This is part two of a two-part blog series. For information on how to discover your company’s unique pain points, including how to create an effective and honest customer journey map, read Finding Your Biggest Customer Pain Points.

Now that you’ve learned how to find your business’ customer pain points, let’s discuss how to solve these issues to satisfy your customers and increase the return on investment for your sales efforts.

Every company’s pain points are unique, even when compared to other businesses in the same industry. However, there are multiple steps that every business can take to eliminate customer pain points, each of which can be tailored to their own current issues.

By applying these tactics to your company's unique customer journey and the types of problems that most often create negative emotions in your customer's experiences with your brand, you can steadily improve satisfaction and loyalty. As discussed by MarketStrategies.com, there are many different areas that companies can focus their time and effort on improving, but businesses should take three factors into account when making decisions:

1. What changes will drive the greatest improvements?
2. Which tactical areas are underperforming the most?
3. What critical pain points will cause the largest improvements in loyalty if fixed?

Pain points often come from a lack of coordination within a business’ operations, leading to confusion and frustrating customer experiences. The following four actions can address some of the most common causes of customer pain points and will frequently meet the criteria listed above, depending on your company. If you are devising a customer pain point strategy, take the following ideas into consideration and reference them against the previously mentioned three criteria in order to create a list of actionable and effective ideas that are right for your business.

1. Eliminate Gaps Between Devices

Common Pain Points Addressed:

• Needing to Restart Progress in Online Shopping
• Being Forced to Re-enter Personal Information

Omnichannel experiences are on the minds of digitally-focused companies everywhere, and with good reason. A true omnichannel experience means that a consumer can jump between any device without skipping a beat in order to continue their ongoing and growing interactions with a brand. While omnichannel experiences show your company is on the cutting edge of innovation, they also combat the very real and very much growing lack of customer patience.

More customers than ever expect to transition between their devices without having to re-enter information or search for what they were seeing somewhere else. And they’re also more willing than ever to abandon their journey and look for a competitor that will give them a satisfactory experience.

By seamlessly continuing the experience across devices, customers can remain engaged and, according to Rosetta Consulting research, engaged customers are five times more likely to buy only from the same brand in the future.

2. Break Down Silos Between Departments

Common Pain Points Addressed:

• Important Customer Information Lost by Companies
• Unnecessary Additional Steps Needed to Complete a Purchase

Departments are the natural result of companies growing and needing to break down their many different types of work into manageable, successful approaches. However, they also get in the way of intra-company data sharing, which has become an increasingly difficult problem in the era of digital marketing.

During a customer’s journey, he or she will almost certainly move between several departments within a company, such as marketing, sales and customer service. If your company has not properly connected these departments, it is likely that the customer will have to start from scratch each time that he or she changes departments, causing complications, lost time and frustration.

If a piece of marketing has caused a customer to submit their information to your company, then that data should be made available to the sales team in order to understand what the customer is interested in. Once a sale has been completed, data concerning what the customer bought should be accessible by customer service representatives so that they can quickly answer questions and solve problems without the customer needing to re-enter all of their information in order to be helped. Breaking down silo walls within your company can fix customer pain points quickly.

3. Improve Integration Between Social Media and Websites

Common Pain Points Addressed:

• Inability to Purchase Desired Products Found on Social Media
• Feeling Ignored by a Company When Voicing Needs Online

Many companies see their social media presences as a separate, supplemental piece of their online world, and not the integrated, useful tool that it should be today. Social media can generate interest in products and foster a community around a business in ways that typical websites cannot. However, when a customer becomes interested in a product through social media and cannot find what they like on your company’s site, social media quickly generates pain points.

In addition, social media is quick to provide customers with a feeling of being known and seen as an individual. Should they shift to your main website or interact with your brand in other ways, only to be set back to square one, the good will generated by social media will quickly be squandered.

Not only that, but social media offers insight into the interests and habits of customers, which can be leveraged to create a better understanding of each person. These insights provide a key component to create a single view of every customer.

4. Create the Right Personalized Experiences to Avoid Irritating Marketing Habits

Common Pain Points Addressed:

• Receiving Ads for Disliked Products
• Being Sent Improperly Addressed Communications
• Long-Term Customers Being Treated as New Ones

There’s nothing quite so off-putting as receiving a piece of marketing material that has clearly been designed to appear personalized, only for a simple mistake to show that you are only one of thousands to have received it. Maybe it’s a missing name in the opening address of an email, or a social media ad presenting a product you just bought. In any case, it can easily make a customer feel completely unseen.

According to AccessDevelopment.com, 57% of consumers they surveyed cited receiving offers for products after submitting a negative review of a related product as being a top reason to stop buying a brand. The message is clear; today’s customers want to feel seen and there are more ways than ever to make them feel unseen by your company.

You will need to take the data you collect from your customers’ online actions and use them to make consistently updated marketing tactics that shift with the audience’s ever-changing needs.