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While customers may not be willing to part with certain current approaches, they are consistently trying to mitigate weaknesses. Pain points are issues that affect a customer's ability to do a job. These are things that customers find inefficient, boring, boring, or frustrating.

While some weaknesses are obvious and can be quickly grasped through common sense or conversations with customers, others are less obvious and are better captured through journaling and observation (e.g. process complexity, points of confusion or indecision, accepted workarounds). This phenomenon occurs even in the most rational of environments. For example, a medical technology company we worked with interviewed dozens of surgeons to understand what is challenging about certain surgical procedures. Heart rate monitors were then connected to these surgeons during the procedure and the data told a very different story. Surgeons have been frustrated doing repetitive tasks, when unable to do their job due to limited visibility of the surgical site, and many other situations that they often viewed as inevitable parts of performing surgery.

Every pain point creates space for innovation. Kimberly-Clark, a global consumer goods company, found that a number of adults suffering from incontinence adopted compensatory behaviors – from bundles of toilet paper to frequent wardrobe changes – to address a variety of physical and emotional pain points. The Depend Silhouette and Real Fit Briefs are designed to reduce the need for these workarounds while addressing key underlying tasks in a socially palatable way. In this way, Kimberly-Clark generated significant sales from adults who had previously suffered months or even years before purchasing an incontinence product.

Solve according to customer pain points

One of the hardest parts of getting pain points relief is making sure you are looking for real pain points – not your personal dissatisfactions, not pain points from customers in other industries, and not artificial pain points that happen to be the counterpoints to the latest on your product are properties. One way to help this is to quantitatively assess the validity of your identified pain points in a large sample. Even if real customers pointed out multiple vulnerabilities, it doesn't necessarily mean that the larger population shares the same problems. Using a quantitative survey, you can map vulnerabilities to specific customer segments, making sure you resolve vulnerabilities for those customers you really want to target.

You can also use such surveys to identify priorities among pain points, possibly through a technique such as conjoint analysis. This approach requires customers to weigh the tradeoffs. Do you want a laptop with two hours more battery life or half a pound less? Would you like the keyboard to be more resonant or five millimeters thinner? By making tradeoffs concrete, you can determine the true preferences of customers, which will ultimately be reflected in their buying behavior.

For more information on this approach, see my book JOBS TO BE DONE: A Roadmap for Customer-centric Innovation.

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