The Paradox of Satisfaction through Dissatisfaction
Understanding dissatisfaction is the path to unlocking greater satisfaction. Identifying, weighting, prioritizing, and addressing customer pain points provides a roadmap to transform drivers of dissat into customer delight.
Across the hundreds of studies we’ve done, we’ve identified three common drivers of dissatisfaction:

1. Imbalanced price/value
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- Premium prices set high expectations and low tolerance for flaws
- Cost not justified by value
- Lack of pricing transparency
- Lags behind competitors in innovation/value
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2. Poor product experience
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- Poor usability or dated UI
- Too many clicks to complete tasks
- Death by a thousand papercuts – small frustrations add up
- System downtime
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3. Lack of care
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- Lack of user confidence
- Ineffective training materials
- Inaccessible, inconsistent, slow, impersonal support
- Minimal post-sale engagement until renewal
- Ignored customer feedback
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How Paradoxes can help
We have partnered with many of the world’s leading B2B SaaS, cloud and social media brands to transform their dissat drivers into customer delighters. Our proven track record of efficiently and affordably listening to customers to identify dissat drivers and opportunities for improvement spans multiple methods, including:
- Understanding pain points through interviews, focus groups, customer councils, and diary studies
- Quantifying dissat through surveys and quick polls
- Observing product friction through usability testing
- Secret shopping end-to-end customer journeys
- Using internal telemetry data and predictive analytics to identify churn risk signals
- Analyzing support logs, tickets, and online community feedback
- Capturing and prioritizing customer video submissions of frustrating experiences
What our clients say
“Paradoxes helped us identify customer pain points across the areas of product, pricing, and customer care, prompting conversations to realign priorities based on real user needs.”
– Leading marketing automation platform
“Through usability testing, Paradoxes uncovered numerous customer friction points that were
obstacles to task completion, guiding future product design choices.”
– Leading social media company
“Paradoxes identified an incongruence between premium price position and product value,
informing key positioning and packaging decisions.”
– Leading B2B SaaS company