Snack 'N Learn podcast. The Profit Concierge with Richard Blank. A Call Center Guru
https://youtu.be/O6ayksYkwKM?si=4iandqsMp04DlGHT
https://youtu.be/-eU4zIc8Bfw
Pam Prior, the Entrepreneur's CFO Quarterback; Radio Host; CEO of Priorities Group, Inc.; and #1 Bestselling Author of "Your First CFO: The Accounting Cure for Small Business Owners"
Pam Prior, Keynote Speaker,
Host of the "Cash Flow" Podcast
Awesome Podcast GUEST (Serving YOUR audience)
Founder, Profit Concierge® Financial Services
THE VIP Bookkeeping🧾 and FInancial Services Solution for Entrepreneurs
#1 Author of "Your First CFO: The Accounting Cure for Small Business Owners"
CEO of Priorities Group, Inc.
And - just for fun - a 30-year finance career in Fortune 50 and Private Equity
prior (get it?) to all this fun stuff
Proud Mom, Wife, Friend, Entrepreneur, and
Dog Owner (3 of 'em) living near Philadelphia, PA
A brilliant, down to earth, finance wrangler
who guides you on the path to confident control of your money mindset and business cash flow. Pam knows what you need to understand, and she cuts out the rest. You don’t need to BE a bookkeeper (though you might need to hire one! We’ll talk); you need to understand a specific set of numbers and how they shape your business. She meets you where you are and takes you where you want to go with no unnecessary, complicated terminology or lingo.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. In addition, inducted into the 2023 Hall of Fame for Business. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
#RichardBlank #CostaRica #CallCenter #Outsourcing #Telemarketing #BPO #Sales #Entrepreneur #B2B #Business #Podcast #Gamification #CEO #smallbusinesschronicles #snacknlearn
snack n learn,, Richard Blank,Costa Rica's Call Center, Outsourcing, Telemarketing, BPO, Nearshore, Sales, Entrepreneur, B2B, Business,Podcast,Gamification,Leadership,Marketing, Radio, Guest, Money, education, trainer,
https://youtu.be/O6ayksYkwKM?si=4iandqsMp04DlGHT
https://youtu.be/-eU4zIc8Bfw
Snack 'N Learn podcast. The Profit Concierge with Richard Blank. A Call Center Guru
https://youtu.be/O6ayksYkwKM?si=4iandqsMp04DlGHT
https://youtu.be/-eU4zIc8Bfw
Pam Prior, the Entrepreneur's CFO Quarterback; Radio Host; CEO of Priorities Group, Inc.; and #1 Bestselling Author of "Your First CFO: The Accounting Cure for Small Business Owners"
Pam Prior, Keynote Speaker,
Host of the "Cash Flow" Podcast
Awesome Podcast GUEST (Serving YOUR audience)
Founder, Profit Concierge® Financial Services
THE VIP Bookkeeping🧾 and FInancial Services Solution for Entrepreneurs
#1 Author of "Your First CFO: The Accounting Cure for Small Business Owners"
CEO of Priorities Group, Inc.
And - just for fun - a 30-year finance career in Fortune 50 and Private Equity
prior (get it?) to all this fun stuff
Proud Mom, Wife, Friend, Entrepreneur, and
Dog Owner (3 of 'em) living near Philadelphia, PA
A brilliant, down to earth, finance wrangler
who guides you on the path to confident control of your money mindset and business cash flow. Pam knows what you need to understand, and she cuts out the rest. You don’t need to BE a bookkeeper (though you might need to hire one! We’ll talk); you need to understand a specific set of numbers and how they shape your business. She meets you where you are and takes you where you want to go with no unnecessary, complicated terminology or lingo.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. In addition, inducted into the 2023 Hall of Fame for Business. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
#RichardBlank #CostaRica #CallCenter #Outsourcing #Telemarketing #BPO #Sales #Entrepreneur #B2B #Business #Podcast #Gamification #CEO #smallbusinesschronicles #snacknlearn
snack n learn,, Richard Blank,Costa Rica's Call Center, Outsourcing, Telemarketing, BPO, Nearshore, Sales, Entrepreneur, B2B, Business,Podcast,Gamification,Leadership,Marketing, Radio, Guest, Money, education, trainer,
https://youtu.be/O6ayksYkwKM?si=4iandqsMp04DlGHT
https://youtu.be/-eU4zIc8Bfw
Snack 'N Learn podcast. The Profit Concierge with Richard Blank. A Call Center Guru
https://youtu.be/O6ayksYkwKM?si=4iandqsMp04DlGHT
https://youtu.be/-eU4zIc8Bfw
Pam Prior, the Entrepreneur's CFO Quarterback; Radio Host; CEO of Priorities Group, Inc.; and #1 Bestselling Author of "Your First CFO: The Accounting Cure for Small Business Owners"
Pam Prior, Keynote Speaker,
Host of the "Cash Flow" Podcast
Awesome Podcast GUEST (Serving YOUR audience)
Founder, Profit Concierge® Financial Services
THE VIP Bookkeeping🧾 and FInancial Services Solution for Entrepreneurs
#1 Author of "Your First CFO: The Accounting Cure for Small Business Owners"
CEO of Priorities Group, Inc.
And - just for fun - a 30-year finance career in Fortune 50 and Private Equity
prior (get it?) to all this fun stuff
Proud Mom, Wife, Friend, Entrepreneur, and
Dog Owner (3 of 'em) living near Philadelphia, PA
A brilliant, down to earth, finance wrangler
who guides you on the path to confident control of your money mindset and business cash flow. Pam knows what you need to understand, and she cuts out the rest. You don’t need to BE a bookkeeper (though you might need to hire one! We’ll talk); you need to understand a specific set of numbers and how they shape your business. She meets you where you are and takes you where you want to go with no unnecessary, complicated terminology or lingo.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. In addition, inducted into the 2023 Hall of Fame for Business. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
#RichardBlank #CostaRica #CallCenter #Outsourcing #Telemarketing #BPO #Sales #Entrepreneur #B2B #Business #Podcast #Gamification #CEO #smallbusinesschronicles #snacknlearn
snack n learn,, Richard Blank,Costa Rica's Call Center, Outsourcing, Telemarketing, BPO, Nearshore, Sales, Entrepreneur, B2B, Business,Podcast,Gamification,Leadership,Marketing, Radio, Guest, Money, education, trainer,
https://youtu.be/O6ayksYkwKM?si=4iandqsMp04DlGHT
https://youtu.be/-eU4zIc8Bfw
The Science of CX podcast. Key Takeaways Into More Productive Customer Engagements with Richard Blank
The Science of CX is a groundbreaking new weekly podcast developed to
address the millions of businesses that need to learn techniques to compete better
in today’s business landscape, by using CX as the cornerstone of a new strategy.
Join Steve Pappas in the lab as he puts his 25+ years to the test to make your
business (soar, grow and accelerate).
Getting to know Richard the man. How did he end up with such a large collection of restored pinball machines and jukeboxes?key ingredients to ensure an effective micro-expression conversationHow agents can positively handle and grow from negative calls and feedback from customersRunning a small business? Well tune in and find out what tips Richard has to help you leverage your everyday conversations into a goldmineTime and numbers. Find out whether or not it's productive to measure your employee’s efforts based on the number of hours or sales made Richard shares with us his unique and world-class system of training and mentoring new agents An exercise you can easily pick up in helping you become a better micro expression reader
https://youtu.be/RJnuK2lPYFc?si=yrsPGin8LM1sXy5F
https://youtu.be/AOPI8wCqX-0
Key Takeaways
Learn how to turn new customers into the most loyal customers and be on the
mind of everyone in town. Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned expert, you will
learn something useful in each and every episode.
CXpert - interviews with CX Leaders and Influencers that have made it their
business to treat customers like a million. Steve, will use his years of CX-Centric
business knowledge to bring out cool ideas for every business owner to
learn new techniques and also avoid some
Steve has built a career transforming, growing, expanding and turning around businesses. He has created successful companies by delivering remarkable customer experiences. Steve makes sure each employee has the actionable knowledge necessary to make better decisions, build great culture and serve customers in a way that increases loyalty, referrals, sales and satisfaction.In his recent role with Panviva, the knowledge cloud company, Steve expanded the Australian software company successfully into the US to a market powerhouse position. Steve also advises many companies annually on their CX strategies. Industry associations, publications, and Fortune 500 companies invite him to speak and write about CX best practices in healthcare, finance, utilities, insurance, and telecommunications.A successful entrepreneur in his own right, Steve has built and sold six companies. He has spent many years cultivating his approach to CX and each company has held to the mantra of “the customer is at the center of the universe.
In fact, his first CX initiative was a college Honors project where Steve redesigned the student registration system to ease the process of registering for classes and enhance the student registration experience. He then went on to running an Technology Division with over 12,000 employee customers, while working for one of the largest global government contractors. All the while addressing internal customer expectations and increase customer satisfaction and productivity.Next, he perfected the concepts of personalization with marketing automation tools to better target and deliver one-on-one communication with customer messaging. Now, Steve is focused on helping business leaders build great strategies to deliver the ultimate in customer experiences and drive their business to new heights.When he is not driving CX strategy or launching companies, Steve plays the guitar and mentors startup business. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and sons.
you're listening to the science of C. X. A podcast that hopes to inspire business owners and leaders to learn new techniques and turn prospects into customers, enter customers into raving fans. My name is Steve Pappas. I'm known for my relentless pursuit of all thing’s customer across my career. And in my six startups, I've had to learn how to make decisions in business that customers really respond to. Let's spend some time together and help your business soar grow and accelerate. Well, welcome everybody to another episode of the science of C. X. I'm Steve Pappas, your host and as always, we look everywhere to find the experts that can help you in your business journey as well as your customer experience initiatives within your organization.
Today is No exception. Today we're going to be talking about some remarkably interesting areas. We're going to cover a lot of material. Please take notes if you want or you can come back and listen to it multiple times because that makes it seem like we have more listeners. Hey, yeah, do that. Instead listen to this episode 3, 4 or five times. That'll do it. Anyway, we're going to be talking about advanced telemarketing strategies. We're going to be talking about conflict management, interpersonal skills, customer support, rhetoric, Gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
Have I piqued your interest yet? Well, we have a gentleman on today. His name is Richard blank, and he comes to us from Costa Rica, and he is the head of a great business process, outsourcing contact center, but he's also an expert in so many different areas that we want to talk about. So why don't we bring him in from the virtual green room? You know, there's no real green room of course by now, but let's pretend he's coming in from the green room and we'll welcome him to the show.
Richard, thanks for joining us today on the show. See, that's an amazing introduction. I'm so happy to be here, really enjoy your work and cannot wait to share amazing ideas with your audience today. That's great. Well, I'm going to give folks a little bit about your bio just so they understand where we're going to start from and maybe some interesting things about you too. So, Richard's journey in the car Contact center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in san Jose Costa Rica with a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric.
Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10,000 bilingual telemarketers. I think he learned a few things along the way. Richard blank has the largest collection of restored American pinball machines and antique rock ola jukeboxes in central America making Gamification a strong part of Costa Rica Contact center. Culture. Richard blank is the chief executive officer for Costa Rica’s Call center since 2008. Richard also holds a bachelor's degree in communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla Spain, a keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School, 68th National Honor Society induction ceremony.
Giving back to the high school is especially important to Richard as such. He endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level. So, I've got to start Richard with the first part here that just jumped right at me as the largest collection of restored American pinball machines and jukeboxes. Now if anybody knows me, they know that I love pinball aside from playing guitar for the last for years. I love pinball, I don't quite go into the Galaga and those things that my wife loves but I love playing pinball.
So, tell us what you have got, I'd love to know what kind of pinball machines you have Steve, I'm so glad that you started with dessert first and naturally our favorite class in school was recessed. So absolutely. I grew up in the seventies and eighties and the arcades were just some of the most amazing places to make friends and compete. It was so new and the artwork on the cabinets and the marquees, it really was an experience and always wanted that game room like Ricky Schroder and silver spoons.
I was jealous. So, I wanted one and down here since I own a call center and I have the space, I go treasure hunting and one man's trash is another man's treasure and they just really do not know what they have in their bodegas. And so, I will find a machine and bring it back here. And with specialist I restore them now regarding my pinball machines. The oldest one that I have is a 1976 Bally's freedom. And one of the newer ones would be like, let's say a last action hero where a doctor who I have an M. B. A fast break in a mouse.
