Customer pain points: the 4 types, how to find them and which to fix first
Customer pain points are problems that keep coming up and cost your customers money or time, at any step from the first purchase to a support request. They fall into four types: financial, productivity, process and support. You find them in what customers say (interviews, surveys, reviews, tickets) and in what they do (drop-offs, refunds, cancellations). Fix first the ones that recur, cost the customer most and no rival has solved.
What is a customer pain point?
A customer pain point is a problem your buyers keep hitting, such as a fee that appears only at checkout or a support line that never answers. UX researchers use the same word for friction inside an interface; this guide uses the business sense.
Three terms get mixed up:
| term | what it is | example |
|---|---|---|
| Complaint | One customer’s report of one bad moment | “My order arrived late” |
| Pain point | The recurring problem behind many complaints, most never voiced | Delivery dates slip in peak weeks |
| Need | The outcome the customer wants | The order arrives before the weekend |
A complaint is one data point. A pain point is the pattern you see once you count the complaints. A need is what the fix must deliver. Take a dental clinic with a few reviews complaining about long waits: each review is a complaint, the pain point is a booking system that double-books morning slots, and the need is to be seen at the booked time.
The 4 types of customer pain points
Most pain points fit one of four types. The type tells you who in your business owns the fix and which metric shows whether it worked.
| type | what the customer feels | signal you can measure |
|---|---|---|
| Financial | Paying too much, or more than expected | Drop-off at the price step, refund requests |
| Productivity | Lost time, or a result paid for and not delivered | Time to finish a task, churn after onboarding |
| Process | Too many steps, or unclear ones | Drop-off per step, return requests |
| Support | Waiting, repeating the story | Time to first reply, reopened tickets |
Financial pain points
Financial pain costs the buyer money: a price over budget, a fee that appears only at checkout, paying for features they don’t use, no installment option, or a subscription that keeps billing after they stopped using it.
Hidden fees are now partly a legal matter in the US. The FTC’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees took effect on May 12, 2025, and requires sellers of live-event tickets and short-term lodging to show the total price up front, with mandatory fees included.1 Cancellation is less settled: the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated the FTC’s click-to-cancel amendments to the Negative Option Rule on July 8, 2025, days before their July 14 effective date.2 Either way, a cancellation flow that is hard to use still draws disputes and bad reviews.
When the price exceeds the buyer’s budget, a lower tier or usage-based pricing can help, and so can installments. When a buyer says “it’s over our budget”, ask which part of the result they would drop first. The answer tells you which tier to offer.
Productivity pain points
Productivity pain means the customer spends hours on the problem or never gets the result they paid for. A software case: a scheduling tool makes office staff type the same client details into the calendar and again into the invoice. The problem is double entry, the consequence is lost hours each week and typos on invoices, and the fix is one shared record.
In services, that’s a client who pays for a trained dog or a fitter body and doesn’t get one. Outdated technology is a frequent cause: a system that cannot export data forces people to copy it by hand. While the product change waits, ship a stopgap, such as a help article or in-app guidance that spells out the workaround.
Process pain points
Process pain comes from the steps around the product, such as sign-up, checkout, the wait for delivery, returns, cancellation and contacting you. One extra step can lose a customer who was ready to buy. A half-digital process is a common form: a clinic takes bookings online and still asks for a paper form at the front desk.
Measure it per step: the share of people who leave at each step, the time to complete it and the share of orders that turn into return requests. Page speed belongs here. Google data from 2016 showed that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned when a page takes longer than three seconds to load.3 The figure is ten years old, so measure your own pages before you build a plan on it.
Support pain points
Support pain shows up when the customer needs help: replies come slowly, each new agent makes them repeat the story, a channel never answers, or nobody updates them on the request. Describe it from the customer’s side. Agent workload is your problem; the customer sees only the wait.
A self-check, where each “no” marks a support pain point:
- A customer can reach a person on the channel they used to buy.
- The second agent sees what the first one was told.
- The customer gets a status message without asking for it.
How one pain turns into another
One pain point often causes the next. A confusing return form (process) sends the customer to the phone (support), the call takes their afternoon (productivity), and then they ask for a refund (financial). Fix the return form and the later complaints drop too.
What an unsolved pain point costs you
The cost comes in three levels. The first is the lost sale. The Baymard Institute’s average documented cart abandonment rate is 70.22%, from 50 studies, and extra costs (shipping, taxes, fees) are the top reason in its survey of US shoppers, at 40% once the “just browsing” group is set aside.4
The second is regret after the sale. Gartner’s 2025 software buying research found that 59% of buyers regret at least one software purchase from the past 18 months.5 Regret turns into refunds and cancellations.
