Solving a customer’s pain

Hands up if you never had a customer case in which you failed to give the customer what he needed simply because you didn’t ask the right questions. Your hand is up? I am impressed.

The sad truth is that we fail quite often. But why don’t we ask the right questions? I think it is because we don’t ask ourself the right question: what is the pain a customer has?

I mean the real pain and not the one he tells you. A customer in many cases thinks he has the solution for his problem at hands but he doesn’t think out of the box. Before the touchscreen tablet computers were invented he might have told you „I want an easier to use mouse“ because anything like „I want to be able to use my computer with my fingertips while sitting on the sofa“ would have sounded too much like Science Fiction. We all had adapted to using a mouse and complex operating systems. We all were used that we had to think like the developers of the computer because they failed to think like us. And those of us who struggled were simply not bright enough.

Solving our customer’s pains should be the one and only reason why we work in customer service. To do it we need to find the real pain a customer has so that we can solve the root cause and don’t just cure the symptoms.Don’t be scared to ask questions as they are the only way to learn more about the customer’s pain.

And not only customer service must be focused on solving pain. It must be the mission of the whole company, of R&D, Marketing and of the sales team. If you live it customers will see the difference. And they will be willing to pay for it.

If you want to know more about pain solving in selling have a look into the common sense selling concept.