And around I got Williams, space shuttle 1987 I got a judge Dredd Street fighter, two lethal weapon, three jokers, World cup hook and Jurassic Park. So, it turned out into a hobby became an obsession. And when you're a married man, you decide which hills to die on which swords to fall upon. And my wife and I have this agreement where pretty much everything is in her favor. But the one thing she knows that makes me happy of restoring these old classic jukeboxes and pinball machines because what an error and the craftsmanship and the fact that they've been preserved for decades shows that people really cared about these machines.
Now you and I was awfully expensive growing up. So, it seemed like a luxury. But the fact that we can afford it. It really is something that I take full advantage of when I have the moments with just not my agents but myself. There's always a pinball marathon going on down here. Well, it's great that you have the employee engagement to do that. But I'll tell you, we had bought one, we had a terminator pinball machine at one point that had the gun for the pinball release, but it took so much to get it into the basement of the home that we were living in when we sold the house.
We negotiated to sell the pinball machine, so I didn't have to get it out of there. It was so heavy to move, and I wasn't about to, but I have been in the market for another one right now. The prices are through the roof on all those two. I was looking for an Adam’s family or another terminator, but the Adams family was the one that kind of thrilled me and as well as jukeboxes, it's funny, we have a lot of similar interests in collection.
I don't have any jukeboxes. I wanted to cut my teeth on the first one and I have a buddy in the UK that restores German jukeboxes and he's one of the largest in the world that restores those early seventies and eighties jukeboxes that were built in Germany. I think it was like N C D M or something like that and that's an interesting market. But let's get on to some of the other areas that we're going to talk about. I gave folks at the beginning of the episode, a lot of terminology that we're going to be talking about today.
And one of the things that I really wanted to discuss, this idea of phonetic micro expressions, I don't know if our audience knows what that really is or maybe some do and of course they'll yell at me in the comments etcetera. But can we talk about these things because let's jump into some of these areas that we're going to get across and are these all used the things we're going to talk about? They all used in the contact center, and can you train people in all these areas?
They're used in my call center and just depends on the sort of profiled agent that you have there. Let me take it back a bit. Everybody studies micro expression reading. There was a tv show called Lie to Me that specialized in where you can judge people's postures, their eyes, their face, their hands. I mean there's books and seminars about it now when you're on the phone, three of your senses are removed, your taste, touch and smell. And the scientists claim that when you do have one that is removed, your others expand.
So, I expect you to do much more active listening and then people can also argue that you can't see people on the phone, but I beg to differ because there is image streaming, you have metaphysics when you read a book, it's better than the movie because of imagination. You can use more descriptions and more adjectives but let's just concentrate on the sound of speech. The average attention span is about 30 seconds to two minutes, conversations have introductions, bodies and conclusions. So, if you have a controlled environment, you can have a consistent variable and then you can see inconsistencies.
So now we have a base of how we're going to study speech and 32nd segments. Okay your tone is what represents your emotion, and it should be confident and empathetic because that should be consistent on your end. People will talk about a mirror imaging technique Steve, and I agree with that. But you also need to know how you're speaking for your adjustments. So, your mirror imaging isn't about you sitting across from someone and crossing your arms and tapping a finger. No, you don't have that over the phone.
So, eliminate any sort of mirror imaging face to face. I study the rate and the pitch. These are things that can be done in any language. I do not study semantics. The word choice. I'm studying the tone of your voice which is mine is consistent. I could care less what your tone is. That could be a flag or a mask, but you study someone's rate of speech and how loud they speak their pitch and every 30 seconds to two minutes. Think about the X. Y. Chart that you had in pre-algebra, you can see how fast or how loud they're going.
You consistently market every 30 seconds to two minutes. I would back it up with an answering speed because that is something that you cannot control. It's more subconscious, you can manipulate your tone rate and pitch. But the professional interrogators and police officers’ usual throw the question in the fourth or fifth time to really judge the answering speed. So, if you can do that xy chart with a horizontal line behind it and kind of gauge from 0 to 10 where you're going, you will see areas of spikes or dips and in my opinion that's the time to ask a tie down or pin down question or clarification question.
And these are certain times in which you're able to assist the conversation of moving forward for better clarification and it's not really giving away your power on that. You're really doing more of the Wuwei the less struggle the rudder of the ship. And so, this phonetic micro expression reading can be done just mind you this in your 1st 30 seconds. I don't know you and one is the loneliest number in your second minute. We could have a match off one and a one fast and high, low and slow by five at least.
You might have an odd man out in regard to your quadrants because after you've gone all four quadrants you have to repeat a quadrant, but most of the time people are in quadrant, on the top and the fast and so by your 10th 30 seconds to two minutes. Think about it like this, it's about 4. 5 to 5 minutes on something like that. And by your 11th you should know how somebody is speaking that's 5. 5 minutes in on a 10-minute conversation. And by then you will know how to close the deal.
And so, once you see it you can't unsee it. After three weeks it becomes habit and once you start paying attention to it it becomes very lucid and clearer. You are not lying and I'm not manipulating but these people are obviously giving away certain tell signs on how they speak on first time or even long term conversations and if you do catch somebody being facetious or not as clear, maybe ask them to repeat it using other senses or using another example to see if they're consistent. And so, I think it's an excellent way not to be offensive because passive aggressively you could once again use a me-too technique with somebody.
Let's just say you can't hear them. It's a bad connection on a cellphone or a dog is barking in the background. I try to fall on that small sword instead of placing blame on them, it's for my clarification Steve, did you say 123 or ABC because the worst thing you could ever do Is have somebody so upset and go down rabbit holes because now you need to restart your phonetic micro expression, reading the Tarot Card Reader said you could read two different reads in 10 minutes depending if it's sunny or raining, same person, same hour, but it could be a different read.
So, the greatest thing you could do is to ride that weight and keep it at that apex if you can. It's like when people said lucid dreaming, you really don't want to readjust your body to be able to keep that consistent breathing and body posture. With someone that you're speaking with, you try to keep them as consistent as possible. There's a little wiggle room there but don't go extreme and if you can handle something like that, fall on these swords, get clarification.
I think your audience would have some extremely effective conversations with people on the first time. This is a remarkably interesting area because we do have an awful lot of folks that either work in contact centers or are managing contact centers or even outsource to contact centers. And the training of agents tends to be remarkably similar in most organizations but they're not thinking about how they can better control they’re usually using the approach where gee I'm sorry you're having that problem. So, they're falling on the sword most of the time.
But if you think about the calls, right? If you think about the types of calls that come in, I mean they're not picking up the phone because they're just calling to say thank you or their colleagues to say gee what an excellent product this is. They're usually picking up the phone or they're making a contact with them because there's an issue, there's some type of an issue either they don't understand, they don't know how to fill out, they don't know how to do something or there's a more negative issue.
So, if you think about the incoming approach that happens, a lot of it tends to be negative. And unfortunately, the contact center agents these days are feeling increasingly of society's negativity coming out of the pandemic. You know, because people who are very understanding more, more understanding during the pandemic, but they’re taking it out on front line people. So, I don't know how you guys have seen things. But from the folks that I've spoken to in the last few months, it seems like most of the calls are key issues and they have to diffuse right away.
So can they use the phonetic micro expression method that you talk about to kind of even the playing field and get them to calm down so that they can explain what their issue is better rather than they're ready to blow up at any moment type of thing. Sure. And I'm glad that you brought that up, that's a subject that I can easily address and apply the phonetic micro expression read because mind you my friend you could start the call yelling and cursing and at the end thanking them.
So naturally your phonetic micro expression reading might be adjusted with raid and Fitch. But I would never say that I'm sorry unless you specifically spilled the drink or broke the window because then you might get offended because this individual speaking with you is so nice, they didn't do it but they're apologizing for someone else's broken window. So, my suggestion from my agents immediately is to thank you Steve for sharing that with me. I understand your position didn't mean that I agree with it, but I understand your position and allow me a moment to make it work and fix it for you.
And so now the audience, your client coming in, guns a blazing isn't really putting all that anger at the individual because that individual did not make that problem. They're taking the shrapnel; you say the incoming. That's a wonderful way to use it incoming Obama grenade. But I like to defuse. There's a technique that I use called the buffer boomerang technique. And so, if somebody comes at me with a negative tone, I will like sponge and buffer that negative tone. I will name drop you and say Steve.
That's an excellent question, repeat back your question what it was to show active listening. So, there's a connected key lock there and then boomerang it back as a plus three. So, I could potentially my friend readjust the tone and the pace of the call to then put it back into that phonetic micro expression reading that you need to really nail it. But I believe that people are frustrated and mind you this there's a lot more omnichannel non voiced support. So, prior to that phone call they might have filled out a couple forms, send a couple of emails that only elevates the stress.
So, when they're calling, they're almost letting off steam. And if you allow them to speak, you'd be surprised how it goes from attend to it to both in pitching the rate they cry it out and then everyone calms down. You've taken copious notes. Now, Steve, you mentioned A B. C. And D. What about the Richard? Thank you, Steve. And e there's nothing wrong with raking and reviewing and meeting minutes. It's I can't just solve it with you with a magic potion. These things, someone is coming to you emotional, they don't know you you might need to repeat your name multiple times in third person because now they're embarrassed.
Three men it's in to ask your name Steve. So, you could say okay at the end of this call, Richard, you're going to say Steve. You really helped me out in this section you know, oh thank you Steve. Great. I got them I anchored. And so, these are certain soft skills to just be polite, show your manners, Take that certain control of a conversation, more of a shepherd with its sheep. They zigzag but they still go back in the barn. So, I don't need so many jagged edges.
There are no straight lines in nature and and I love empathy with somebody because when I use your name, I will usually use it in a transitional sentence or confirmation. And then during the conversation I will use personal pronouns as you know the yours and ours just to make sure that I'm keeping your conversation going in your attention and then landing in the bomb when I dropped the name drop and you should take these calls every 30 seconds to two minutes because as you say, they could change. But this gives you an excellent chance, my friend, if you really want to look at it logically that if somebody is calling in, you have a chance to retain the client, you have the chance to up sell them.
If that's what you're doing, you could get a referral out of it. But look at it like this, let's say we drop the ball. Worst case scenario, this individual will take the time to do an exit interview and tell us areas in which we could have improved or what our competition had done to earn their business and as long as you're willing to keep an open mind and I don't like the word constructive criticism. I mean you fumbled the ball; you should have known what you were doing.
Then just call the balls and the strikes and let you know that you made this error and learn from it and don't do it again. And these are the sort of things call by call person by person instead of doing 100 calls a day Steve. Why don't you have your agents take 95? They're taking extra couple three minutes on the phone to let Mr. jones relax a little bit. That is the secret to the successor old school style. This is interesting because as you're explaining some of these tips and techniques, it occurs that it doesn't just apply in the contact center world.
I mean this could be if you're a brick-and-mortar store, it could be your pizza place. There could be people calling because hey, you got the wrong toppings on my pizza. The delivery was wrong or there could be all kinds of things, but it applies to all areas of business and people running small businesses could learn from these same techniques. Don't you agree? This could save a thanksgiving dinner. A marriage. These are just diplomatic soft skills of attentive listening and prioritizing, but I couldn't agree with you more and I never even shared with you.
My favorite technique. It's the positive escalation when I call a place and people always give the gatekeeper a bad rap. But these are the individuals that the CEO and the owners love the most and they're the first impression and the strongest warrior of the tribe. They're the first one there, representing them in the best light. And so, for me, I'd like to understand their protocol. I like to properly introduce myself and say the name of their company and ask how their company is doing sometimes better than they do just to at least give them a taste of how I speak instead of just immediately asking to speak to you Steve.
And then if this individual decides to transfer me the first thing, I'm going to let them know prior to the transfers that they did an excellent job. And I will be mentioning that verbally to the owner of the company and at the conclusion of the call with the owner of the company, I will also mention that in writing. So, if I happen to call your company back, the Richard Circle's complete because this individual remembers me, and I've heard dozens and dozens of times. I thank you and saying I've been here for a decade and you're the first person that wrote about me to Mr. jones.
