What is a bread point in a customer relationship?

Pain point is an anglicism that can be translated as “pain point”. A pain point then refers to an irritant, i.e. a point of friction during your customer’s experience. This has the effect of undermining the satisfaction of the latter. The accumulation of pain points contributes to the degradation of your customer relationship, which will result in the breakdown of your collaboration in the long term.

How to identify the pain points in your customer journey?

Don’t worry, pain points are not irreversible if you can identify them. This identification of pain points is based on the implementation of a rigorous process based on listening to your customers and composed of key steps.

1 – Measuring your customers’ satisfaction

In order to set goals and measure progress, it is important to identify your pain points in your customer journey, so the first step is to take stock of the situation.

This notion of bread point is closely linked to customer satisfaction, so it is important to look at these different points:

• The NET PROMOTER SCORE or NPS: an index to establish the rate of customers willing to recommend your products or services to others
• Retention or loyalty rate: this allows you to measure the loyalty rate of your customers
• The attrition rate or also called CHURN: it allows you to evaluate the extent of the loss of your customers

This measure of satisfaction is essential to eliminate pain points. An unhappy customer is an expensive customer: dealing with complaints involves costs in terms of resources and compensation.

2 – Have a model of your customer journey

In order to visualise all possible interactions between your customer and your company, it is important to map your customer journey.

The mapping of your customer journey should identify each point of contact by associating :

• The channel: physical point of sale, website or your social networks
• To have figures on customer satisfaction. It is important to be able to include survey steps.
• Know your customers’ emotions (positive, negative or neutral). VIDATA‘s personalised videos are equipped with a questionnaire at the end to collect the emotions of the customers.

Modelling your customer journey allows you to identify the irritants that hinder the fluidity of your customer relationship.

3 – Link your customer journey with your employee journey

Before dealing with your customers’ pain points, it is sometimes worthwhile for the company to adopt a new angle of vision and thus satisfy its employees before its own customers. Indeed, the blocking point for your customers is often the tip of the iceberg. This is usually due to an operational malfunction or a lack of internal information.

Simply put, it’s about putting your employees’ experience on the same level as the customer experience by creating a mirror effect.

4 – Listen to and know your client

The first thing you need to do to make a sale is to listen to your customers. You can use this work to support your customer in using their product or in using your services. So by personalising your customer relationship you can already eliminate pain points in your customer journey.

Survey your customers during your customer journey

At every interaction, consider giving your customers a voice to get their opinions. Many dedicated tools and solutions can be integrated during your customer journey.

• A satisfaction questionnaire. VIDATAproposes to integrate a satisfaction questionnaire at the end of a personalised video in order to easily collect your consumer’s opinion.
• Reviews collected by a trusted third party such as verified review companies

According to Critizr, a company that provides feedback between consumers and companies, 96% of dissatisfied customers will not tell the company directly. On the other hand, they will not hesitate to make this known to those around them.

Therefore, it is important to encourage and facilitate the process for customers to give you feedback on their experience.

Train and raise awareness among your employees

Your company is a team, so customer satisfaction is everyone’s business, whether they are in direct contact with the customer or not. So beforehand, it is important to mobilise your employees around customer satisfaction.

Raising the awareness of your employees to customer satisfaction allows you to create a real corporate culture based on customer satisfaction. This results in a better understanding of your customers’ pain points and motivations.

Turning your pain points into business

1 – Prioritise and address the pain points you have identified

Identification is good, resolution is better! It is not enough to collect your pain points after identifying them for them to resolve themselves. Indeed, it is important to spend time resolving each blocking point in order to improve your customer service. Because the number of pain points you will collect can be large, it is important to prioritise the handling of complaints in order to improve your customer relationship and make the necessary changes in your customer journey.

Some returns will be quick and easy to resolve, others will not and will require further thought or even a substantial budget to plan.

2 – Building a continuous improvement system

Your process of identifying pain points should integrate seamlessly with your process of continuous improvement of customer satisfaction.

Build and maintain a customer knowledge database

This database should be accessible to everyone who interacts with your customers. It will aim to centralise all data relating to bread points and thus enable your staff to use this data to save time in dealing with dissatisfaction and improve your customer relations and customer journey.

This same knowledge base can be used to create a dynamic FAQ that is widely used in a self-care strategy. You can also use this data to improve the script of your custom videos.

Organise collaborative workshops and invite each stakeholder

A round table discussion with your employees who interact to a greater or lesser extent at different points in your customer journey will help you to go beyond identifying pain points and solve them. In some cases, it is even possible to anticipate them.