Customer Pain Points: 6 Common Issues and Solutions
Think of your website as a shop. Imagine you had a store on the high street. What feeling would you want your customers to have on entering your shop? The pride you would take in the appearance of your physical shop should be the same level of pride you take in the appearance of your website.
Whether it’s the first time someone is visiting your site, or it’s a returning customer, pain points on your company website will make for a poor experience and leave a bad impression. By pain points, we mean specific problems or challenges that customers encounter while interacting with your website.
These pain points can lead to decreased user satisfaction, reduced conversions, and lost revenue. Let’s see if we can help you identify these pain points and explain the importance of overcoming them for a seamless and enjoyable experience for visitors to your site.
Identifying Customer Pain Points
1. Poor Navigation:
This can be a visual test as well as a technical one. Does your site look appealing to you? If not, it probably won’t be appealing to your target audience either. Do users spend a lot of time searching for information? Looking at your Google Analytics, is your bounce rate high and do you have low average session durations? These are all indicators of poor navigation.
SOLUTION
Simplify the menu structure. Use clear and descriptive labels, and ensure that most of your important pages are no more than three clicks away from the homepage. You want to include navigation links in the page footer as well.
2. Slow Load Times:
You may not be the best judge of this from your usual device as your cache will make the site load faster than it would for a new visitor. Indicators that this is happening are usually high abandonment rates, lower search engine rankings or direct complaints from customers about speed.
SOLUTION
If you’re using WordPress then you can use certain plugins to help you achieve better speeds by optimising images, leveraging browser caching, and using content delivery networks (CDNs).
3. Non-Responsive Design
This occurs when your site does not automatically adjust for users on mobiles or tablets. Your site only works properly on laptops and desktops but users have difficulty in navigating the site on mobile devices. You will notice low mobile conversion rates and increased bounce rates from mobile users.
SOLUTION
Implement a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes. This is one of the reasons why we recommend WordPress for building your sites as most, if not all the themes in their portfolio are responsive.
4. Complicated Checkout Process:
If your site is an e-commerce site and you start noticing high cart abandonment rates, chances are your checkout process is not seamless enough. user feedback about the complexity of the process.
SOLUTION
Simplify the checkout process by minimizing the number of steps. Offer guest checkout options if you can so a customer is not required to sign up to your site just to make a purchase. It is always better to get customer details where you can, with their consent to keep in contact, but we wouldn’t recommend losing sales as a cost for that. You will want to provide multiple payment methods as well.
5. Lack of Clear Calls to Action (CTAs)
Your site appears to be getting more visitors but users are not following through on desired actions, such as signing up for newsletters or making purchases.
SOLUTION
What is it that you want visitors to your site to do? You have to be bold in what you want from them but tactful in how you guide them to your desired outcome. For example, while you may want every visitor to buy something, it wouldn’t be wise to have ‘Buy Now’ buttons everywhere on your site.
It would be more effective to guide your potential customers through a journey of discovering more about your product and ultimately coming to a decision to make a purchase. What is your unique value proposition?
Clearly communicate your unique value proposition on the homepage and throughout the site. Use engaging content that resonates with your target audience.
Use clear, concise, and compelling CTAs that guide users toward the next step. Ensure these CTAs are prominently placed and easily noticeable.
6. Ineffective Search Functionality:
You can tell users are struggling to find what they’re looking for using the search bar when you have high exit rates on search results pages.
SOLUTION
Depending on the size of your site, you will want to routinely go through your search logs looking at the common queries and the results provided. Most common in-site search engines will allow you to make manual adjustments to search logs so you can manually indicate those items that you want to appear at the top of the search results list for certain queries.
The Importance of Overcoming Customer Pain Points
1. Enhanced User Experience:
It’s one of those things that can be hard to identify from a user perspective, but when your website experience is intuitive and just flows, it shows in how long the user spends on your site. When visitors can easily find what they are looking for and navigate the site without frustration, they are more likely to stay longer and explore further.
2. Increased Conversion Rates
It’s all about simplicity. As someone once said, simplicity is the highest form of sophistication. Simplifying the user journey and removing obstacles encourages more users to complete desired actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for a service. By addressing some of teh common pain points like complicated checkouts and unclear CTAs, you can significantly boost conversion rates.
3. Improved Customer Loyalty
Satisfied customers are likely to return to your website, and a pleasant experience would lead them to recommend it to others. Showing commitment to continually wanting to improve your customers’ experience is a great way to build trust and loyalty. The kind of trust and loyalty that can lead to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth referrals.
4. Better Search Engine Rankings
Search engines will always prioritize websites that offer a positive user experience over ones that don’t. Once search engines recognise that customers are spending more time on your website which indicates that you are providing valuable content and a good user experience, this can lead to higher rankings on the search engines and increased organic traffic.
5. Competitive Advantage
A well-optimized website can set you apart from competitors in today’s digital landscape. By continually identifying and overcoming pain points, you can create a superior online presence than that of your competitors which will attract and retain customers, giving you a competitive edge.
SUMMARY
Regularly audit your website and make gathering customer feedback just as important as making a sale. Get in the habit of continually making improvements to ensure your site meets the needs and expectations of your audience. If your main objective is to make things as easy as possible for your end user, your sales, sign-ups, and search results will begin to show improvements.