And these are individuals that will tell you anniversaries and promotions or no Steve’s direct extensions. 1 25 calms on Thursdays at two. Thank you, Catherine. I appreciate it and I love them to death. Those are the greatest insiders. It's a plethora of information and the moment that you start bullying your way in there or pretending they're waiting for your call or your insistent. That's why they're there to hang up on you. But there's a certain way to be not clever, but you have 30 seconds to make a first impression.
Half of that is your speech her speech and give a couple of seconds of silence. So, you really got about 12 seconds to speak. That's not a lot. My suggestion is to say things that they're most familiar with which is the name of their company and their own name and then you got to do your own name as well because you can't be anonymous. The whole call that's shady. You can use a little bit of that in the beginning by just doing a name spike in a proper introduction and if you get the past to pitch, you have the momentum and then you do once again that sort of escalation.
It It seems to work for me because it separates you from hundreds if not thousands of people that are prospecting that business interesting back to the contact center for a second. You talked about have your agents take 95 calls instead of 100 but most of the contact centers that I've dealt with over the past 20 plus years. They're driven by their average handle time. They're driven by the numbers to some degree. They're even told when they're going to the bathroom. How do you resolve that to a contact center manager that is just driving everything by the numbers.
So, you're an intake coordinator for a law firm for lawsuits against firings or disabilities and somebody calls in and they happen to become emotional for a minute. What are you going to do Steve look at the clock and say Mrs. jones. Please hurry up. I only have two more minutes to talk to you. You know what would happen? It wouldn't be for the client or for me, the agent might resign on something like that. So as much as we want to stick to certain metrics, you're talking about an artist of speech.
Somebody that is in the moment that's in the now that wants to assist this individual the best way that they can and by limiting their ability to build that sort of rapport or to allow someone to get it out. Which could be the key to closing the deal or to Upsell for something or to get that referral. I don't do things like that. Now we're not doing extreme where someone's doing 50 calls a day instead of 100. But you can see there's an average but that's what it's called an average and if you say you just want to look at conversion ratios.
Look at that too. But everyone once again is an artist and they have their own special sauce and some people are graded intros, other bodies, other conclusions. But my goodness gracious is somebody is in the moment and they're connecting with someone and they're standing up instead of sitting down and you could tell they have the glaze where they're not staring at anyone. They're just thinking of the client, and everyone can see them doing this. You don't think that that energy spreads on the floor. You don't think that that's important as well.
That sort of synergy. So, these rigid centers that judge you on your bathroom breaks and your handling time you're going to break the agent. I mean you can do that and grind it out, but you might have an attrition rate. But if I give somebody the ability to expand on a call and to be themselves my friends. So, they're not just plastic and going through the motions then I can create an ace, I can create a leader. I can create someone that will come to me at the conclusion of the call and say you know, Mrs. jones started crying.
I go she alright, She goes, yeah, it took a couple more minutes but I connected her through to the counselor and I gave additional notes because we had to speak about her husband just passing away and the fact that she has to move and other things that would have never been qualifying the call because you're supposed to be asking her just certain questions but know this individual added additional things and then they say, thank you for listening. You're the different company than the ones before that. Just put me through the assembly line and you know that it's the mom and pop.
It's the bed and breakfast. You'd rather go to the small hardware store sometimes because you know the man, I'll drive an extra couple of miles from my favorite restaurant Steve. That's the sort of the science that you're talking about. It's amazingly simple. It's how you feel and how you were treated. What about the price? What about the price? Sometimes it's worth the money. It's not always about saving a dollar. It's about supporting your business or if I'm having a day with some blues, you come over to me and just let me know you're happy that I'm there and you sit with me for a second.
So, as we get older, my friend, those are the sort of relationships that we see at businesses and you, and I understand that the grind and we also understand when your favorite client walks through the door. So, I like to pay that forward the best that I can. Absolutely. So, I went down that path and I think your answer and your philosophy is brilliant. Unfortunately. I mean it's the way I believe too that the contact center folks in an organization should be revered because they are your front line.
They hold things together. They are the impetus for the referral the up sell the further sell the expansion all those things. Yet still in today's world, C E O s don't always think that way. They look at a contact center as a cost center rather than the proper way of looking at it as it's an expansion center. It's a focus group. It's the lifeblood of the company because those folks have the most contact with our customers post sale, they become the hub of the post-sale journey and unfortunately maybe it'll take another generation before enough sea level folks understand that.
So that brings me more to the conversation of culture. How do we develop a culture in our contact centers especially and I know this can spill out into the rest of the business, but how can we develop a culture that rewards and reveres the contact center agents as being the customer success vehicle, the people that help our customers become more successful using our products and our services. You must look at it Two ways. If you yourself are not centered in balance, it would be exceedingly difficult to expand and to think of others.
I can't hit the ball and drag johnny as much as my agents here have become bilingual, which shows structure and dedication over years outside the classroom. I expect them to do the same thing if they're thinking about being a telemarketer as a profession besides the eight hours that they put in here, they should be doing dedicated practice outside of the center, reading in English watching certain movies or speeches so they can take certain parts of rhetoric that inspired them. That they saw transitional sentences or effective. You could do case studies in history and find out certain speeches that moved people.
And then secondly, I mentioned the word synergy. These individuals were a very social environment. If you and I are working out at the gym Steve, we're going to be pumping each other up to put up three or four more on the bar and put more plates up. So, I expect the audience, the agents to feed off their energy and to share ideas and to pick someone up when they're feeling down. As I mentioned, I created a Gamification culture. So, I have a place where people can let off steam, recharge batteries hang out with me and meet people from other departments.
So that assists me in one way. But also, since once again English is their second language. The fact that they are getting a return on investment. I see that these agents are much more focused for intense periods of time because of the translation. So, it's less area for distraction. But here's the best part my man regarding my culture when I first came down here 27 years old, I didn't start sea level of my friends call center. I taught English decided to stay and then worked at the center and so I was with the proletariat for four years, I went through so many departments.
I saw the good and the bad and what it did for me was it enabled me to see areas to enhance it for the agent and for the client to give them their dignity, so they don't feel like robots are expendable. And when I had the opportunity to start this business, they couldn't fool me because I was on the phone, I've done this before and I hate to say it, I'm not bragging but I am the sin save my dojo in this industry where people burn out and they look down upon it, I thrived really excelled.
But I saw the art in it. Look at it like this, you're very selective of the campaigns that come in here, we're in a strict catholic country. They must go home and tell their parents what they do. If I brought in something gray area or shady, no one would take it. So I'd have no friends of my chuck e cheese birthday party and so you have to do an account to not only where the client feels okay offering it, but the Asian would feel comfortable making the calls because if it's a forced fit, if it's out of place and out of character, they're not going to last long, they're not going to sound natural and we're not giving anything real specific here.
But as I say, I must ensure that what I'm bringing into this call center something where I'm able to fulfill the needs. Now I can add scripts and suggestions, but initially it must be something that just does not compromise any sort of ethics interesting. Well, let's cover a little bit more because I'm fascinated by not only the culture, but the organization that you've built to help organizations that want to outsource their contact center. So, we could talk a little bit about your training, you're coaching your mentoring methods and then what does the knowledge base look like for your agents to always do a better job?
Because quite frankly, I mean you're going to do as good or better a job than the company you're representing because you're going to keep the account and you're going to keep them happy and keep them over the course of a lifetime. So how do you train differently? How do you coach and mentor folks and keep them so that you don't have the attrition level that a lot of places have today. That's a wonderful question real fast in regards to attrition, I have more of a natural attrition than a forced attrition because companies such as amazon hp intel and oracle and Sykes are here, so I'll lose somebody for a scheduling conflict for the university of boyfriend or girlfriend works there closer to their home, very rarely, if not never someone will say that I insulted them, yelled at them, gave them the walk of shame.
It's just maybe an ex-employee with some sour grapes. I treat everybody with dignity, and I look for ways to delegate and promote them, but initially it's really the psychology prior to any sort of skill set. So, fear is a morbid anticipation of things that haven't happened yet. The fact that they learned a second language is 10 times harder than any campaign. I'll put them on. I also believe in the right bus, right seat philosophy. And so, when they come into the call center besides starting their day playing pinball to make friends and relax a little bit.
We really do focus on quality assurance so we can grade their calls for certain metrics. But I try to do certain breakthroughs like when they're filling out their resumes with me and putting in all their credentials, I'll ask them to turn the page over Steve and give me a couple of paragraphs of a coming of age moment, let me know when you beat up a bully or save the kitten from a tree. And so, I could use this when they're having a rainy Wednesday to remind them of when they were a champion.
These are things they always have in them. It's just a matter of getting it out and keeping it consistent and so let's just say in the first day of class, it's especially important not just to lecture them when they just nodded you and walk out the door. You need to have checkpoints; you need to have interaction. You can go over a certain segment and then just maybe have somebody stand up in front of class and read the next paragraph. Why? Because you're triple gunning. They're reading out loud their public speaking, they're doing it in front of the boss.
Imagine those sorts of butterflies you would have, but if you could triple or quadruple your training daily where then you go upstairs, you record yourself reading the script, where you're practicing it. You're not just reading it, you're speaking into a recording device, then you're listening to it and then you're doing a self-analysis for self-adjustments over the things we spoke about. You'll know when you're pausing is off or when you're too loud or too best. Are you stuttered or mispronounced a word and I'm allowing you Steve to write it out phonetically, at least learn how to spell it.
But the vowels are sometimes tricky for Latinos, so it's okay to be able to switch things around so it's pronounced a certain way, and these are the sort of adjustments, minor adjustments that we make for somebody to feel more comfortable initially. So, they don't pick up unhealthy habits and kind of like bedside manner. I can't stress enough; the name drops and the act of listening and the confirmations because people feel much more comfortable when they're being listened to, and you are taking your meeting minutes and if we need to repeat something in the military alphabet.
A it shows that you're extremely involved and engaged in the conversation. A lot of the times people served in the military, so they think that's cool and you're not just making up words and going along. These people know that you are actively trying to spell their name, their email address correctly. And so, I've seen the tens of thousands of phone calls. That that's the most effective way of not to offend somebody when you can't hear them well or they have an exotic name or if it's something where you just say, yeah, okay, but the next thing, you know, your email bounces back.
It would have been better off to confirm if it's L for lima, you know, and just to make sure that you got it. And as I say, these are the sort of things like in school, you come to class, you do your homework and you do your quizzes, you can still not do so well on the final exam, but you're going to pass the class, you will be preparing yourself and marinating and softening up the call in the relationship in order to convert it. And sometimes my friends, it happens a second or third time don't expect a cold call close.
I tell my clients to put their checkbook away. A lot of the times, I just want to answer their questions and show credentials and reintroduce them to other people on the floor that they can meet and make a better decision. So don't feel rushed. People will see that, and they will be apprehensive to move forward with you. So let it happen at a natural pace. So, you said something about you QC. All the calls and I think I remember you were talking about your Hall of Fame, you know, the best and the worst calls.
I mean is that used as a training method for everyone to understand both the good and the bad types of calls. Absolutely. Remember you were mentioning earlier about people calling in the first round of calls coming where people are upset if they can ride that wave and they see the bark is, there's no bite. It's just barking and that we calmed mars jones down. We listened to Mrs. jones, we separated piles, we were able to move forward. The call didn't take that long because we didn't have to repeat things because we were confirming things.
We eliminated rabbit holes. We did the mirror imaging. We did the phonetics; we did the drops. It's beautiful. Now you have this toolbox. It's not a to Z. There are steps that can be skipped or moved back to how about we look at it like this? I loved romantic tragedy. So, I consider that a hang up call is a romantic death. Where am I going with this? Let's just say you're just hardcore carpet bombing, making outbound calls and no matter what you say, you're calling a place that she says, don't call again or not interested or we're good.
Thanks, and hang up. I always look at it like this. If you can do a company named spike and do a name, drop of the individual before they hang up on you. I think that's a beautiful death. I think at least poor lome knows you got something out of that call. But then they wouldn't be surprised that you could anchor yourself by just getting them out of that trance by saying their name in that 1st 30 seconds. I've had Times where we bought another minute, bought another three minutes and just by default, nothing on our own.
