Everyone in the world doesn’t speak English.  If you want to cater to other audiences you have to speak their language.  There are three options.  One is speaking the language and creating content for them, two is paying someone that speaks the language to create your content in the other language and third is using translation software to create content in other languages.  Software is not perfect, but it’s a cheap and easy way of getting your product out to a new audience.

Here’s a quick video tutorial on how to do it:

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You try to provide the best service and products to your clients but sometimes there is nothing you can do to please everyone.  You could be selling a proven, working item that is of the highest quality and still there will be someone that finds something wrong with it.  They start complaining and complaining every where.

They say every unhappy customer tells 10 friends and every happy customer tells 3 friends.  It’s in your best interest and in your pockets’ best interest to have happy customers.

The first thing when you have an unhappy customer is see how you can fix the problem before it escalates into an unmanageable situation.  Just showing you care is the first step.  If you can actually fix the problem you will might even be able to turn that customer into a happy customer.  Think about the testimonials they can give you, “There was a problem with my sprinkler installation but Frank from Brick Sprinklers, fixed the problem and even threw in a couple of installed free sprinklers for my troubles.  I have to admit these are the best sprinklers I’ve ever used and they even save me money on my water bill.  Frank and his team handled everything very professionally and even helped when they could have just sent me straight to the manufacturer.”  You can convert an unhappy customer to a raving fan.

Don’t let the problem escalate.  Offer a solution when possible and give them a bonus for their trouble or immediately refund them.

A refund will shut most mouths, but if you give them a bonus and fix the problem you will still be able to keep the client for the future.  Remember not all buyers are one time customers.  The lifetime value of a client can be very high so we should try to keep all clients satisfied and happy to do business with us.

Some people no matter what you try to do to fix the problem will never be happy.  You can offer them bonuses and a fix to the problem and they’ll still be mad.  There are people that are just unpleasant to deal with.  If you know in advance a person is difficult to deal with you can politely let them know your product might not be appropriate for them and send them somewhere else.  I know, no one wants to give away or turn away clients but sometimes it will save you money and aggravation to just cut them from the beginning.

People aren’t always happy with a refund.  If someone bought your product then they bought it for a reason (they might actually need it).  A refund isn’t always going to help the situation but it is appropriate at times and should be given at your discretion.

Not all clients are going to complain directly to you.  Some people will go on the internet and complain to the world in public forums and blogs.  This is actually great.  Remember how the saying goes, “All publicity is good publicity.”  You can leverage those comments and complaints and publicly settle them quickly and easily.  You just got free advertising.  Be polite and cordial.  Do not say the customer was wrong (unless they really were completely wrong and were ripping you off), just give a solution, or a way to get a quick solution.  Thousands of people can see complaints about your company online, if you settle it publicly your company will be respected as someone who is looking out for the best interest of their clients and you can earn more business from people that admire the way you handled the situation.

Some people still won’t forgive you, but if you did everything within your power to settle it (offered a refund, fixed the problem, offered to fix the problem and give a bonus or partial refund, etc..) and posted it publicly the internet audience will even start to defend you and you’ll still look like the knight in shining armor.

Remember some people like to criticize no matter how good a product or service is.  Do not take the criticism as an insult.  Always stay level headed.  A nice even temperment will get you more clients and more respect for the way you do business.  So many times I’ve seen business owners get mad over comments and the only thing that does is lose business for that business owner.  You can defend your product or service in an intelligent way, where everyone including yourself feels satisfied with your answers.

A good way to find comments about your company online is just doing a quick google search with your company name.

Custom Request is a very generic term so it doesn’t help to look that up.  It has 23,200,000 results and although I’m number one for that result, I don’t want to go sifting through all those results to see if I’m mentioned somewhere.  I could try in quotes “custom request”.  I’m still number one but there are still 87,500 results.  For me the easiest way would be to use my domain name or even look at my website stats and find the referrers to my site.  customrequest.com gets me 74,300 results and my site is a large portion of those results.  I can start my search here.  An even better way is “customrequest.com” only 962 results but they are all mine or related to my site.  I can go through these results and find if anyone is commenting about me.

Anytime I find comments about myself I go and respond.  Whether the comments are good or bad (they’re always good) I like to personally respond.  It shows you care.

An easy way of keeping track of who’s saying what about you is google alerts.  You just put in your search term in the box and google emails you anytime there is a mention of you or your company.  It’s a set it and forget it way of keeping track of what’s going on.

The short answer is maybe.  The longer answer is if you have time to maintain them, then the answer is, “hell yes!”  You also need a decent product, if you’re selling a shitty product and you get a lot of complaints it’s probably not a good idea to have a public complaint area.

Forums need to be maintained.  A lot of companies have forums where staff never show up.  You’ll find you are getting a lot of complaints from customers or future customers when you don’t have someone in that section of your site doing damage control.  A good forum moderated properly can skyrocket your business.  If someone is curious about your product or service they just go to your forum see all the people raving about how great your super squeegee is, they get their questions answered by other product owners or your staff and they end up buying.  Now since this person looked at the forum in the first place to make the decision it’s possible you’ve earned yourself another forum member.

A company forum doesn’t necessarily have to be busy to be a success.  I’ve in the past used a closed forum for an FAQ section to a site I’ve owned.  It was great because it had all of the functionality of a forum, it answered everyone’s main questions and I was also always able to promise that the forum would open to the public soon.  I never really opened the forum because the site is kind of a hit and run type of product.  It’s a one time sale with no hopes of a re-order or any other future business.

Forums and blogs rank very well in the search engines.  They are great for quickly and easily adding new content.  How much easier can it get than just typing out what you want and pressing Post or Publish?  You don’t have to worry about formating or any other issues, everything is handled in the built in WYSIWYG editor.  The search engines know these types of sites aren’t static so they keep coming back to crawl the site and see if there is any new content.

Blogs are great, you can moderate all the comments made without looking like a big dictator and it doesn’t normally require as much work as a forum.  They are also very flexible you can base your whole business site off of a blog with very little if any modifications.  It’s possible with a forum, but you’d have to add some kind of CMS funcionality to it.

Popular/Best Forum Software:

VBulletin.  The best out there in my opinion.  I always make sure I have a few licenses at my disposal to quickly launch forums.  Paid software.

phpBB.  This use to be my favorite, now I’m not to sure what place I’d put this one in.  It’s free.

SMF.  A solid software that’s also free.  This one seems to be getting more and more popular by the day.

IPB (aka Invision Power Board).  I have a license for it.  It works, I don’t know if I really care for it though.  I’m so use to VBulletin that I personally don’t care for this one.  This is a paid forum software.

MyBB.  Originally made to be a VBulletin-like clone.  It’s pretty solid although I’ve heard development is a little slow on this one.  Very nice looking, does look very similar to VBulletin.  Free software.

Popular/Best Blog Software:

WordPress.  The end.  Game over.  There is no competition.  WordPress is free, easy to customize, a million free themes and plug-ins out there (and some great paid one’s).  Can’t be beat right now and no one is in their league on the blogging end of things.

Remember because a script/software is paid don’t think it’s better.  A lot of things are a matter of preference.  Paid doesn’t necessarily mean better.  You can get away with using a free forum script without any issues.  The people that are really the most anal about free forum scripts are webmasters and very savvy internet users.  The casual internet user could care less about what script you’re using.  My motto is if you can do it for free, why pay?