What is the Pain Points Dimension?

Pain Points is the Dimension that asks every piece of customer feedback "What goes wrong or creates difficulty?" It identifies the recurring obstacles, breakdowns and sources of dissatisfaction within the experience: a checkout that fails, a delivery that arrives late, a setting nobody can find. Kimola groups the same problem across all of your reviews, survey responses and support conversations and counts the records behind each one, so you see what goes wrong for your customers and how many of them run into it. Pain Points belongs to the Issues group and is available in every package.

A Dimension is a research question Kimola asks of every piece of feedback. Themes tell you what customers talk about, and sentiment tells you how they feel about it. Pain Points names the problem itself, in your customers' own words, and shows which problems come up again and again. Every answer stays tied to the feedback that gives it, so you can open the records behind a pain point and read them.

The Question It Asks

Pain Points asks one question of each record: "What goes wrong or creates difficulty?" Feedback that describes a problem gets an answer. A pain point can be a breakdown (something stops working: an app crashes, a payment fails), an obstacle (something makes a task harder than it should be: a long form, a confusing menu, a slow reply from support) or a source of dissatisfaction (something works but disappoints: a smaller portion than expected, a price that feels too high).

Feedback that describes no difficulty gets no answer for Pain Points. That is expected: a short note of praise, a question or a neutral description has no problem in it to find. The share of records that answer Pain Points tells you how often your customers report a problem at all. One piece of feedback can name several pain points at once, and each one is counted.

Pain Points looks at what the feedback describes, and sentiment looks at its tone, so the two complement each other. A review can be negative without saying what went wrong, and a positive review can still name a problem: "Love the app, though it logs me out every day." gives the pain point of being logged out. Pain Points is also different from Unmet Needs, the other Dimension of the Issues group. Unmet Needs asks "What is missing or desired?" and collects what customers wish existed, while Pain Points collects what exists and goes wrong. Underlying Causes ("Why does this occur?") takes the next step and explains the conditions behind a problem.

What You Get

Kimola builds the answers of Pain Points from your data. It reads the dataset, finds the problems customers describe and names each answer in their terms, so the pain points of a grocery delivery app and those of a hotel come out different. Across thousands of records, Kimola groups the same problem under one answer and counts the records that give it. The counts and shares come from the classification itself; an AI model writes the summaries afterwards, from numbers that are already computed.

In a Report

On the Report's Dimensions page, Pain Points has its own tab. A ring shows the share of the Report's records that answer the question. The summary card gives a headline and a few paragraphs on what goes wrong for customers, with key terms in bold. Below it, each pain point is a cluster with its number of records, its share and a short summary. A pain point that only a few records give is still counted, but the page says that its summary is not available due to small cluster size.

Cluster Scale shows each pain point's share of the records that answer Pain Points, and Dataset Scale shows its share of all the records in the Report. Because one record can name several pain points, the shares on Cluster Scale can add up to more than 100%. The Columns and Dimensions buttons on a cluster card show what lies behind a pain point, for example in which country it comes up most or at which Experience Stage it happens. See Dimensions in Reports.

In a Space

Spaces are available in the Enterprise package. On a Space's Dimensions page, Pain Points shows its answers under What they talk about and how they change Over time. A pain point whose share changed significantly with the last upload is marked ▲ or ▼ "since the last upload", so a problem that grows after a release shows up with the next file. Kimola writes Insights after every new file: What the answers say for Pain Points as a whole, and Why they answer so for each pain point that at least 10 of the latest records give. In a Space, the answers come from the labels of the Funnel's Pain Points model. See Dimensions in Spaces.

In both Reports and Spaces, you can filter the Content and Performance pages by a pain point, or cross Pain Points with a column or a classifier in Tables, for example Pain Points by city or by sales channel.

An Example

Take this invented review of a grocery delivery app:

Pain Points finds four answers in it. "Checkout freezes" is a breakdown. "Re-entering card details" is an obstacle that makes ordering harder than it should be. "Items replaced without asking" and "Slow support replies" are sources of dissatisfaction. The reason the customer stays is not a pain point; it is an answer for Motivations. The last update, the checkout moment and the other services that can't deliver as fast are picked up by Underlying Causes, Experience Stages and Substitutions when those Dimensions are added.

A second review, "Fresh vegetables, a friendly courier, and the order came 20 minutes early.", describes no difficulty, so it gets no Pain Points answer.

Across a dataset of 6,000 reviews, the same problems gather into clusters. "Items replaced without asking" might be the largest, with 870 records, followed by "Late deliveries" and "Checkout freezes". The summary would then say that customers mostly struggle with replacements they didn't agree to, and the quotations would show how they put it.

When to Use It

Use Pain Points whenever you need to know what goes wrong for your customers and which problems affect the most of them. It works best on feedback where customers describe their experience in their own words: product and app store reviews, support tickets and chat conversations, and open-ended survey answers to questions such as "What was the hardest part?". For how teams use this kind of research, see Pain Points.

Prioritizing fixes. The record count of each pain point tells you how many customers run into it. Start with the largest ones, and read the quotations to see exactly what fails and how customers describe it.

Support and operations. Create a Report from your Zendesk tickets or Intercom conversations to see which problems bring customers to support.

After a release or a change. In a Space, check the ▲ and ▼ marks on Pain Points after each upload to see whether a release, a new supplier or a policy change brought a new problem, and whether a fix made an old one fall.

Segments. Cross Pain Points with a column in Tables to see whether customers in different cities, plans or channels run into different problems.

Competitors. Create a Report from the review pages of a rival's product to see what goes wrong for their customers, and compare their pain points with your own.

Pain Points works best together with Unmet Needs, the other Dimension of the Issues group: Pain Points shows what goes wrong today, and Unmet Needs shows what customers want added or changed. Outside the group, Underlying Causes explains why a problem happens, Experience Stages shows at which moment it hits, and Personas shows who runs into it most often.

Use It in Kimola

How you add Pain Points depends on whether you work in a Report or a Space.

In a Report

Select Pain Points in the Dimensions step while you create a Report. It is listed under All and under Issues. Click it to add it to My List, then check the Required Query in the Review step. To add it to a Report that is already analyzed, open the Report's Dimensions page, click the Pain Points tab without a check mark and click Generate Now. Kimola classifies the Report's existing records with Pain Points and writes its analysis. The steps are in Add Dimensions to a Report.

In a Space

A Space gets Pain Points from a Dimension model in its Funnel. In Models, click Create AI Model, choose By Prompt, click Dimension in the Purpose step and choose Pain Points under Which dimension?. Its Question and Description are filled in, and you can fine-tune them for your business. In Labels, define the pain points your Spaces can find, such as "Late deliveries" or "Checkout freezes", each with a short description. Then pick the model on the Dimensions tab of the Funnel wizard's Models step. Every file uploaded to the Funnel's Spaces after that is classified with Pain Points. The steps are in Add Dimensions to a Funnel.