We couldn't move forward. I'll give you an example. People can call me, and we could be on the phone and 99% were ready to sign the contract. But then they ask if we do Chinese, I don't have Chinese agents, I don't do graveyard shift and I can't match offshore prices India and the Philippines. So just by that alone, I'm not able to move forward, but 99% fit. So how do I feel about that? A little disappointed. But then again, I was able to go 15 rounds lost on the decision, but I was still able to make my points listen to their points build rapport, have some labs introduce, fantasize good call.
So, another couple of questions, what type of companies or what type of industries do you guys mostly handle calls for inbound or apa? Well, I'll let you know five. We don't do, we don't do sports books, casino stocks, pharmacies or sweepstakes. I have nothing against it. Just don't want to do it. But I'm looking for small to medium sized companies in the United States, Canada Central America and Europe that would need individuals to make outbound lead generation, appointment setting or inbound customer support. And it's amazingly simple.
Our agents are college educated; they're dedicated. I don't have a blended or mixed center. They only work for your campaign, and they have some amazing skill sets here. Costa Rica really packs a punch regarding business process outsourcing. I have mentioned some of the big boys, but there are tons of call centers here and since we're the only democratic society in central America, they don't have a standing army. So, there's a 95% literacy rate Steve so as much as people might see telemarketing call centers as transitional sort of jobs or something in the United States, as you say, has a certain rap here.
It pays more than most vocation. So, I'm having some extremely educated bilingual people with degrees walking in this door and working with me. So, it's amazing the sort of people that you meet here. Very eclectic, all diverse types. That's great. So, if a company called and says, okay, we want to get started, what is that initial onboarding looks like time wise especially and system wise and how quickly can you be up and running to take their calls? Great. Well let's just say I accept the vertical and I'm comfortable with that.
There's a pre-launch checklist that my floor manager and chief technical officer sent to that company. It's exceedingly difficult for me to start moving forward without stations being set up connections, made scripts for bottles, reporting and contact because once the ads go out and people come in, it's really a seller's market. I got to be able to explain it to their candidates a, the campaign that they're doing the incentives that they have and the metrics that they're expecting. It just can't be fantasy time. It needs to be something that's concrete.
And so, once we bring the people in, it really all depends on the training time. I've had people go as low as a half a day just to teacher CRM and do a little bit of role play for fun and others do longer training sessions, even up to a month. That concerns me because we do follow all Costa Rican labor laws and there are certain call centers that are known for like for an example, sykes has the MetLife account and supposedly people will be there for an entire month training and then on their first day of coming back to work, they just don't show up.
And by Costa Rican labor law, they need to get paid for that month they go on a certain list as being a jumper and it's not fair, but that's the name of the game. So, the longer the training, the more I'm concerned because people sometimes can take advantage of that and just use that as a placeholder until they can find another job. So, if we have certain awfully specific checkpoints to ensure that this agent really has done their due diligence, really engage really up to speed.
That's a good risk compared to just doing five days’ worth of classroom, talking about merchant process outsourcing and stuff like that. It needs to be awfully specific, and I have to ensure that this client that I'm speaking with does have a track record. If it's a brand-new pilot project, then we need to invest in the process and there shouldn't be any surprises and I must let them know what to expect when building a campaign, there may be attrition. We may need to readjust the script, call certain area codes, or do certain things.
But I guess the most important thing about it is being forthright, when it comes to onboarding people, I can easily have somebody in five business days, depending if you need 10 people give me up to 10 business days, you know, and maybe we can hire people piecemeal, we can catch them when certain campaigns and other centers and as I mentioned, it's very competitive out there. The more that you put out the start date, the more that you're going to lose people because they need a job between those times and now since Covid came, it really adjusted to the work from home.
So there is an advantage of the brick and mortar because of internet redundancy, my generator and on site I. T. Support but Steve, I was exceptionally fortunate during Covid to be able to adjust my business model virtually because if I owned a brick and mortar only like a bike shop or a pizza parlor, I'm in big trouble as much as I lost a lot of the essence of the center and the camaraderie? I was able to survive. But you know, the labor pools changed. I must ensure if there is training, they should be on site to know the company culture and at least meet us before going home.
It's one of those things my friend where I really did see a huge shift that when I first started this back in 2000, that's great. Well, in the last few minutes that we've got, you know, I'd ask you whether we could give our listeners an exercise. We talked about the two-paragraph coming of age. Can you explain an exercise that folks can do as homework after they listen to this episode. And that might be interesting for them to learn more about the content that we gave them here today and then when we come back maybe you can give folks a way of getting in touch with you guys if that's something that they're looking for.
Thanks Steve, I appreciate it. Let people do the Triple watch. They should watch something without sound, they should watch something without sight. And if you want to study the visual body language, that's great. Just watch something without sound. You can assume what they're doing and then if you want to study the phonetics, to choose a channel that you don't understand the language. Like for me it would have to be Chinese or German or something like that. Italian French and Portuguese are too like Spanish for me.
But if I watch the Chinese channel, it's extremely easy for me to do that phonetic micro expression reading because I don't understand any semantic. So even I'm taking out the tone, I'm just studying their rate in their pit. Do not get study it that way while you're on the phone, once again these are things that you can do. You just draw your xy chart the horizontal line and every 30 seconds to two minutes point to how Mr. Jones's speaking just for practice, but it is about practice. It's about dedicated practice.
Record yourself, listen to yourself. I don't like how I sound. That's what everybody says. But guess what you that's what you got. So, you need to adjust it and as you and I have a mirror and our beards look great because we do look great. You could do the same thing with your voice as well. Record it, master it adjusted. And if you do that, you'll see that you'll get more positive reinforcement from people. There will be more I guess inclined to ask you for advice because you were sympathetic about it and the way you spoke about it and finally if you are in a certain situation where there's emotion and its tense, you should choose to speak last.
And if it's not something where you need to immediately give an answer then you should sleep on it so you can decompress and come back the next day a little more levelheaded and prioritize and that's an excellent way to grow and to crack some codes and to get to various levels. You don't always need to prove your point at that moment. There are other ways to do it. So, you don't overreact overextend and say something you regret. So, it's not like you're being weak. No, you're being considerate of it and you're being tactful about it.
If you're in the moment and its face to face with somebody if you must, even though it looks funny, you should close your eyes when speaking. So, there's less distraction and you're not energy being sucked from you. They might say why you close your eyes. I'm allowed. There's no rules to this. It's not tag you're asking me something emotional, so allow me my focus and my balance and if somebody is being aggressive with you, I think you should look in between their eyes, it looks like you're looking in their eyes.
So it's not like you're looking away or allowing them to suck the energy out of you, like Medusa, but it is a certain technique sir where instead of losing your direction and your energy and your breathing, you can regroup yourself and these are the sort of conflict management skills that have assisted me and having more productive conversations when they could have really gotten out of hand. That's great. I mean this has been filled, filled with great techniques, tips and insight as well. Thank you for being so generous with your expertise.
This has really been a wonderful episode, Richard. How can people get in touch with you if they're thinking about outsourcing if they're thinking about needing a contact center because I think by the end of this, they understand what you bring to the table. So how can they get in touch with you? I really appreciate having me on the show today with you, your audience and allowing me to share this information. The first thing they should do, my friend is by a first-class plane ticket. Come down here to Costa Rica so you can enjoy some eco-tourism, go to some beaches and waterfalls but your audience can give me a call at triple 82716750.
Or send me an email. CEO Costa Rica’s call center dot com. And finally have an exceptionally large Facebook fan page about 98,000 local Costa Rican Ticos. And they can't wait to meet you, Steve. You're going to have tens of thousands of new fans in central America. I can't wait. Well, Richard, thanks again for joining us today. I really love the thing that you said earlier and I'm going to add something to it. So, each agent is a voice artist, and this is a message to all the C E. O. S out there that have contact centers and folks that have agents working for them that each agent is a voice artist and I think you should let them create a great interaction.
So let them create, let them build those great interactions. So that's it for our episode of the Science of C. X. I'm Steve Pappas, your host. We've had Richard blank on today from Costa Rica call center and I want to thank you all for joining us. If you like the content that we bring to you, please feel free to drop us a review wherever you get your podcasts and until we meet again, please stay safe. Stay healthy and do take care everyone. Bye bye. You've been listening to the science of C. X. My name is Steve Pappas.
I really hope you've enjoyed this episode and if you have the highest compliment that you can give us is to subscribe rate and review the science of C. X. Thanks. And we'll see you in the next episode. Finding one place to see all customer experience related tools of technology has been difficult until now. We just built it. Get ready for a science of C. X. Original customer experience technology has been helping to drive businesses by giving them insights into better methods to engage and delight their customers for some time now.
But if you're looking for C. X. Tech you must search everywhere to understand the whole landscape. C. X stash is your simple why stop directory of all the Great Sea X related technology you need. It breaks down all C. X by collections like analytics, crm, journey mapping, voice of the customer, you ex customer support and more. It's free to create an account and use no advertising. Cluttering up your experience just one place to find all the great C. X. Tech. Sign up today at www.
Richard’s vision quest journey is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. In addition, inducted into the 2023 Hall of Fame for Business. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
#RichardBlank #CostaRica #CallCenter #Outsourcing #Telemarketing #BPO #Sales #Entrepreneur #B2B #Business #Podcast #Leadgeneration #Appointmentsetting #SacrificetoSuccess #Scienceofcx
Science of CX, The Forgotten Art Project, Richard Blank,Costa Rica's Call Center, Outsourcing, Telemarketing, BPO, Nearshore, Sales, Entrepreneur, B2B, Business,Podcast,Gamification,Leadership,Marketing, Radio, Guest, Money, education, trainer,
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By Margin Business Digital Entrepreneurs Podcast
The MarginBusiness Podcast is your compass in the entrepreneurial wilderness. Tune in to learn from successful entrepreneurs who've blazed the trail. No need to start from scratch; simply embrace the path to success!
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. In addition, inducted into the 2023 Hall of Fame for Business. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
#RichardBlank #CostaRica #CallCenter #Outsourcing #Telemarketing #BPO #Sales #Entrepreneur #B2B #Business #Podcast #Gamification #CEO #MarginBusinessDigitalEntrepreneursPodcast
Elevate with MarginBusiness. The Digital Entrepreneur Show with Richard Blank
https://youtu.be/eAByfuEMcxs
The Digital Entrepreneur Show. Elevate with MarginBusiness. Scale a B2B telesales call center with Richard Blank
Leading the Way in E-commerce Localization. MarginBusiness is not just an agency but a pioneer in e-commerce localization, guiding businesses to extend their reach beyond Amazon.com into the lucrative markets of Europe and the UK.
With Omar Angri at the helm, they provide more than just translation services; they offer comprehensive market-specific strategies, ensuring their clients don’t just compete but excel in the international arena. The Crucial Role of Localization in Amazon Selling. Omar shares insights into common mistakes sellers make when expanding into new markets and the power of localization in improving conversion rates. Omar shares valuable lessons and client success stories, illustrating how businesses have achieved significant growth and revenue milestones by investing in localization and optimization. He also offers advice to entrepreneurs on creating unique brands and products and the importance of Amazon PPC campaigns.
OMAR ANGRI
Omar is a seasoned professional with diverse experience in graphic design, corporate roles, and international relocations. He pivoted his career to follow his passion for kickboxing, launching an online retail e-commerce business internationally in 2005. His entrepreneurial journey led him to co-found MarginBusiness Agency, a global consulting firm that specializes in helping brands succeed on Amazon. Omar and his team focus on Listing Optimization and Localization, assisting clients in penetrating global markets and standing out in a crowded marketplace. Omar's inspiring journey demonstrates adaptability and seizing opportunities in an ever-changing business landscape. Omar Angri: From Graphic Design to E-commerce Virtuoso Omar Angri’s journey from a graphic designer passionate about kickboxing to becoming the CEO of MarginBusiness is a story of transformation and dedication. His shift to e-commerce in 2005 marked the beginning of a path filled with corporate roles, international experiences, and entrepreneurial ventures, leading to the establishment of MarginBusiness.
Elevate with MarginBusiness - The Digital Entrepreneur Show
By Margin Business Digital Entrepreneurs Podcast
The MarginBusiness Podcast is your compass in the entrepreneurial wilderness. Tune in to learn from successful entrepreneurs who've blazed the trail. No need to start from scratch; simply embrace the path to success!
