain points within the context of understanding the larger systems involved based on hindsight of the past, insight of the present and foresight of possible futures.

In this way you can develop a pretty holistic view of the issue and how your organisation might dedicate resources into commercialising the future opportunities that it presents.

Understanding your customer's pain points is an ongoing relationship building process and a commitment to strengthening that bond into the future.

This is an active engagement, but an important process in your brand building efforts.