- Hurdles, or problems in
the customer's experience, are called pain points. Pain points are diverse. They can be broad or specific, severe or generally insignificant, extremely obvious or hidden. Identifying pain points is a first step to designing exceptional experiences that address our user's needs. Pain points fall into
one of three categories, interaction level, journey
level, and relationship level. These three levels mirror the three levels of customer experience. So let's start with
interaction level pain points. These are pain points that,
for example, usability issues, can be detected through user
research like a usability test. Traditionally, the UX field
has been mostly focused on identifying these types of issues. An example of this would be when you're passed from person to person when you call customer support. You talk to multiple departments until you finally land with someone who's able to handle that request. Not only is your time wasted, but we have to explain our
issue over and over again to different support agents. Even more, there's discrepancies in the information we're told. This type of interaction causes
wasted time and confusion. The next category of pain points is journey level pain points. These are found through a combination of exploratory research,
such as user interviews, diary and field studies,
customer journey mapping. This approach allows us to
collect various data points across the entire journey, and assess how successfully interactions come together to reach their goal. An example of a journey level pain point might be when a user places an order, but doesn't receive it for months. The long duration between
the beginning of the journey, making the purchase, and then the completion of the
journey, receiving the item, creates frustration. Additional pain points often include the lack of upfront
communication about wait times, or the need to call customer support to check in on delivery. In this instance, the entire journey from purchase to
completion is a pain point. The third and final category are relationship level pain points. Relationship level pain points are uncovered over long periods of time. Our goal is to assess
the lifetime experience that a person has with the organization, and the summary of the pain points that they have as a patron. We identify pain points at this level via benchmarking surveys, thinking: brand loyalty,
likelihood to recommend, and overall customer satisfaction, as well as analytics data,
technical infrastructure, and managing the data of
an individual customer. An example of this is my
recent subscription to Hulu, a streaming service which I pay for, but I'm still having
to watch constant ads. This is an anomaly compared to
my other streaming services, and doesn't meet my
expectations of industry norms. These advertisements are a pain point in my overall relationship with Hulu. My trust in the company is diminished due to the financial commitment I've made without equal reward. All pain points incur a cost to the user, whether it's time and extra
steps that they have to take, or actual money that they lose. While pain points are never ideal, it's not cost efficient for us
to try to solve all of them. Identifying the category that a specific pain point falls into can help us weigh impact
and prioritize solutions. Tradeoffs are going to have to be made, and UX resources should
be strategically applied. Once we uncover a user's pain points, we can prioritize them, and then explore potential solutions, and plot that work into a future roadmap.
