Solving the Right Pains: A Smarter Playbook for Service Leaders
Mihir Joshi
Service leaders today face an impossible balancing act. Customers benchmark their experiences against digital-first giants like Amazon and Tesla, expecting instant responses, predictive services, and zero downtime. Yet service organizations operate under tight budgets, talent shortages, and competing business priorities.
Not every pain point can (or should) be addressed. Some are structural, others misaligned, and many require ecosystem-wide shifts beyond the remit of service leaders. This article explores the expectation–reality gap and lays out a smarter playbook for leaders: how to separate critical pain from aspirational demands, prioritize what truly matters, and engage customers with transparency.
The future of service excellence isn’t about solving every customer pain - it’s about solving the right ones consistently, sustainably, and at scale.
“Why Service Leaders Can’t Solve Every Customer Pain Point—And What to Do Instead”
Introduction: The Customer Expectation Trap
Today’s customers don’t benchmark their service experience against direct competitors alone. They compare it with the fast, digital-first experiences they receive from companies like Amazon or Tesla. They expect 24/7 responsiveness, seamless digital interactions, and proactive service that prevents problems before they occur.
Service leaders, however, don’t have unlimited budgets, endless talent pools, or full control of the supply chain. Attempting to solve every pain point risks spreading resources too thin, leading to underwhelming performance across the board. The smarter path is to identify which pains truly matter, and which are better acknowledged - but not fully addressed.
The Expectation–Reality Gap
Competing priorities across the business: Service often struggles to get funding when sales growth, cost-cutting, or new product launches are on the table. Leaders operate within budgets that rarely match ambition.
Fragmented accountability: Pain points like parts delays or warranty disputes usually sit across supply chain, finance, or legal -not just service. Leaders can’t unilaterally fix systemic bottlenecks.
Short-term vs. long-term pressures: Predictive maintenance, workforce upskilling, or digital investments take years to show returns. Yet boards and CFOs often demand quarterly results.
The adoption paradox: Customers clamor for mobile apps, portals, and self-service, but uptake remains inconsistent. Technology investments can look underutilized, creating skepticism internally.
Value perception gap: Customers expect premium service (speed, personalization, uptime) but resist paying more. The mismatch between cost-to-serve and willingness-to-pay keeps widening.
Customers expect seamless, digital, and proactive service. But inside most manufacturing and industrial organizations, reality looks very different. Leaders often find themselves fighting a losing battle between expectations and what the business can deliver.
Service leaders say customer expectations are rising faster than their ability to deliver
81%
Mapping the Customer Pain Landscape
Service leaders often face the impossible task of addressing every customer complaint. The truth? Not every pain point deserves the same response. Some issues can and must be solved immediately, while others lie outside your control. By mapping pain points on two axes - priority (low vs. high) and control (internal vs. external) - leaders can classify challenges into four categories, each with a clear strategy.
Critical Pains (High Priority, Internal Control): These are the issues that directly affect uptime, safety, and customer trust, areas where leaders must act decisively.
Aspirational Pains (Low Priority, Internal Control): Desirable but not urgent, these can be placed on a roadmap without straining current operations.
Misaligned Pains (Low Priority, External Control): Areas where customer perception doesn’t align with reality. Here, the solution often lies in better communication rather than heavy investment.
External Pains (High Priority, External Control): Challenges driven by macro forces - supply chain disruptions, energy costs, or regulatory shifts. Leaders can’t solve these directly but must mitigate impact through resilience strategies.
Customer Pain Landscape
Why Leaders Can’t Bridge Them All
Even with the best intentions, service leaders are constrained by structural realities. Understanding these limits helps leaders redirect focus where it truly matters.
Structural challenges: Issues like global supply chain delays or parts shortages cannot be solved by service leadership alone. They require industry-wide fixes.
Misaligned expectations: Customers sometimes want premium service at commodity pricing. Meeting these asks is economically unsustainable.
Ecosystem dependencies: Many solutions such as sustainability compliance, AI-driven insights, or parts circularity require cross-functional and ecosystem-wide participation. Service alone can’t deliver them.
Internal trade-offs: Investing heavily in one pain point (say, hyper-personalized apps) may mean starving critical enablers like technician enablement or predictive analytics.
A Smarter Playbook for Service Leaders
Success lies in solving fewer pains, but solving them better. The smartest service leaders distinguish between critical, contextual, and aspirational demands - and make their playbook transparent to customers.
Segment customers intelligently
Strategic accounts may value sustainability and high-touch service, while transactional customers prioritize cost and uptime. Tailor investments accordingly.
Communicate trade-offs
Invest in scalable levers
Double down on execution
Reset expectations openly. Acknowledge constraints and clarify what is prioritized and why. Customers value transparency more than vague promises.
Predictive maintenance, digital self-service, and technician enablement create broad value across segments without over-customizing.
Doing the basics consistently- fast response, clear communication, reliable uptime- earns more trust than half-baked “next-gen” initiatives.
PwC research shows that 73% of customers say consistent reliability matters more than ‘innovative features’ in their service interactions.
Solving The Right Pain
The reality is simple: service leaders can’t (and shouldn’t) solve every pain. The real mark of leadership is focusing on the pains that matter most—the ones customers care about deeply and where the organization can realistically deliver value.
By structuring the customer pain landscape and adopting a disciplined playbook, service organizations can move away from firefighting and towards sustainable impact. Not every pain will be solved, but the right ones will - and that’s what customers will remember.
Revenue growth opportunities for leaders with customer-first strategies growth of their peers
2X
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Author Info
Written by Mihir Joshi
After 15 years working with leading manufacturers, I created SmartServiceOps to share practical insights for the field service industry.