The third is the card dispute and the public review. A dispute costs you the payment, and a review reaches the next buyer before you do.
How to find customer pain points: 7 methods
The first four methods record what customers say; the last three record what they do. Use at least one from each group, because people often describe a problem one way and behave another way.
1. Interview customers
Talk to recent buyers and to people who almost bought. Move from broad questions to specific ones, the way the Sandler Pain Funnel from Sandler Training moves a sales conversation from the category to the actual experience.6
- What problem were you trying to solve when you started looking?
- What is the best experience you have had with a product like this?
- What did you try before, and why did it fail?
- What would you want next?
It won’t tell you how common the problem is. Keep the channel open after the first round, since pain points change over time.
2. Debrief your sales and support teams
After a lost deal, ask the salesperson four questions. What reason did the buyer give? What do you think the real reason was? Which rival won, and on what? What did the buyer ask that we could not answer? Ask support which question they answered most often this month. What it cannot show: staff report what they hear, filtered through what they can fix.
3. Run a survey with open questions and an effort score
Ask one open question per type:
- Financial: “What part of the price surprised you?”
- Productivity: “What takes you longer than it should?”
- Process: “Which step confused you?”
- Support: “When did you last wait for an answer from us?”
Right after the purchase, ask “What almost stopped you from buying?” Pair the open questions with the Customer Effort Score, which asks how easy it was to get something done and averages the replies. CEB, now part of Gartner, introduced it in the 2010 Harvard Business Review article “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers”.7 What it cannot show: the views of customers who already left.
4. Mine reviews, forums and social posts
Read Google reviews, Yelp, Amazon, G2 for software, the BBB, Reddit and niche forums, and search X (named Twitter until July 20238) for your brand and your rivals’. Read your rivals’ reviews as closely as your own: their customers’ complaints are gaps you can fill. Act only on themes that recur across sites, and set aside reviews that look fake (no details, posted in bursts). What it cannot show: the quiet middle, since reviews lean to the delighted and the furious.
5. Tag support tickets, refunds and cancellations
Tag each support ticket with one reason, do the same for refunds and cancellations, and count the tags each month. Card disputes carry a reason too: Visa and Mastercard reason codes have a category for merchandise not as described, separate from fraud codes such as unauthorized transactions.9
| reason | likely pain point |
|---|---|
| “Not as described” dispute | The page promises more than the product does |
| Refund: “too hard to use” | Productivity, at onboarding |
| Cancellation: “too expensive” | Financial, the plan does not fit the use |
| Second ticket on one order | Support, no status update |
What it cannot show: customers who left without asking.
6. Read what customers do
Four signals in your analytics, each with the pain it usually points to:
- Rage clicks, repeated clicks on one spot: a button or link that does not work the way people expect.
- Exit pages: the step where the process loses people.
- A conversion gap between mobile and desktop: process pain on the small screen. Mobile is about 44.6% of US ecommerce sales, and it crossed 60% for the first time on Thanksgiving Day in the 2025 holiday season.10
- Site searches that end in an exit: the answer the customer looked for is missing.
What it cannot show: why people leave.
7. Buy from your competitors
Buy from a few rivals as a customer would. Compare the same steps at each (the price page, checkout, the first email, one support question) and note every step that annoys you. The limit: this can’t show how buyers with other habits react.
Where pain points show up in the customer journey
| stage | typical pain | signal you can see |
|---|---|---|
| Discover | Cannot tell what you sell | High exit rate on the home page |
| Compare | Price or terms hidden | Price page visit, then exit |
| Buy | Extra fees, long checkout | Drop-off per checkout step |
| Use | Setup takes too long | Low activity in the first weeks |
| Get help or leave | Slow reply, hard cancellation | Reopened tickets, disputes |
A first-time buyer and a repeat buyer get stuck at different stages.
Which pain points to fix first
This rule is our own way to order a list; our check does not compute it.
- How often. Count a theme across independent sources. One complaint is an anecdote. When a theme shows up in two independent sources, such as reviews and support tickets, treat it as a pain point.
- What it costs the customer. It costs the customer money or time, or puts them at risk. Name the type.
- Who already solves it. If a rival fixes it, the fix is the minimum you must offer. If no rival does, it can become your positioning.
- The order. A pain that recurs, costs the customer most and no rival solves goes first. A recurring pain that is cheap to fix goes into this week’s work. A rare one goes on a watch list.
