We hear the term pain points, but what does this mean? Pain points could be a number of issues in your company, but generally they are areas where you could improve. Whether that’s improving how you capitalize on your resources, executing on projects, or what you lack in your business.

While there are a variety of ways to resolve these pain points, how many of them can be approached as a software solution? It’s hard to give an answer without taking the time to look at where they exist.

How to find your pain points

To figure out your pain points, meet with your team. They will know where to start on improving your business and communicating with them should be a major component of your business already. Try to understand what challenges they see in your company and get their feedback on how you can improve. Often, high level positions, even managers, may be out of touch with the more granular issues.

To address this oversight, make sure you’re speaking with everyone across your company and getting their feedback. Next, speak with your customers or clients. These can be current clients and should include previous clients. It’s important to get their perspective because they offer opinions outside of your business and internal culture.  Whether your relationship was good or bad, it will prove helpful to gather as much feedback on your company as possible.

Evaluating your pain points

Hopefully, you’ve been able to create a list of areas where your company can improve. What are you losing based on each of these problems you’ve found? It could be that someone in your company is performing a task manually such as inventory tracking which could be solved with software attached to a database. In that scenario, you’ve wasted time and you’re personnel aren’t spending their time as efficiently as they could be.

Perhaps, you’re working on scaling your company and all of your orders are currently handled by sales reps. They can each only handle so many orders per day, and there’s no self-service option. You’re losing out on additional orders and not shipping out your product as quickly as you could be if you had a more automated process. In other words, you’ve lost out on opportunities and are feeling restricted by your current capabilities.

No matter what problem you’re running into, start assessing what is being affected by your inefficiencies and then you’ll be able to start changing them.

Acting on your pain points

Now that you have collected information on your pain points, start sorting your data and see where there are commonalities. Organize this data and bring your team back together to discuss solutions based on the info you collected.

How many of these solutions can be solved with better software? The purpose of  your technology should be to help your business be more efficient. For example, automating processes, passing critical info to customers, improving access to your business, or better managing your data.

Look at the capabilities of your current technology, compare that to what you want, and then it’s time to consult with an expert.

Pain points to Opportunities

We believe software will improve the business your company is able to do. Don’t believe us? Look at Domino’s or Starbucks as examples of how innovation made an incredible impact upon their business. It all comes down to what you hope to achieve and transforming your pain points to features a software can complete.

Let’s consider you have difficulty tracking your inventory and want a more transparent way to find certain items. Well, a software solution to solve this problem could include using bar code scanning on your inventory and sending that information to a database linked to your website. What this allows is for you to check your inventory internally and inform customers how much you have left of an item without them having to call you.

Now, you may have a problems more complicated than tracking inventory and after identifying your pain points, you have a laundry list of problems you wish to address. Good.

Reach out to us

Software is an investment and the only returns you will see from what it are how much you are willing to put into it. There’s no guarantee it will solve every problem you have, but undoubtedly it will address your most pressing pain points as best as possible.

Interested in having a conversation? Reach out to us and set up a consultation. We’re always willing to offer our expertise. Talk to you soon.