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. In addition, inducted into the 2023 Hall of Fame for Business. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
#RichardBlank #CostaRica #CallCenter #Outsourcing #Telemarketing #BPO #Sales #Entrepreneur #B2B #Business #Podcast #Gamification #CEO #MarginBusinessDigitalEntrepreneursPodcast
Elevate with MarginBusiness. The Digital Entrepreneur Show with Richard Blank
https://youtu.be/eAByfuEMcxs
The Digital Entrepreneur Show. Elevate with MarginBusiness. How to start a BPO nearshore call center with Richard Blank
Leading the Way in E-commerce Localization. MarginBusiness is not just an agency but a pioneer in e-commerce localization, guiding businesses to extend their reach beyond Amazon.com into the lucrative markets of Europe and the UK.
With Omar Angri at the helm, they provide more than just translation services; they offer comprehensive market-specific strategies, ensuring their clients don’t just compete but excel in the international arena. The Crucial Role of Localization in Amazon Selling. Omar shares insights into common mistakes sellers make when expanding into new markets and the power of localization in improving conversion rates. Omar shares valuable lessons and client success stories, illustrating how businesses have achieved significant growth and revenue milestones by investing in localization and optimization. He also offers advice to entrepreneurs on creating unique brands and products and the importance of Amazon PPC campaigns.
OMAR ANGRI
Omar is a seasoned professional with diverse experience in graphic design, corporate roles, and international relocations. He pivoted his career to follow his passion for kickboxing, launching an online retail e-commerce business internationally in 2005. His entrepreneurial journey led him to co-found MarginBusiness Agency, a global consulting firm that specializes in helping brands succeed on Amazon. Omar and his team focus on Listing Optimization and Localization, assisting clients in penetrating global markets and standing out in a crowded marketplace. Omar's inspiring journey demonstrates adaptability and seizing opportunities in an ever-changing business landscape. Omar Angri: From Graphic Design to E-commerce Virtuoso Omar Angri’s journey from a graphic designer passionate about kickboxing to becoming the CEO of MarginBusiness is a story of transformation and dedication. His shift to e-commerce in 2005 marked the beginning of a path filled with corporate roles, international experiences, and entrepreneurial ventures, leading to the establishment of MarginBusiness.
Elevate with MarginBusiness - The Digital Entrepreneur Show
By Margin Business Digital Entrepreneurs Podcast
The MarginBusiness Podcast is your compass in the entrepreneurial wilderness. Tune in to learn from successful entrepreneurs who've blazed the trail. No need to start from scratch; simply embrace the path to success!
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. In addition, inducted into the 2023 Hall of Fame for Business. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
#RichardBlank #CostaRica #CallCenter #Outsourcing #Telemarketing #BPO #Sales #Entrepreneur #B2B #Business #Podcast #Gamification #CEO #MarginBusinessDigitalEntrepreneursPodcast
Elevate with MarginBusiness. The Digital Entrepreneur Show with Richard Blank
https://youtu.be/eAByfuEMcxs
Secrets to properly introduce yourself on the phone. Stand Out Get Noticed podcast (The C Method Episode 283) guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center.
Christina Canters: Prospecting, you. Can we role play this? I would love to. Let's role play this. So can I, I'm gonna pretend that I'm the secretary. Right. And did I hear you say before that you say the company name better than how we would say it? How's
Richard Blank: the C method doing today? ? Yeah, let's reaction , you know?
Christina Canters: Um, let's play this.
Okay, so I'm gonna be the secretary and then I'm gonna put you through to me, Christina, and I wanna hear how, what's
Richard Blank: your secretary's name, who you're gonna be in Charact.
Christina Canters: Uh, let's make my secretary Aaron, my husband .
Richard Blank: I love it. There you go. Are you gonna use a gr voice when you answer the phone? Being
Christina Canters: character?
He's very friendly, but I'll make, try to make my voice deeper. There you go. Okay, so ring, ring, ring, ring. Hello, the same method. This is Aaron speaking.
Richard Blank: Hey Aaron. How's the SEA Method doing today?
Christina Canters: Oh, you know, ticking along. That's what he would say, .
Richard Blank: Well, that sounds good to me. My name is Richard Blank, and I'd like to see if I might be able to speak with Christina for a minute,
Christina Canters: please.
Uh, can I ask what the
call's
Richard Blank: regarding? Absolutely, Aaron. The reason for this phone call is that I'm in Costa Rica. I got an amazing call center. I collect pinball machines In excess is my favorite band in Australia, and I just would like to touch base with it for 30 seconds to properly introduce myself.
Christina Canters: Oh wow. What kind of pinball machines
Richard Blank: do you have? Oh my goodness gracious. My oldest is a 1976 Ballet's Freedom. I got 13 of. One man's trash is another man's treasure. And I'm so glad, Erin, that you brought that up. I tell you what, when you ever come and visit in Costa Rica, we'll do a pinball marathon.
How does that sound?
Christina Canters: That sounds absolutely fantastic. I love, I love me bit of vintage, uh, gaming. Uh, alright. I'll put you through to Christina.
Richard Blank: She should be available Before you transf me or I just wanna let you know that you did an excellent job and when I speak to Christina, I'm gonna let her know that.
Christina Canters: Thank you. That means our, our marriage is strong, man. Still strong. . I'll transfer her through. Excellent. Then ring, ring, ring, ring. Uh, hello, Christina
Richard Blank: speaking. Hey Christine, this is Richard Blake. I just gotta let you know that Erin is probably the greatest employee that I've ever spoken to. You should be very proud working.
Christina Canters: Ah, thanks Richard. Um, can I ask her
Richard Blank: what the call's about? Well, absolutely. He was kind enough to transfer. My name is Richard Blank. I'm with Costa Rica's call center, and I just wanted to touch base and introduce myself. Let you know I got a great call center in Central America. I collect pinball machines in excess is my favorite band.
And I just wanted to share some of our services with you to see if this is something that you may be interested in.
Christina Canters: Awesome. All right. Pause, role play. Big round of applause, Richard .
Richard Blank: But check it out. When I call your company back and I speak to your amazing husband, you know he is gonna remember me and he's also going to thank me for saying that to you and in writing.
And then he might also tell me your direct extens. In anniversary or promotion, something of your company culture that may move the ball forward a bit. And those are the sort of things, my friend, that we just paid it forward. And as you can see, your husband actually gave me the pass, the pitch. So rock on.
I got you. .
Christina Canters: Can I, okay. So can I summarize what I believe you. Yes ma'am. So firstly, you said you asked how the company was going and you said the C method name. With so much joy and excitement that I got excited just hearing, you know, what my company was up to. So that was one thing. Yeah. The second thing you used Aaron's name, you said, hi Aaron, how are you doing?
You know, how are you doing? Um, which I believe builds that rapport cause people also love hearing their own names. You also mentioned a couple of interesting facts about yourself that I wouldn't have expected on an initial call. Exactly. So you said you've got a pinball collection and that in excess is your favorite band.
Why do you do that? And is that random and weird?
Richard Blank: No, because I'm extremely proud of in excess and everybody in the world should listen to them. Um, why? Because if not, I'm gonna sound like everybody. And you're gonna hang up on me and it's gonna put a bad taste in your mouth. And yes, you don't need my pinball machines and I'm sure you love inaccessible.
What's that have to do with the C method? It's got a lot to do with the C method. Everything's got to do with everything.
Influence People Over The Phone With These Powerful Communication Techniques – with Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center [The C Method podcast Episode 283]
The C Method podcast guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center.
The C Method podcast has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Christina Canters discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation, phonetic micro expression reading and INXS.
The C Method provides public speaking and communication skills training for high performing professionals.As a manager and leader, your ability to speak up, present with confidence and communicate well is key to career success.You may be highly skilled, intelligent and work harder than anyone, but if you can’t articulate your ideas clearly, engage your team or influence others to take action, it will hold you back from getting the promotions, opportunities, and recognition you deserve. Listen to the 'Stand Out Get Noticed' podcast. Now at 2 million+ downloads! Discover how to develop a success mindset, speak with confidence, articulate yourself clearly and build strong relationships for more influence and impact in the workplace. Topics include: public speaking, mindset, social skills, overcoming fear, workplace communication, relationships and leadership.
Have you ever wanted to have more influence over the phone?
My guest this week is Richard Blank, CEO of Costa Rica’s Call Centre. He is a master of the cold call, and has trained over 10,000 telemarketers to improve their communication techniques over the phone.Richard is here to share his powerful techniques for improving your ability to lead and influence in conversation – and some of them are much simpler than you think!This will benefit you if you want to build better relationships and be more persuasive with your team, senior managers and clients.
“I love to allow people to feel more comfortable with me, to become more engaged in a conversation. This is not a lecture, and I’m not just checking off boxes and interrogating you. It’s a conversation. And it’s I mean, I don’t learn anything new when I speak. I love hearing what other people have to say to see what I have in common.”
This is Richard Blank’s story…
My name is Richard Blank and I’m the CEO of Costa Rica’s Call Center. I’m skilled in reading phonetic micro expressions and use this to my advantage when speaking with people, especially over the phone.
I’ve found that by using someone’s name, asking how their company is doing, and sharing interesting facts about myself, I’m able to build rapport and influence the person I’m speaking with. This has been beneficial in both my personal and professional life.
In this episode, you will discover:
Phonetics is the purest form of communication, the sound of speech, not the semantics or even the tone.
The tone of voice should always be positive and empathetic.
0 seconds to 2 minutes is the best time to gauge a person.
How to gauge someone. They discuss some of the techniques they use to do it.
Richard believes in open-ended questions and specific name drops.
He also believes in the art of speech and meeting minutes to avoid conflict.
Richard’s advice to people is to be authentic.
When he was in his 20s, he tried to change his personality for a job interview, but he realised it was not going to work for him. Now he allows people to grow naturally.
He believes that people that feel seen, they feel heard, and they feel like they matter through the way that they communicate with others.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
https://youtu.be/Wl_tS1ielGg
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https://thecmethod.com/podcast/standoutgetnoticed/influence-people-over-the-phone-with-these-powerful-communication-techniques-with-richard-blank-ceo-of-costa-ricas-call-centre-episode-283/
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Buffer Boomerang Technique explained on the TrulyYourVA with Janis podcast. Special guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center.
Janis Melillo: K. Another question, and I'm not sure what this is, I'm very intrigued by it, and I have to tell you about four or five times I went to go on Google just to search this term, but I'm like, I, I wanted to save that suspense for this question. Yes. Tell me more about the famous buffering boomerang
Richard Blank: technique.
The buffer boomerang technique? Mm-hmm. , I like it. It's really more of conflict management because somebody may ask you a question with a very negative tone. In fact, I'll show you the image. There's my famous buffer boomerang technique, so somebody might ask you a question with a negative tone. What I like to do is buffer the negative tone.
I like to do a name. Bring it around by saying, that's an excellent question. Repeating the question to show active listening and then sending it back as a plus two. So for an example, let's say I'm prospecting your company. I'm calling truly your va, and somebody says, What is your name? I go, Ah. Janice, I'm so glad that you asked that question.
Once again, my name is Richard Blank, and so you can almost reset the tone on something like that. People will be asking you questions and so I think instead of just answering it as a, you know, a toe to toe's office answering a question cuz you're in trouble. Sometimes you need to buffer the tone, smooth that out a bit, show the active listening and send it back.
And so a lot of the times people will also be doing desert pitching or they'll just be going through a list of the services that they have. I, I think people need to pause every now and again for rest and for drink. In a desert, you need an oasis. And there's also times for positive and negative reinforcement.
And when you find a certain area that you like, you take it from a horizontal to a vertical. And then you start stacking open-ended questions. These like your virtual assistants, they need to show empathy on the phone and a lot of active listening. I believe that using names are very important. You should do that during tie down or pin down or clarification questions, and then amongst the conversation, using the pronouns of your and are to keep their attention in every 32nd.
Two minute intervals. And so buffer Boomerang is really just one of many techniques just to show active listening, so you're not just reacting, you're almost in mode of acting because of listening and adjusting your conversation accordingly. So the most frustrating thing is repeating. And so as long as that you once again, understand where that person is coming from, it could lower temperatures, bring back a speed and give you a little bit more control on a call.
Janis Melillo: I love that because Richard, I think there is such a difference from hearing to listening. So you take an active engagement, for instance, obviously we're on Zoom, we're streaming live through, uh, through my Facebook page and people can hear it, but are they listening?
