What are Customer Pain Points?

Customer pain points are the specific problems or frustrations your users face when trying to achieve their goals. They’re the gaps between what your users want to accomplish and what they’re actually experiencing.

These obstacles can appear at any stage, whether someone’s researching your product, going through your checkout process, or using your service months after purchase.

Examples include:

• Software teams struggling with an unintuitive interface that slows down their work
• customers getting frustrated by shipping delays or confusing return policies
• wasting valuable time dealing with unresponsive support teams

These friction points can directly influence whether customers stay with your business or look elsewhere. Although some pain points may seem minor on their own (such as having to click through multiple pages to find basic information), the knock-on effect can massively impact a user's satisfaction and .

Many businesses make the mistake of seeing pain points as just complaints to manage. However, they’re also opportunities.

You can use what customers say and experience to innovate your product and differentiate your offering. Identifying where people struggle most gives you a clear direction on which improvements will have the greatest impact on your business .

Addressing genuine customer struggles can lead to measurable returns in the most important parts of your business: , referrals, and .

Reduce friction

Solving a meaningful problem for your customers naturally reduces friction in their . You make it easier for them to achieve their goals and find value in your product, often leading to higher satisfaction and longer-term loyalty.

Attract new business

Tackling pain points doesn’t just mean keeping your existing customers happy. When you confront a problem that affects your entire market, you set yourself apart in a way that helps attract new business.

People actively seeking solutions to common challenges will naturally gravitate toward companies that clearly understand their needs.

Stronger growth metrics

Businesses that eliminate customer pain points often see stronger growth , such as lower , higher , and more .

After all, people are far more likely to stay with and recommend products that genuinely make their lives easier.

Most customer pain points fall into one of four categories. They can appear at any stage of the .

Productivity pain points

These surface when customers can’t complete their tasks efficiently, usually because of a flaw in the product or service itself. A technical problem, poor design, or a lack of integration—anything that slows down a task—might cause this blockage.

For instance, a design team could lose hours because its collaboration software keeps crashing, while a marketing team may need extra resources because its doesn’t have automated reporting.

Process pain points

Process pain points arise from clunky or unclear workflows in your business operations. Unlike productivity pain points—which they can influence—process pain points specifically deal with obstacles within your internal workflows. Essentially, what is your actual business doing to hinder or disrupt the customer journey?

A classic case is when customers are made to fill out the same information multiple times across different forms because your internal system doesn’t store or assign their properly.

Support pain points

These arise when customers can’t get help when they need it. Think about how frustrated customers would be if they had an urgent issue but could only access support during limited business hours or were bounced between different departments.

Financial pain points

Financial pain points relate to the monetary aspects of your product or service. Price is the most obvious, but they can also go beyond this—think hidden fees, unclear pricing tiers, or billing cycles that don’t align with business needs.

Typical examples are customers who must commit to annual contracts when they’d prefer monthly flexibility or who have to pay for they rarely use.

Identifying customer pain points requires searching for both the obvious and hidden challenges. To do this, you’ll need to draw on multiple research approaches.

Gather customer feedback

Go beyond the standard satisfaction . Carry out in-depth interviews where customers can walk you through their experiences.

Pay special attention to their word choice and emotional responses—phrases such as “I wish,” “It’s frustrating when,” or “I hate that I have to” often signal pain points. You can also record and analyze support calls to identify common threads in your customers' struggles.

Analyze user data

Mine your for insights. High drop-off rates on certain pages, , or frequent feature abandonment can suggest your customer has encountered obstacles.

Track the time-to-completion for important tasks—unusually long completion times often reveal those more hidden pain or friction points. Look at your to see where users deviate from the path you expected them to take.

Look at social media

Monitor social media mentions, review sites, and industry forums. Customers often share unfiltered feedback in these spaces, revealing pain points they might not express directly to your company. Look for patterns in complaints and how customers describe their challenges to your competitors, too.

