Why An Annoyed Customer May Be Exactly What You Need

You’ve heard the old customer service adage that a complaint is a gift. When a customer is angry, you look for ways to solve their problem and prevent it from happening to other customers.

But what about all the small complaints, those annoyances that don’t warrant a call to customer service? Identifying and solving those little annoyances may be your path to a competitive edge in your market.

Where Content Goes Wrong

Too many companies use blogs with the wrong audience in mind. Instead of writing to their customers, they’re writing to themselves.

How else could you explain the proliferation of blog posts telling audiences how great the product is, with its awesome features and great price. If this is your content style, your potential customer is bored at best and at worst, they’ve already clicked away. You’re not talking to them in a way that holds their attention because they don’t see any value in it.

The best and most effective content provides value by addressing customer pain points. Don’t tell them about features. Talk to them about the problem they’re having with efficiency in their manufacturing site and what your product does to save them both time and money.

How Do You Identify Pain Points?

The simple answer is to listen to your customers. If you’re in a B2C market, social media listening can tell you a lot about what annoys people that buy products or services like yours. If that doesn’t yield enough information, try a well-executed survey:

• Introduce the survey at a moment when it’s convenient with a pop-up that only appears for repeat or loyal customers
• Offer something in exchange for the survey, such as access to a great resource or a 20% discount
• Tell them exactly how long it will take, by telling them how many questions or how long they can expect to be at it, with three questions being a good length
• Communicate your purpose (we’re trying to be even more awesome)

You can also reach out via email or start a conversation on social media, simply asking your audience what gets on their nerves about their experiences.

Look for the Best Opportunities

You may not be able to address every inconvenience, but be ready to assess the cost and benefit of addressing pain points. Some may be hard to quantify, but easy decisions, nonetheless. When Qdoba learned that consumers eating at Qdoba and Chipotle were fed up with being charged extra for items like guacamole, they saw an opportunity. They told their customers, “Extras aren’t extra” and began differentiating themselves in their market.

Qdoba could have gotten caught up in the money they would lose when sides of guacamole no longer added a dollar or two to the ticket, but they saw the value in aligning themselves with their customers’ priorities.

When you consider the trade-off of annoying a customer one time with a charge for guacamole versus the money you’ll make when they come back for the second, third and fourth times, it’s an easy decision. You may also find that it’s possible to make up the difference in profit in another area.

What’s your version of charging customers for guacamole? Is there something that’s annoying them in your industry that you could solve, offering value to your customer and increasing brand loyalty?

For help in identifying customer pain points, contact us at DirectMail.io. Once we know where you can bring your customers value, we can address those pain points in a well-coordinated campaign with our all-in-one marketing automation tool.