Richard Blank: Most of the time though.
Janis Melillo: Yes, I, I, I agree.
I agree. Objections right there. There's a lot of distractions and I think in, in our, like I said, in the digital world today, you know, there's, for instance, news notifications. I've had to turn off all my news notifications as much as possible because it's distracting. Because when I'm working for a client, as I'm sure you are, because I think we have the same, uh, work ethic, I have to tune, I turn, tune all that stuff out because that is a distraction and it's only human nature to, you know, look down.
Oh, you know, there's some other news alert. Turn off the distractions. Cause I think that's a lot of outside clutter. We don't need clutter when we're focusing on the task at hand.
Richard Blank: We may not have the luxury of that sort of controlled environment in our offices Right now, there's no distractions. But if you and I were somewhere having lunch and there's a lot of noise, we still might need to find that focus.
So that's why I mentioned 30 seconds to two minutes. And I also believe, once again, when you are, um, engaged with the individual by having checkpoints either repeating what you say, confirming what you say, thumbing up what you say, moving on on what you say, because it would be foolish of me to be three or four points down or thinking of that.
We haven't even confirmed the one that we are on right now. Mm-hmm. . So people need to slow down a bit. And I think what's very important for me as well, and it can almost set the pace as a positive escalation, if there are individuals that assist you prior to being transferred or just anybody along the way, they should be mentioned verbally and in writing.
So let's just say hypothetically I'm calling a company back. This individual answering the phone will thank me for that compliment. Give me more company information, company culture, and would love to transfer the call. So it's almost like the philosophy of wwe, Janice. Well, we're just trying to reduce any sort of resistance.
Go with the current. Mm-hmm. , let the wind be in your sales. And so when you're trying to force a fit, you're trying to shove in your point, you're stepping on someone's toes, you're interrupting. We're not dancing well. And I think there's a very good place. Where through deductive reasoning, letting the person talk and then choosing.
What is the area of focus and possibly getting back to what you need to later in the conversa? Your conversation may be prolonged, but it's also a quality call, and I'm not saying we're repeating anything. What we're possibly doing, Dennis is expanding on certain topics where I couldn't get it before. I love meeting minute.
Because when someone concludes a conversation, if they can send an email back on all the points that they talked about, a, they're accountable for it. It's dated, so someone can't say they forgot about it. And it's an excellent point that where you pick up, where you left off, you start going through the, the checkpoint and delegating.
Who has a responsibility, if these are just first time relationships, we need to create certain boundaries and parameters and protocols because your way of working may be different from mine. And so as long as there's no surprises prior, and we can adjust that accordingly, it should flow exceptionally well.
Janis Melillo: Right. So the next question that I wanna ask you,
TrulyYourVA with Janis podcast has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Janis Melillo discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
In a now all consuming digital world, Virtual Assistant's are in such high demand. From choosing which social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Clubhouse and many others; knowing how to hire a VA is just as important as to which social media outlet you should use. Did you know that hiring a VA will actually save you money? Janis Melillo is a Virtual Assistant, Business Coach, Ghostwriter, Author, Publisher, Speaker, Podcast Co-Host.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
https://youtu.be/kJus0bLJBCI
https://youtu.be/CeaeZlgcA_Q
https://youtu.be/WyBcKPONXhw
https://youtu.be/SeXAlO8kQR0
https://youtu.be/x9uYZb_c4VI
https://youtu.be/tGyk9vWbgUc
https://youtu.be/JonGMOF7xB4
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/trulyyourva-with-janis-4667344/episodes/this-is-not-your-usual-call-ce-143296088
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyv7cqXIykc
https://rumble.com/v1als7a-this-is-not-your-usual-call-center-ceo-richard-blanks-approach-to-business-.html
https://www.bitchute.com/video/fhZZj4h2ALw7/
https://anchor.fm/janis-melillo/episodes/This-Is-Not-Your-Usual-Call-Center---CEO-Richard-Blanks-Approach-to-Business---06-30-22-e1klioj
https://www.trulyyourvawithjanis.com/this-is-not-your-usual-call-center-ceo-richard-blanks-approach-to-business-063022/
https://fb.watch/gSeXAmSk5J/
on the TrulyYourVA with Janis podcast. Special guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center.
Janis Melillo: K. Another question, and I'm not sure what this is, I'm very intrigued by it, and I have to tell you about four or five times I went to go on Google just to search this term, but I'm like, I, I wanted to save that suspense for this question. Yes. Tell me more about the famous buffering boomerang
Richard Blank: technique.
The buffer boomerang technique? Mm-hmm. , I like it. It's really more of conflict management because somebody may ask you a question with a very negative tone. In fact, I'll show you the image. There's my famous buffer boomerang technique, so somebody might ask you a question with a negative tone. What I like to do is buffer the negative tone.
I like to do a name. Bring it around by saying, that's an excellent question. Repeating the question to show active listening and then sending it back as a plus two. So for an example, let's say I'm prospecting your company. I'm calling truly your va, and somebody says, What is your name? I go, Ah. Janice, I'm so glad that you asked that question.
Once again, my name is Richard Blank, and so you can almost reset the tone on something like that. People will be asking you questions and so I think instead of just answering it as a, you know, a toe to toe's office answering a question cuz you're in trouble. Sometimes you need to buffer the tone, smooth that out a bit, show the active listening and send it back.
And so a lot of the times people will also be doing desert pitching or they'll just be going through a list of the services that they have. I, I think people need to pause every now and again for rest and for drink. In a desert, you need an oasis. And there's also times for positive and negative reinforcement.
And when you find a certain area that you like, you take it from a horizontal to a vertical. And then you start stacking open-ended questions. These like your virtual assistants, they need to show empathy on the phone and a lot of active listening. I believe that using names are very important. You should do that during tie down or pin down or clarification questions, and then amongst the conversation, using the pronouns of your and are to keep their attention in every 32nd.
Two minute intervals. And so buffer Boomerang is really just one of many techniques just to show active listening, so you're not just reacting, you're almost in mode of acting because of listening and adjusting your conversation accordingly. So the most frustrating thing is repeating. And so as long as that you once again, understand where that person is coming from, it could lower temperatures, bring back a speed and give you a little bit more control on a call.
Janis Melillo: I love that because Richard, I think there is such a difference from hearing to listening. So you take an active engagement, for instance, obviously we're on Zoom, we're streaming live through, uh, through my Facebook page and people can hear it, but are they listening?
Richard Blank: Most of the time though.
Janis Melillo: Yes, I, I, I agree.
I agree. Objections right there. There's a lot of distractions and I think in, in our, like I said, in the digital world today, you know, there's, for instance, news notifications. I've had to turn off all my news notifications as much as possible because it's distracting. Because when I'm working for a client, as I'm sure you are, because I think we have the same, uh, work ethic, I have to tune, I turn, tune all that stuff out because that is a distraction and it's only human nature to, you know, look down.
Oh, you know, there's some other news alert. Turn off the distractions. Cause I think that's a lot of outside clutter. We don't need clutter when we're focusing on the task at hand.
Richard Blank: We may not have the luxury of that sort of controlled environment in our offices Right now, there's no distractions. But if you and I were somewhere having lunch and there's a lot of noise, we still might need to find that focus.
So that's why I mentioned 30 seconds to two minutes. And I also believe, once again, when you are, um, engaged with the individual by having checkpoints either repeating what you say, confirming what you say, thumbing up what you say, moving on on what you say, because it would be foolish of me to be three or four points down or thinking of that.
We haven't even confirmed the one that we are on right now. Mm-hmm. . So people need to slow down a bit. And I think what's very important for me as well, and it can almost set the pace as a positive escalation, if there are individuals that assist you prior to being transferred or just anybody along the way, they should be mentioned verbally and in writing.
So let's just say hypothetically I'm calling a company back. This individual answering the phone will thank me for that compliment. Give me more company information, company culture, and would love to transfer the call. So it's almost like the philosophy of wwe, Janice. Well, we're just trying to reduce any sort of resistance.
Go with the current. Mm-hmm. , let the wind be in your sales. And so when you're trying to force a fit, you're trying to shove in your point, you're stepping on someone's toes, you're interrupting. We're not dancing well. And I think there's a very good place. Where through deductive reasoning, letting the person talk and then choosing.
What is the area of focus and possibly getting back to what you need to later in the conversa? Your conversation may be prolonged, but it's also a quality call, and I'm not saying we're repeating anything. What we're possibly doing, Dennis is expanding on certain topics where I couldn't get it before. I love meeting minute.
Because when someone concludes a conversation, if they can send an email back on all the points that they talked about, a, they're accountable for it. It's dated, so someone can't say they forgot about it. And it's an excellent point that where you pick up, where you left off, you start going through the, the checkpoint and delegating.
Who has a responsibility, if these are just first time relationships, we need to create certain boundaries and parameters and protocols because your way of working may be different from mine. And so as long as there's no surprises prior, and we can adjust that accordingly, it should flow exceptionally well.
Janis Melillo: Right. So the next question that I wanna ask you,
TrulyYourVA with Janis podcast has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Janis Melillo discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
In a now all consuming digital world, Virtual Assistant's are in such high demand. From choosing which social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Clubhouse and many others; knowing how to hire a VA is just as important as to which social media outlet you should use. Did you know that hiring a VA will actually save you money? Janis Melillo is a Virtual Assistant, Business Coach, Ghostwriter, Author, Publisher, Speaker, Podcast Co-Host.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
https://youtu.be/kJus0bLJBCI
https://youtu.be/CeaeZlgcA_Q
https://youtu.be/WyBcKPONXhw
https://youtu.be/SeXAlO8kQR0
https://youtu.be/x9uYZb_c4VI
https://youtu.be/tGyk9vWbgUc
https://youtu.be/JonGMOF7xB4
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/trulyyourva-with-janis-4667344/episodes/this-is-not-your-usual-call-ce-143296088
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyv7cqXIykc
https://rumble.com/v1als7a-this-is-not-your-usual-call-center-ceo-richard-blanks-approach-to-business-.html
https://www.bitchute.com/video/fhZZj4h2ALw7/
https://anchor.fm/janis-melillo/episodes/This-Is-Not-Your-Usual-Call-Center---CEO-Richard-Blanks-Approach-to-Business---06-30-22-e1klioj
https://www.trulyyourvawithjanis.com/this-is-not-your-usual-call-center-ceo-richard-blanks-approach-to-business-063022/
https://fb.watch/gSeXAmSk5J/
I was still on my vision quest when I came to Costa Rica.TrulyYourVA with Janis podcast guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center.
Richard Blank: And so I really take it from a case by case old school basis when I'm dealing with the people that work with me.
Janis Melillo: Wow, that is amazing. So you, you've, like you said, you've been there for 22 years. You, you decided, you know, to build your own company. What was that moment? Because I think so many people out there today, for instance, who, um, you know, were in the era where we work virtually.
I'm a virtual assistant, but for somebody who wants to start their own brick and mortar business, can you share some of. Challenges, but also the excitement that came along with.
Richard Blank: Absolutely. I was still on my vision quest when I came to Costa Rica looking for my walkabout and to shed some skin, and I will be forthright with you.
It did take into my mid thirties for impulse control maturity and have enough capital to start a business. Mm-hmm. and a lot of people may overextend themselves by taking out loans or mortgages or just trying to, uh, create a certain image of bells and whistles where, you know, they're not acting their wage, they're just giving an impression.
And so for me, I, I wanted to do it slow and. And as grandma said, if you can't pay for it in cash, you just don't do it. And so when I started my call center, I was working out of my home, but I was also renting an individual turnkey station from a blended center. So I didn't have privacy. I was just on an open floor plan and just renting seats per month and paying the taxes and making a margin.
And after a couple years, I saved enough capital and really knew the business to then rent. And purchase enough to build out 150 stations in a server room, and then after about six years, I had enough to be able to build a 300 seat station that I currently own and I'm at right now. So as much as I want to give the glamour to it and the fast track, a lot of the time a business is building on foundation and doubling down on yourself and saving money so you can weather certain storms and just be very conservative.
And I like it that way. In fact, I'm very selective of the campaigns that come in here because A, it's my reputation. And B, it's also seller's market. If the agent doesn't wanna do it, I. Fill seeds. So it's an extremely delicate balance, and the fact that I am hands. I like to walk the rows and break bread with the agents and to listen to them and coach them.
