While it might be customary to complain about your local cable company, I had the pleasure of having a Comcast technician come to my house/office today.

My reason for calling was that CNN was pixelating and troubleshooting it myself and working with a technician over the phone proved unsuccessful.

After a couple of jokes about why CNN was the only channel doing this (and actually, ESPN was also not working, but who knew that???), Sean determined it was a loose connection and proceeded to investigate.

In the process, he found and fixed the culprit, and also replaced my cable box and my modem, rewired the system from outside and rebooted my system – and waited to see that everything worked.

I was so taken with the commitment to “as long as I am here…” to check everything and take care of whatever needed attention or was due for an upgrade in the near future. When I thanked him and tipped him, he said: “You don’t need to do that…you are already paying me”.

I did ask him, however, if his service was standard to the technicians or individual to him, to which he graciously replied, “I want you to get everything you need and I trust that others feel the same, but can’t be sure of that.”

Wow.

We never know where our lessons are coming from, so keep your eyes open today.

Now, go sell something.

oxo

Jody

As often happen, “Since….” occurred to me on a coaching call with one of the Artistic Tile showroom teams.

We were discussing how to constructively direct a designer to not offer as many selections, but rather pare down to 2-3. This was in response to a designer asking for FOURTEEN samples of granite from slabs!!! All agreed that 14 was 11 too many but how to say No and still appear willing to find the right choice was our challenge.

I had been having good results starting responses with “Since you….” and using an assumptive tone in the communication. How we reconstructed this conversation was to start with “May I offer another perspective?” and WAIT for their response. When they say “Yes” offer: “Since you are committed to helping your client to select the right slab AND you don’t want to confuse them, what if we took photos of you beside 11 of the slabs that you are considering and gave you samples of your three favorites to take with you? That way,  your client will know how much time you put into this AND what you found and favor. Would that be helpful for you?” WAIT for a response.

Try this. It’s a good way to determine willingness to see from another point of view AND of beginning with agreement. Try it with friends and family!!!

Let me know what happens.