Then place each pain on a grid of impact on the customer against effort for you:
| low effort | high effort | |
|---|---|---|
| High impact | Do now | Plan |
| Low impact | Batch | Drop |
Choose “plan” when the fix needs a product change, and ship an interim fix while you build it.
How to fix pain points: this week, this month, this quarter
Copy and settings changes ship this week, small builds this month, product changes this quarter. Measure each with its type’s signal.
| type | this week | this month | this quarter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Financial | Show the full price, fees included, up front | Add a pay-per-use or monthly plan | Build tiers around the features customers use |
| Productivity | Publish a help article on the workaround | Add in-app guidance where users stall | Add data export; rebuild what causes your top theme |
| Process | Rewrite the FAQ answer support quotes most often | Cut one step from checkout or signup | Let customers cancel where they signed up |
| Support | Send an automatic order-status message | Give every agent the ticket history | Staff every channel you sell through |
Ask those who complained whether the fix worked, and count the answers the same way.
How our idea check reads pain points
Our free idea check runs the “what customers say” methods on your future rivals, before you have customers of your own. It searches the niche (17 queriesex and 26 sourcesex in the example below, example by our method) and finds the direct competitors. It pulls the complaints from those rivals’ reviews, groups them by theme, such as “Quality” or “Service and support”, and counts each theme. A count is how many complaints that one run found, so read it as a sample size, not as a rate or a share of survey answers. Each theme becomes one of the check’s risks, a sentence on what the pain means for the new business.
Worked example: the pain points behind a hunting-dog kennel
This is our check’s example in one niche: a hunting-dog kennel outside Pierre, South Dakota, that boards and conditions retrievers and pointers for out-of-state pheasant hunters (example by our method).ex The check ran 17 queriesex over 26 sourcesex and found 7 direct competitorsex, all figures example by our method.
It found 5 complaints about rival kennels on qualityex and 1 on service and supportex, in the example. Quality here means conditioning that did not deliver: the owner paid for a dog ready for the season and did not get one. That is productivity pain. The single support complaint is an anecdote by the rule above. The check carried the quality theme into a risk: “Quality complaints about rival kennels show that poor conditioning hurts trust, so one bad season could damage your reputation quickly.”ex
On the financial side, board plus training at $875 a monthex, paid monthlyex, over a 10-month customer lifeex comes to $8,750 per hunter, example by our method. Process pain is an assumption, and we state it as one: owners leave the dog far from home, so updates on its conditioning are part of what they pay for. The check has no theme for it.
What to offer from this: a written conditioning plan with a result the owner can see each month answers the quality theme, and a regular video update answers the assumed process pain.
The limits are plain. Six complaints are a small sample. The check found no demand sourceex and says so in its own risk: “Without search-volume data, you may build for buyers who are fewer than the monthly price model assumes.”ex The verdict was “Worth building”ex at 65 pointsex, example by our method.
Your next step
Name the pain and confirm it in two independent sources. Then fix it and ask the people who complained whether the fix worked. To see the complaints customers already have about your future rivals, run the free check.
FAQ
What are the 4 types of customer pain points?
Financial pain costs money. Productivity pain costs time or a result the customer never got. Process pain sits in the steps around buying, including returns and cancellations. Support pain is about getting help. Most complaints map to one of them.
What is an example of a customer pain point?
A tool that makes staff type the same data twice is a productivity pain point. In our worked example, rival kennels drew complaints about conditioning that did not deliver.
How do you identify customer pain points?
Use interviews, team debriefs, surveys, reviews, ticket and refund tags, behavior analytics and purchases from rivals. Pair one method that records words with one that records behavior.
What is the difference between a pain point and a complaint?
A complaint is one customer’s report. A pain point is the recurring problem behind many complaints, most of them never voiced.
Which customer pain points should you fix first?
The ones that recur across independent sources, cost the customer most and no rival has solved. Recurring pains that are cheap to fix go into this week’s work.
What are financial pain points?
Problems with money: a price above budget, hidden fees, plans that charge for unused features, no payment over time and subscriptions that are hard to cancel.
Sources
- govinfo.gov, 04/09/2024
- morganlewis.com, 07/11/2025
- blog.google, 02/26/2018
- baymard.com, 10/18/2026
- howmarketingtechnology.works, 08/06/2026
- go.sandler.com, 04/22/2026
- usersnap.com, 10/14/2026
- reuters.com, 07/24/2023
- developer.payments.jpmorgan.com, 06/03/2026
- mobiloud.com, 08/26/2026
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