I, I think I gain a couple gold medals there because a lot of, I might be able to even break some stereotypes and misconceptions of what a business owner, a telemarketer, or even what a call center is. It's not like what you see in the movies. Wolf of Wall Street's amazing. Glen Gary, Glen Ross, and Boiler Room, but not every call center sells stock.
And that might not be the appropriate profile for truly your VA or for individuals that work with you, Jan. So these are the sort of things that we take into consideration when offering, um, our services to potential clients.
TrulyYourVA with Janis podcast guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center.
TrulyYourVA with Janis podcast has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Janis Melillo discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
In a now all consuming digital world, Virtual Assistant's are in such high demand. From choosing which social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Clubhouse and many others; knowing how to hire a VA is just as important as to which social media outlet you should use. Did you know that hiring a VA will actually save you money? Janis Melillo is a Virtual Assistant, Business Coach, Ghostwriter, Author, Publisher, Speaker, Podcast Co-Host.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
https://youtu.be/kJus0bLJBCI
https://youtu.be/CeaeZlgcA_Q
https://youtu.be/WyBcKPONXhw
https://youtu.be/SeXAlO8kQR0
https://youtu.be/x9uYZb_c4VI
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/trulyyourva-with-janis-4667344/episodes/this-is-not-your-usual-call-ce-143296088
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyv7cqXIykc
https://rumble.com/v1als7a-this-is-not-your-usual-call-center-ceo-richard-blanks-approach-to-business-.html
https://www.bitchute.com/video/fhZZj4h2ALw7/
https://anchor.fm/janis-melillo/episodes/This-Is-Not-Your-Usual-Call-Center---CEO-Richard-Blanks-Approach-to-Business---06-30-22-e1klioj
https://www.trulyyourvawithjanis.com/this-is-not-your-usual-call-center-ceo-richard-blanks-approach-to-business-063022/
https://fb.watch/gSeXAmSk5J/
How to score a pass to pitch on a telemarketing call? INspired INsider Podcast guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Richard, you mentioned from an outbound perspective, so there's different kind of parts to the call. So I'd love for you to break that down, especially the opening part. Cause if you, you know, you've mentioned before, if you don't get past that, it doesn't matter what you have planned
Richard Blank: for the rest of the call.
Richard Blank: That's a great point. Well, every conversation has an introduction of body and a conclusion. You can't land that intro. There is nobody in conclusion. Doctor. I also believe that every conversation and attention span is 30 seconds to two minutes. Okay? And so when we're touching base with somebody, there is a give and a take initially before that positive escalation for the assistant that's answering calls for your company.
Richard Blank: What I love to do is a company name Spike. I'm not anonymous for the entire phone call, but the first thing that comes outta my mouth is the name of your company, how your company is doing. You know, before I even introduce myself, so I'll say better than somebody that answers the phone at your company.
Richard Blank: And then from there, a lot of the times they'll be asking me questions. And what I have here is a certain technique, it's called the buffer boomerang technique. Hypothetically, Germany, if somebody is answering with a negative tone, there's a way to be able to buffer that negative tone. Do a name drop, let them know that's an Exxon question.
Richard Blank: Repeat the question to show active. Listen. Then boomerang it back as a plus two. And so initially somebody could ask what my name is, and now I'd say, Jeremy, that's an Exxon question. My name is Richard Blank, as an example. And so what happens is you're able to show the active listening, readjust the tone of a call, but then in the middle of a call there is something that I like to consider.
Richard Blank: Micro phonetic, micro expression reading, and what I have here, As an actual chart, it's very simple. You're focusing on phonetics, which is your tone, rate, pitch, and duration. Your tone should be the consistent variable of empathy and confidence. There's a mirror imaging technique, but I believe that should be done every 30 seconds to two minutes with your rate of speech and your pitch.
Richard Blank: You're speaking level. Now. I need to match you with this. Because if you do a spike or a dip, that's usually when I ask a tie down or a pin down question if it makes sense or sounds good. And then also when people are on the phone and they're explaining their services. A lot of times they'll do desert pitching, Jeremy.
Richard Blank: Well, they'll just talk without any sort of oasis for drinking and resting. And so what I like to do is to give my list pause in between each one, like a dessert tray to see if there's a reaction at the end. Say in a brazen way. I'm sure you'll like at least one, so I can break the sort of questions that I have.
Richard Blank: And then sort of positive or negative reinforcement in these conversations. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. After three weeks, it becomes practice. I believe in a five to one name drop to pronoun, where in every sentence you're either saying R or your, and then usually use a name drop for the tie down question.
Richard Blank: And then at the end you can also rake one last tongue by saying, Listen, since you have me on the phone today, Jeremy, are there any other additional questions that you have? Usually you might mention something else after I repeat the. I repeat information in military alphabet because instead of concluding the call, there's a very good chance we could be talking about how proud we are of the military and those that have served.
Richard Blank: And then as I mentioned before, giving you a positive written escalation regards to those that are working with you. And so these are things that I believe won't compromise ethics, values and morals naturally. I'm skimming over this quickly, but there are certain things as expression reading. And since we're losing three of our senses over the phone, our taste, touch, and smell, the doctors and scientists say that your other senses should be expanded.
Richard Blank: Besides your active listening. I believe in image streaming where they say that books are better than movies and there's no reason why your imagination, your adjectives and your descriptions could be incredible. It could be illuminating. It could really put some insight in where you're going on some of these phone calls.
Richard Blank: And so as I mentioned before, as long as you become animated, engaged, and you are this individual's biggest fan, and you really take in the information and energy that they're giving with you, you'll find your job very fulfilling. It's because most people today see a telemarketing job as transitional or they look down upon it, but there is a ton of people that make and receive phone calls for every type of business.
Richard Blank: And some of the greatest people that you could speak with in the world do show this empathy because I, I'll share an example with you. I have a law firm account here, and we have intake coordinators for, it's a disability and wrongful termination. And so what happens is, and you being a doctor as well, you might be meeting people when they're most vulnerable in having the worst day of their life.
Richard Blank: And so if you are capable. Of having somebody calm down, find their focus and move forward with you. You could be one of the greatest individuals there when they needed you the most. And so a lot of my agents, instead of they can earn a living so many different ways, but if they can get this sort of fulfillment by knowing that success is built on a million thank yous and that they get all these positive written escalations to our company about how great they're doing.
Richard Blank: They know that they are on the right path and that once again their karma's gonna kick it, and that if they do leave this company and I am the last boss that they ever have, they will be prepared to build an incredible organization.
Inspired Insider Podcast has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding taking a chance by moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Dr. Jeremy Weisz discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
INspiredINsider.com Show features interviews with successful and inspirational entrepreneurs, authors, and visionary leaders.The interviews reveal deeply personal stories and explore the tough journey of Big Challenges or Big Mistakes that the inspirational leaders overcame to achieve success. Have You Ever Hit a Wall in Business or Life?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz is the Founder of InspiredInsider.com & CEO of Rise25.com He has been featuring top entrepreneurs with video interviews since 2010 that include founders/CEO’s of P90X, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, the Orlando Magic, Rx Bars and many more on InspiredInsider. He was senior producer for 6 years at one of the early top business podcasts helping to put systems in place and to run some of the behind the scenes operations.He continues to run his own chiropractic & massage facility in downtown Chicago and is founder of a nutritional supplement business.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://youtu.be/xMQ-mlL9ohA
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
https://www.inspiredinsider.com/richard-blank-interview/
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-inspired-insider-wi-29650573/episode/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-99381742/
https://player.fm/series/inspired-insider-podcast/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-blank-of-costa-ricas-call-center
https://www.deezer.com/en/show/38477
https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/2939630
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-blank/id729464589?i=1000569868046
What is a perfect volume of calls per month for a telemarketer? INspired INsider Podcast guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center
Richard Blank: And this sort of company culture, I think you can then once again readjust your prospecting accordingly,
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Richard, in that situation with a company, go, Great. We want you to actually. You know, these are customers that aren't using, decide not to use this anymore for whatever reason. And what volume does it make sense for them to call you?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Like let's say if they have one a month, it probably doesn't make any sense, right? To have them use your services. Is there a certain volume of calls that make sense for a company before they, you know, uh, I guess a baseline of a volume? You're like, Yeah, this makes sense to work with us.
Richard Blank: I think as long as they get full-time work for somebody.
Richard Blank: Cuz I, I, by labor laws, I don't do part-time work here because they won't be able to get their benefits. But if somebody only has enough leads to call for one month and it's an individual working out of their home and it's a startup company. Not saying that I have a preferred child, but I was in those shoes back in the day.
Richard Blank: So I guess I have more, uh, empathy and compassion towards the startup company. That might even almost be embarrassed that they're not able to give me a hundred seat, 10 year commitment. Well, once again, everybody had to start with their first step. And it's almost like when somebody says, How do I get job experience if somebody doesn't hire me?
Richard Blank: Not saying I'm willing to take any campaign. I'm extremely selective of those that come in here. But if they make their case and if they're willing to, you know, invest in a process and there's no surprises, and we can share resources, It's my pleasure to see what happens. I mean, Pete Rose should have been in the Hall of Fame for singles.
Richard Blank: It's still okay and 100 singles opens up to a huge 100 seat account. And so, as I mentioned before, uh, a little at a time equals a lot in the end. And from time to time, a client may be testing you small or it might be an iceberg where they want to see how I would react to a one seater before they give me 100 seats.
Richard Blank: And for me, as I mentioned before, everybody gets the same red carpet treatment and everybody gets the same sort of attention, and I would love to earn their business. And so I have had certain clients, as you were mentioning, test me on a certain volume just to see what my reactions are and I've earned that business.
Richard Blank: And so anybody out there, you should be extremely appreciative of anybody that walks into your door that orders one slice to 20 pies. You just never know because the 20 pi guy come is a one and a done. The one slicer could be there for the next 20 years. And so as I mentioned before, I believe in good faith and stars being aligned in energy.
Richard Blank: And as somebody has that sort of, uh, interest to contact me, it's my obligation to be able to share ideas with them. So, on an educated point of view, Jeremy, they can make a decision to move forward with me. Richard.
Inspired Insider Podcast has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding taking a chance by moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Dr. Jeremy Weisz discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
INspiredINsider.com Show features interviews with successful and inspirational entrepreneurs, authors, and visionary leaders.The interviews reveal deeply personal stories and explore the tough journey of Big Challenges or Big Mistakes that the inspirational leaders overcame to achieve success. Have You Ever Hit a Wall in Business or Life?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz is the Founder of InspiredInsider.com & CEO of Rise25.com He has been featuring top entrepreneurs with video interviews since 2010 that include founders/CEO’s of P90X, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, the Orlando Magic, Rx Bars and many more on InspiredInsider. He was senior producer for 6 years at one of the early top business podcasts helping to put systems in place and to run some of the behind the scenes operations.He continues to run his own chiropractic & massage facility in downtown Chicago and is founder of a nutritional supplement business.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://youtu.be/ADwIu8q76yM
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
https://www.inspiredinsider.com/richard-blank-interview/
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-inspired-insider-wi-29650573/episode/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-99381742/
https://player.fm/series/inspired-insider-podcast/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-blank-of-costa-ricas-call-center
https://www.deezer.com/en/show/38477
https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/2939630
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-blank/id729464589?i=1000569868046
Clever ways to buy time on a telemarketing call.INspired INsider Podcast guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So Richard, let's say there's a company and um, they have a list of whatever every month of clients who decided not to use a service, they can hire a company like you to go, Hey, Richard, here's the list right now. We don't offer support via phone. Here's a list of these clients every month, and your company would call them and almost do kind of like an exit type of interview.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Sure. Is that.
Richard Blank: We can, I'd be very much interested to see the tone of the script, the voicemails, and the email templates that you have to offer me. If I have to start that, I'd like to start off positive or one of the first things I could say is, Hey, we didn't forget about you, and unlike other companies that just sent emails, I'm giving you a personal courtesy call.
Richard Blank: May I have a few moments to be able to find out what we could do in order to earn your business? What the competition did to get your business. And I'd like to see if I could match it or to be able to exceed those sort of expectations. And so as long as I mentioned before that you could almost custom make this, you'd have to gimme the exact vertical, how long you communicated with them, the sort of communication they gave to us services we were offering.
