How to Solve Customer Journey Pain Points
Customer journey pain points refer to points in the journey, or aspects of it, that bring up obstacles or frustrations that could put customers off. They can dictate whether a purchase is made, the sale size, frequency, and likelihood of referral.
While pain points are typically focused primarily during the sales cycle, for B2B firms, a comprehensive look at the entire customer journey is necessary to mitigate pain points’ negative impacts.
What is the Customer Journey?
The customer journey is a more cyclical look at each client’s experience with a vendor instead of the linear outlook provided by an illustration like the sales funnel. While a sales funnel ends with a purchase, the customer journey continues to describe the rest of their experience, including service management and customer success. Doing right by customers during these additional aspects of the journey can lead to renewals, cross-sells, and upsells, creating a cycle of customer satisfaction and ongoing purchases that benefit both parties.
As this cycle covers quite a bit more than a sales funnel, many more opportunities arise for pain points. This can make or break a B2B business, as renewals and upsells the key to sustainable income for most vendors and service providers in B2B industries.
Common Customer Journey Pain Points (and Solutions)
While pain points in the sales process are well converted, those that take place after are often neglected, leading to clients that choose not to renew due to the feeling that they weren’t given the proper support to get the value they expected from their product. Let’s cover some of the most common customer journey pain points after the sales process and how to solve them.
| Pain Point | Solution |
| Lack of knowledge of the product or service, leading to subpar results or slow deployment | A comprehensive knowledge base, FAQ page, and/or quickstart that is easily accessible through a clean, simple customer self-service portal |
| Delayed responses to support requests | A streamlined and automated ticket routing system that gets support tickets to the correct associate the first time, and provide some level of automated assistance while customers wait for them to respond |
| Support unavailable through a client’s preferred communication channel | A modernized, omnichannel customer support system that can get clients quick support over the phone, through email, or through an online instant message platform |
| Lack of billing transparency | A self-service portal that provides access to order history, past invoices, itemized receipts, |
| Cumbersome or redundant renewal process | Automated renewal process, or pre-generated renewal offers for goods with variable pricing over time. |
While it can be difficult to tackle all of these solutions at once, there are comprehensive CSM software platforms that offer functionality that can implement all of them simultaneously. This modernizes the entire customer journey, including the sales process, leading to better outcomes for both the vendor and the client.
How to Identify Customer Journey Pain Points
There are a few direct ways businesses can identify clients’ pain points in their industry by communicating with their own clientele.
These include:
- Offering customer surveys immediately after a purchase and a number of months down the line about their experience with a product and its provider
- Providing a customer knowledge base or forum that clients can contribute to with their experiences, and solutions to issues they are experiencing with the product or service
- Analyzing customer support tickets and reviews left for the company
If businesses are having trouble getting feedback from clients, but are noticing many aren’t renewing, they can take a look at what stage in the customer journey that clients are in when they leave. Have they just purchased the product, requested no support, and decided not to renew? Or, are clients frequently deciding not to renew after attempting to get support, and not receiving it promptly or adequately? Questions like these can be answered by simply diving into customer files, which can also be made easier by a quality CSM platform.
Offer a Frictionless B2B Customer Journey with Vivantio
While each of the benefits listed in this article works wonders for businesses, they won’t help if managers choose a platform that doesn’t offer all of the necessary features. Vivantio offers a cutting-edge customer service software platform that offers everything listed and more, including:
- Endless integrations to make implementation easy
- Automatic ticket routing to ensure every ticket gets to the proper agent
- Workflow designer tool that allows managers to customize the framework of their CS operations without any technical knowledge required
- White-label service portals so businesses can maintain a cohesive brand throughout the service process
- A holistic view of each client to ensure that no agent is left without vital information
