What is a nice way to ask if your collar is turned on?
We are in the customer service business. We spend a good bit of our time helping folks pick the right products and troubleshooting product issues. It takes a certain level of patience and skill. Our staff is good at it.
I ran that particular department for years. I have no idea the number of calls and issues I’ve helped folks solve. It’s a bunch.
One of the most common problems we would run into was a customer calling in and having an issue with a remote training collar not working. Sometimes it would be an issue of the collar not being synced with the transmitter. Sometimes it would be an issue of the transmitter being in the dog two position while the customer was looking at the dog one collar. Pretty simple stuff. You just go through the steps and ask the right questions.
Sometimes the issue would be that the customer had not turned the collar on.

That’s right. The customer had not turned the collar on.
It actually makes sense. Many of or transmitters don’t have an on/off button. The unit is on all the time. It just doesn’t do anything until you press a button. Why wouldn’t the collar be the same way?
It took me a while to figure out how to ask the question “is your collar turned on?” with out getting a really bad response from most customers. No one likes a Customer Service Rep to call them stupid over the phone. It can turn a conversation south real quick.
So I starting asking “what color is the flashing light on the collar?”
That allowed the customer to answer “green” or “red” or “yellow.”
It also allowed them to say “what light?”
At this point it might dawn on them. If it didn’t, I could also go with “when you turned it on, did it beep?”
Sometimes there would be a short pause and a “what do you mean – turned it on?” The issue would then be quickly resolved and the customer wasn’t called out on my end.
Tricky stuff.