AI-powered tools for addressing real customer pain points

Author: Jeremy Rader

Date: November 11, 2023

Disclaimer I have no affiliation with any of the products mentioned. Nor am I providing reviews for any of them. The sole intent of this article is to demonstrate the availability of AI-powered solutions to meet your business needs

Why do most startups fail?

CB Insights says that 42% fail tackling problems that are interesting to solve, rather than those that serve a market need.

So how do you fill a market need? You need to go to the source (the customer) and identify common pain points.

Identifying and addressing pain points

1. Direct Feedback: Directly engaging with your customers is crucial for understanding their pain points. Create customer satisfaction surveys with open-ended questions, allowing your customers to express their issues and desires in their own words.

   Creating your own customer surveys can be time-consuming. And if you're like me you might spend hours just deciding on the right questions to put in to the survey.

   AI-powered tools can cut back on the time spent creating these surveys in the first place.

   Two examples that I've found:

   BlockSurvey - Create a survey in seconds using AI generated questions. This is a free option that is all about data privacy. It also provides a white-label solution and webhook integration through Zapier.

   Yay!Forms - Create forms that capture the audience's feelings. The forms come with a responsive design and options for custom branding. This product also includes analytics for form conversion rates and market segmentation.

2. Indirect Feedback: Sales and customer support teams are valuable resources for identifying customer pain points. They possess insights into common customer complaints and can offer actionable feedback based on their expertise and experiences with customers. Engaging these teams with open-ended questions similar to those used in customer surveys can yield significant insights​.

   AI can assist sales and customer support teams by providing them with tools for better customer interaction and feedback collection. For example, AI-driven chatbots can handle initial customer inquiries, gather preliminary data, and route complex issues to human agents. This can help in prioritizing tasks and managing workload more efficiently. AI can also analyze past interactions to identify common issues and solutions, thus aiding team members in resolving customer problems more quickly and effectively.

   It is quite easy to setup your own chatbot using chatbot builders that require zero coding knowledge on your part.

   Tools in this category include:

   botpress - Build ChatGPT chatbots, surprisingly fast. Botpress is a low-code chat-bot builder with OpenAI support for ChatGPT features. Features a visual flow editor, a large collection of integrations, and multi-language support.

   VoiceFlow - The AI chatbot platform that meets your ambition. Another low-code options that has support for ChatGPT and Claude. Allows you to upload documents that serve as a knowledge base for your bot. Also includes a visual flow editor and support for integrations using webhooks.

3. Analyze Customer Data and Conduct Research: Collecting and analyzing hard data, such as customer churn rates, resolution times, and conversion rates, can provide insights into customer pain points. Additionally, conducting both qualitative and quantitative research, including surveys, social media analysis, and review of online feedback, can offer a deeper understanding of customer challenges and the effectiveness of current solutions​.

   Whereas the first two points are focused on gathering data about your customers' pain points, this point is focused on generating actionable insights to save you money.

   You may find AI-powered analysis on the market similar to these:

   betterfeedback- AI tool for analyzing qualitative customer feedback. Offers product teams the fastest and most efficient way of discovering customer needs, and pain points.. Features sentiment analysis, qualitative analysis, topics and trends discovery.

   freetext - Artificial Intelligence for customer obsession. Convert reviews, chats, surveys, emails, support tickets and other textual customer feedback from multiple sources into actionable insights and trends.

In conclusion, there are plenty of actions that you can be taking to address the pain points of your customers. Although this can be expensive and time-consuming there are tools available to you today that require minimum effort on your part to implement. You don't even need to understand code, the complex underpinnings of machine learning or need to contract out to a data science team.

If you'd like to learn how your company can benefit from AI-powered solutions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me for a free consultation