- 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.