Talk to your teams

Your customer-facing teams hold valuable intelligence. Sales teams know which objections they repeatedly need to overcome, support teams understand common frustration points, and account managers recognize why customers consider leaving. Create ways to collect and analyze this feedback to ensure everyone talks to one another and shares their knowledge.

Pay attention to competitors

Study your competitors’ customer feedback and reviews. If customers regularly praise a competitor for solving a specific problem within your niche, that could mean your offering is lacking (i.e., a pain point). Look for gaps between what your customers want and expect and what the industry currently offers.

Not all problems need immediate resolutions, but the most important ones deserve your focused attention and the best resources. Start by prioritizing pain points based on their impact and your ability to fix them.

With this ranking in mind, you can start working on a solution.

Map solutions to your business goals

Connect each pain point solution to a specific business objective.

For instance, if customers struggle with your , you could measure how improving that process would affect . If users are confused about your pricing, you might track how clearer pricing pages could impact .

This alignment helps justify your resource allocation and demonstrates the to other teams and stakeholders.

Take a gradual approach

Start with quick wins that show customers you’re listening. These early victories build trust while you continue working on more complex solutions.

Test each improvement with small user groups before rolling it out and gather feedback to refine your approach further. Remember that perfect solutions rarely exist (you can’t please everyone). Instead, it’s best to focus on meaningful progress—which improvements will move your business in the right direction?

Communicate changes

When you implement solutions, tell customers what you’ve fixed and why it matters. Clear communication helps your users appreciate the improvements and shows you value their feedback.

You could even create short videos or guides highlighting these new features or simplified processes and explaining how their design addresses the challenges they’ve shared.

Monitor and adjust

before and after launching solutions. Watch for unexpected consequences—fixing one pain point might reveal or even create others.

Keep open feedback channels to ensure your solutions solve the problems they aim to target. Use this information to guide future improvements.

Go beyond technical fixes

Some pain points need deeper organizational changes, not just a quick technical fix. For example, if customers consistently struggle with how long your support team takes to respond, you might need to rethink your staffing or revamp other internal processes.

Let’s look at some common real-world pain points and their practical solutions.

Long support wait times

Customers wait hours or days for responses to urgent issues, leading to frustration and a potential loss of business.

Solution: Implement a tiered support system, with live chat for quick issues, ranked tickets for critical problems, and detailed resources (e.g., or FAQs) so users can address the problem or question themselves first.

Confusing onboarding

New users feel overwhelmed by complicated setup processes, resulting in them abandoning the product early.

Solution: Create an interactive onboarding sequence that breaks product setup into manageable steps. Slack is a great example of this—it first highlights essential features to its users and then gradually introduces them to more advanced ones through tips at the right time.

Unclear pricing

Potential customers struggle to understand your service's total cost and are hesitant to commit because they’re not sure what they’ll pay.

Solution: Create transparent pricing pages that compare each tier. Explain what features customers will get, and suggest the best tier based on their company size or expected use. Include a cost calculator if needed, and, most importantly, make sure no fees are hidden.

Feature overload

Users feel overwhelmed by too many options and struggle to find the features they need.

Solution: Implement progressive disclosure in your interface. This is where you show basic features by default and only reveal advanced options when users need them or in response to their actions.

Integration difficulties

Customers cannot connect your product with their existing tools, meaning they can’t find value in their current workflow.

Solution: Build a reliable API and create native integrations with other popular platforms in your niche. Remember to make these integrations accessible to non-technical users, too.

Turn your customer pain points into insights and solutions that genuinely make a difference with .

The advanced helps you move beyond guesswork by revealing exactly where customers struggle in their journey. Understanding your users’ most pressing pain points enables you to build better products and solve real problems.

• Use to see exactly where users drop off, which features cause confusion, and what patterns can predict customer success or frustration
• Understand how different use groups experience your product through , and which pain points affect specific segments the most
• Connect your product usage data with customer feedback to spot helpful correlations between certain behaviors and reported pain points
• Test solutions and measure their impact on key metrics (such as retention and engagement) with