Have a Positive Attitude!
We have been talking about Dave Lupberger’s 8 attributes homeowners most desire in their service provider. As a quick reminder those 8 attributes are:
- Good listening skills
- Good communication skills
- A positive, non-adversarial attitude
- The demonstration of understanding and patience
- A relationship-oriented approach
- Honesty and integrity
- Personal responsibility
- Fair price
In my last two posts I talked about good listening skills and good communication skills. Today I want to talk about maintaining a positive, non-adversarial attitude.
Obviously it will be very counter productive to ever take a negative, adversarial approach with a customer so why does it happen? I think a dynamic that leads to this is when we feel attacked and put on the defensive. In such situations we can rationalize that the other side started it and we simply responded in kind or, as a five year old might put it, they started it.
Regardless of who introduced the negativity into the relationship and made it adversarial in nature it is in our best interest to keep it positive and non-adversarial.
While we can’t control how our customers will choose to behave we can control how we choose to react. We can choose to respond to negativity in kind and end up with an unhappy customer that will bad mouth us to everybody they know or we can choose to respond in a more productive manner. The only thing we have control over in such a scenario is how we will behave.
As we look at the list of 8 attributes it is striking how staying committed to the first 7 will help us weather being attacked or put on the defensive in such a way that we are more likely to come out of it with a good relationship intact and a customer that is satisfied and will refer others to us.
Mitch Anderson is currently a training manager at ServiceMagic. In former lives he worked in the construction trades (as a laborer, hanging and finishing drywall, framing, painting, roofing and HVAC) and practiced law for 15 years. He has been married to his high school sweetheart Judy since 1978 and they have three children – Josh, Zach and Jessica.
