Why Identifying and Addressing Customer Pain Points Is Key to Elevated CX
February 26, 2024
With competition for consumers’ hard-earned dollars fiercer than ever, prioritizing customer satisfaction is key to standing out in an increasingly crowded market.
So, what can you do to gain a better understanding of your customers and help to ensure the experiences you provide keep them coming back for more?
It may seem counterintuitive, but when thinking about what makes a positive customer experience, companies need to first understand what constitutes a negative one.
Where do consumers struggle in your customer journey? What are the issues that customers seem to run into time and time again? Discovering and solving these pain points is the first step to delivering CX that delivers soaring CSAT scores.
In this blog post, we delve into how businesses can identify customer pain points using voice of the customer (VoC) solutions, explore how analytics and machine learning can uncover vital insights, and discuss implementing changes that enhance overall customer satisfaction.
Customer Pain Points: Why Unified VoC Is the Way Forward
Understanding customer issues is the cornerstone of crafting a customer-centric CX strategy. These pain points represent the challenges, frustrations and unmet needs that occur during everyday interactions, offering invaluable insights into areas of the CX that require attention.
It’s not just about fixing problems; it’s about proactively anticipating and preventing issues, creating a seamless and enjoyable customer journey.
But with consumers engaging with your business via your website, self-service channels (such as live chat or private messaging), in-store or a number of other means, it can be difficult to pinpoint what issues they’re facing and where.
This is where choosing the right VoC solution is vital. It makes no sense to have a solution that only provides insights for one engagement channel, as you’ll miss out on vital feedback.
The best approach for building a well-oiled VoC program is to use a unified solution that gathers information and provides insights across all channels in one place. This way, companies gain a holistic understanding of customer interactions and experiences, pinpointing pain points at every touchpoint throughout the customer journey including across web & mobile, and in location.
Struggle Detection: Identify and Address Issues in Real Time
Struggle detection gives you a front row seat for the most prominent challenges of your customer experience. Imagine being able to spot exactly where customers get confused or hit a stumbling block in real time. It’s your secret weapon to understanding their pain points on the spot.
With Verint Digital Behavior Analytics, struggle detection taps into the live feed of customer interactions—clicks, scrolls, and gestures—to identify these moments of frustration. It guides you straight to the heart of customer challenges, letting you address issues in real time.
Whether it’s a tricky form, a confusing webpage, or a navigation hiccup, struggle detection ensures you’re not just catching issues, but actively addressing them too.
Survey Management: Streamlining Feedback Collection for Informed Decision-Making
Gathering and analyzing inferred behavior via struggle detection is a great start to solving customer pain points, but you still need to marry this data with a more traditional approach.
Customer surveys are still a sure-fire way of collecting invaluable information about service issues—but there’s an art to it. Modern survey management solutions help to remove any friction for the customer, making it effortless to leave their much-needed insights.
A follow up email asking for feedback may still capture customer attention, but surveys are more likely to be completed when delivered within the same interaction, whether that’s straight after a live chat session, private messaging conversation or at the end of a phone call.
With Verint Survey Management, for example, businesses can collect feedback seamlessly across all engagement channels, helping to scale surveys and creating a unified view of feedback, facilitating informed decision-making.
Capturing customer critiques in the heat of the moment may not always be pretty, but it helps to get to the heart of any CX issues you may be having.
Case Study: Rue21’s Success with VoC Solutions
By aggregating VoC insights gathered through surveys and other channels, Rue21 generates a cross-functional view of customer interactions that’s helped them to improve their CX and achieve a notable increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS) and, most importantly, sales. This success story highlights the tangible impact of implementing VoC solutions.
Integrating VoC Data: Transforming Data into Actionable Insights
Arming your CX department with customer feedback and a wealth of behavioral data is only the beginning. Now it’s time to pinpoint those pain points.
A central repository for interaction and survey data serves as a foundation for analytics. Integrating VoC insights from various customer touchpoints and merging structured and unstructured data allows organizations to identify patterns and trends that may not be immediately apparent.
Businesses can then leverage analytics to delve into this data, revealing deeper insights.
Text Analysis: Identifying Emerging Trends
There’s no better way to understand what’s top of mind for your customers than by analyzing vast volumes of text-based data from channels such as chat, email and social media.
Verint Text Analytics uses automated theme discovery to identify emerging trends and enables CX teams to take appropriate action. Using pre-defined language templates with industry-specific terms means you can start generating insights from day one and then add your own subject matter expertise for a truly well-rounded VoC program.
Speech Analysis: Going Beyond Simple Transcription
A modern speech analytics solution harnesses the power of natural language processing and machine learning to extract meaningful insights from voice interactions. Spoken words are automatically transcribed and analyzed to identify key themes, sentiments, and trends within customer conversations.
By processing vast amounts of audio data, you can distill valuable information such as customer preferences and those all-important pain points. Speech analytics goes well beyond mere transcription, employing sentiment analysis to gauge the emotional tone of conversations, allowing businesses to understand customer experience on a deeper level.
This comprehensive approach enables organizations to proactively respond to customer needs, enhance service quality, and make data-driven decisions that foster a more customer-centric approach to business operations.
Make Six-Figure Savings with Speech Analytics
Discover how New York Life reduced call volume by 400,000 calls a year, realized savings of 40% across quality assurance (QA) teams, and improved sales effectiveness to the tune of six figures.
The Data Insights Bot: Elevating Data Analysis and Automation
The Verint Data Insight Bot makes it easier than ever to root out customer pain points from your VoC data.
This bot provides actionable insights by understanding not just the “what,” but also the “why,” and “how” of things happening across the range of interactions and data. All of this is achieved through natural language queries, incorporating generative AI technology.
Users don’t require any specific training because the bot is already trained on their behalf. You simply ask your question and receive the results with a click. For instance, you could ask the bot to unearth the most common customer complaint, and it will immediately generate a list of your top CX pain points.
This integration allows for powerful insights across channels, applications, and the workforce, without the need to consider the source of the data. You can simply ask the question you need, and the bot will provide the relevant insights.
Embrace VoC, Elevate CX
Businesses that prioritize discovering customer pain points using VoC solutions are better positioned to enhance their customer experience. By applying analytics and machine learning, organizations can uncover invaluable insights, leading to informed decision-making that makes a real difference.
Embrace the potential of VoC solutions and embark on a journey toward elevated customer experiences.