Richard Blank: So as I say before, there's certain ways there. There's a philosophy of Wu wei. Where it's least resistance. I don't want to call you and badger you on why you're not giving me the business, but if you're kind enough to spend the time with me, even if I'm starting five touchdowns behind, there is a chance we can come back and win this game.
Richard Blank: It's just a matter of earning time. At least let me get the first 30 seconds and if I can get the 30 seconds, maybe I can get a 10 minute conversation out of you and we can take it step by step and piece by piece. And even if I have to stop midway, To reschedule it or to follow through with information to pick up where we left off.
Richard Blank: That's your protocol and I'm okay with that. As long as your clients can build a pipeline, depending on sense of urgency and the sort of company culture, I think you can then once again readjust your prospect rich.
Inspired Insider Podcast has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding taking a chance by moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Dr. Jeremy Weisz discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
INspiredINsider.com Show features interviews with successful and inspirational entrepreneurs, authors, and visionary leaders.The interviews reveal deeply personal stories and explore the tough journey of Big Challenges or Big Mistakes that the inspirational leaders overcame to achieve success. Have You Ever Hit a Wall in Business or Life?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz is the Founder of InspiredInsider.com & CEO of Rise25.com He has been featuring top entrepreneurs with video interviews since 2010 that include founders/CEO’s of P90X, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, the Orlando Magic, Rx Bars and many more on InspiredInsider. He was senior producer for 6 years at one of the early top business podcasts helping to put systems in place and to run some of the behind the scenes operations.He continues to run his own chiropractic & massage facility in downtown Chicago and is founder of a nutritional supplement business.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://youtu.be/JUTNIPTMztY
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
https://www.inspiredinsider.com/richard-blank-interview/
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-inspired-insider-wi-29650573/episode/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-99381742/
https://player.fm/series/inspired-insider-podcast/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-blank-of-costa-ricas-call-center
https://www.deezer.com/en/show/38477
https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/2939630
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-blank/id729464589?i=1000569868046
How to scale a one man show with telemarketers. INspired INsider Podcast guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Um, what about from a service perspective? People calling, maybe, maybe they're a fit from a company perspective, uh, the type of company you serve, but they're looking for a different type of service. What are the, the service type of services that maybe people are expecting that you're, you tell them, we don't, we don't really do that here.
Richard Blank: Well, a lot of it has to depend on their workforce. I mean, if somebody in their office is starting out as just a one man show, I can scale for them. A lot of the times people need to offset certain work or to be able to, uh, once again give a certain sort of a company a chance to be able to compare apples to their metrics at home office.
Richard Blank: But we offer all different types of services. As I mentioned before, inbound and outbound support. My difference is the infrastructure. I do have redundancy in regards to our internet. We do have backup electricity with generators. And also have immediate IT support. And so a lot of the people, if they're just starting out or if they have a limited budget, would be able to use us in regards to making their company grow.
Richard Blank: Now, the only difference is, and it's really not a difference now because most people working from home that these agents can fulfill these needs virtually. What I try to do is to extend all of my resources, my experience in regards to script writing rebuttal. A quality assurance department. I, I'd like to see if we could find some consistency with the client to be able to find areas of improvement.
Richard Blank: And so a lot of it, my friend, is just an investment in a process and sometimes the client just gives me a plug in play operation where they already have things in place, which makes it very easy for me. And then on the flip side, it is my pleasure to be able to build a custom made campaign for my clients.
Inspired Insider Podcast has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding taking a chance by moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Dr. Jeremy Weisz discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
INspiredINsider.com Show features interviews with successful and inspirational entrepreneurs, authors, and visionary leaders.The interviews reveal deeply personal stories and explore the tough journey of Big Challenges or Big Mistakes that the inspirational leaders overcame to achieve success. Have You Ever Hit a Wall in Business or Life?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz is the Founder of InspiredInsider.com & CEO of Rise25.com He has been featuring top entrepreneurs with video interviews since 2010 that include founders/CEO’s of P90X, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, the Orlando Magic, Rx Bars and many more on InspiredInsider. He was senior producer for 6 years at one of the early top business podcasts helping to put systems in place and to run some of the behind the scenes operations.He continues to run his own chiropractic & massage facility in downtown Chicago and is founder of a nutritional supplement business.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://youtu.be/TuHpCsyZ84Y
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
https://www.inspiredinsider.com/richard-blank-interview/
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-inspired-insider-wi-29650573/episode/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-99381742/
https://player.fm/series/inspired-insider-podcast/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-blank-of-costa-ricas-call-center
https://www.deezer.com/en/show/38477
https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/2939630
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-blank/id729464589?i=1000569868046
INspired INsider Podcast welcomes guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: What I've got. You care by every side between my eyes. Walk through the, came out better on the other side. See? Looks like a, You find the same. Right now I'm feeling like a hundred grand. You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Wise. Dr. Jeremy Weiss here, founder inspired insider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurial leaders.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Today is no different. I have Richard blank of Costa Rica's call center. You can check it out. I'm gonna formally introduce Richard in a second. But Richard, I always like to talk about other episodes people should check out of the podcast. And because, uh, Richard is a pinball fanatic, we will definitely point out Roger Sharp.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Um, they call him the Babe Ruth of pinball. He called his shot in 1970. To, I guess pinball in the day was illegal and he made it legal somehow. So watch that. There was an episode on Drunk History of Roger Sharp. That's hilarious. Um, also because we're talking call centers in direct response, um, you know, I've had some direct response legends on the podcast.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: You can check 'em out. Um, Ron Po. Peel, if anyone's heard this saying, But wait, there's more. He is an infomercial legend selling over $2 billion worth of stuff. Unfortunately, may rest in peace. He passed. But check that episode out. He was fantastic and Rick Sari as well was a great episode. Direct response.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: He helped Santa Care toothbrush and George Foreman Grill with their infomercials and juice Man Juicer and so many other legendary companies. So check that episode out as well. This episode is brought to you by Rise 25 and it rise 25. We all businesses give to and connect to their Dream 100 relationships.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: How do we do that? We help you run your podcast. You know, for me, Richard, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I'm always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I've found no better way to do that than to profile the people and companies I most admire over the past decade and have them on and shout from the rooftops what they're working on, what they're doing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So if you've thought about podcasting, you should, uh, if you have questions, go to Rise 20 five.com or email. At Support Rise 20 five.com and Richard Blank is a CEO of Costa Rica's call center. His journey in the call center space is filled with a lot of twist and turns, and I know Richard, for you, when you were 27 years old, you relocated to Costa Rica and you started training employees from a larger call centers in San Jose.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: You've shared your knowledge and trained over 10,000. Bilingual telemarketers, and I know, um, people could check out Costa Rica's call center.com, where they have a variety of services we're gonna dig into, um, like customer care, telesales, lead generation, appointment setting, and much more. And Richard, thanks for joining me.
Richard Blank: So happy to be here today. Jeremy, thank you so much for having a guest in podcast.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I'm excited because there's so much stuff we wanna talk about gamification of culture, um, expat moving there, some of the challenges of call centers, training, soft skills. But I wanted to start off with people of misconceptions.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Of call centers, right? They picture is just like a churn and burn calling people. What are some of the misconceptions that you come across in the call spanner call center space?
Richard Blank: Well, the first thing is my friend, they say that I call them during dinner, and we don't have any campaigns that do that. But, uh, it's pretty much what you've seen in Hollywood from Glen Gary, Glen Ross Boiler room, and of course the Wolf of Wall Street.
Richard Blank: You see these environments where it's fast paced aggression and they're selling stock well. Not every single environment has those sort of verticals. In fact, at my call center, most of our campaigns revolve around inbound support, outbound lead generation and appointment setting. So there's a certain level of assertiveness, not aggressiveness in regards to the campaigns that we accept in work with at the center who's not a fit.
Inspired Insider Podcast has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding taking a chance by moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Dr. Jeremy Weisz discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
INspiredINsider.com Show features interviews with successful and inspirational entrepreneurs, authors, and visionary leaders.The interviews reveal deeply personal stories and explore the tough journey of Big Challenges or Big Mistakes that the inspirational leaders overcame to achieve success. Have You Ever Hit a Wall in Business or Life?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz is the Founder of InspiredInsider.com & CEO of Rise25.com He has been featuring top entrepreneurs with video interviews since 2010 that include founders/CEO’s of P90X, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, the Orlando Magic, Rx Bars and many more on InspiredInsider. He was senior producer for 6 years at one of the early top business podcasts helping to put systems in place and to run some of the behind the scenes operations.He continues to run his own chiropractic & massage facility in downtown Chicago and is founder of a nutritional supplement business.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://youtu.be/wxjdupp_RpA
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
https://www.inspiredinsider.com/richard-blank-interview/
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-inspired-insider-wi-29650573/episode/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-99381742/
https://player.fm/series/inspired-insider-podcast/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-blank-of-costa-ricas-call-center
https://www.deezer.com/en/show/38477
https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/2939630
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/improving-your-customer-support-with-richard-blank/id729464589?i=1000569868046
Joe Killinger: Welcome to the Real Estate Jam session. You know, I always try and bring value to you guys and it's all geared toward the real estate industry, and I'm always looking for ways that I can really enhance the experience of being in this industry. And cold calling, like it or not, is a big part of our industry.
Joe Killinger: So as fortunate to run into Richard Blank, Richard has been a cold collars entire life. Matter of fact, he runs a cold collar company down in uh, Costa Rica, which I think I need to go visit. Looks beautiful down there, but he came on the show today and really gives us tips and tricks to really be more successful with our cold calling.
Joe Killinger: So make sure you check it out. Give us a like while you're there. Now, if you're new to the channel, my name is Joe Klinger. I've been a real estate entrepreneur for over 20 years, and I use this channel to bring on people like Richard to really help you learn all that tips and tricks to be successful in this industry.
Joe Killinger: So make sure you check it out. Give us a like while you're there, and if you haven't done so, make sure you.
Joe Killinger: So Richard, you know, is a, a real estate agent. Breaking those barriers, getting in front of a client, a serious client, and, you know, a, it's, it's daunting, right? You know, you gotta pick up that phone and be ready for rejection and, um, you know, it, it's very hard. So, can you kind of, uh, let's, let's start with commercial real estate first.
Joe Killinger: Let's, let's start there and talk about what tactics do you put in place to really help you, um, get through to the decision maker?
Richard Blank: Well, first and foremost, very happy to be sharing these ideas with you and yeah, I appreciate it. Really enjoying the time that we're having today on this podcast. And so what I do here, I have a simple structure.
Richard Blank: I have an introduction of body and conclusion, usually in a normal conversation, and the average attention span, in my opinion, is 30 seconds to two minutes. So let's say you're making a prospecting outbound phone call, as you were mentioning, B to. B to B business to business, the first thing I would do is when somebody answers the phone, is to use your anonymity and do a company name spike better than they would.
Richard Blank: So I'd say, Hey, how's Joe doing today? , you know, and then just to make sure that the whole company is doing great. And then the individual that answers the phone would usually ask me. What is your name? And the first technique I would mention is a buffer boomerang technique because they're usually, as you mentioned, black and blue, from getting so many phone calls.
Richard Blank: Mm-hmm. . And the fact that they are just gonna say, We're good. Thanks. Hang up or not transfer the call. You almost have to differentiate yourself, mothers, So usually I like to say even the name of the company, how the company's doing the first time. And then when they ask me this buffer boomerang technique, I will say, Hey Joe, that's an excellent question.
Richard Blank: My name is Richard Blank, and so this individual sees the active listening. I can readjust their negative tone into a positive tone, repeat their question, and then send it back once again with a name drop and who I am. And so after gaining the trust of this gatekeeper, as you would call them, I'm also gonna let them know that I'm transferred to the decision maker.
Richard Blank: I'm gonna let them know how great you are on the phone. We call that a positive escalation. So it increases your odds of actually having that call transferred. Didn't say you get the appointment but transferred. So then when the call is transferred, you are given the gift of telling this individual how amazing Joe was who answered the phone.
Richard Blank: And so you still have your anonymity. And don't be anonymous. The whole call, that's a little bit of shape, right? But if you just start off strong by complimenting someone that works with them. , it separates you from the others that have been calling and shows what you do prior to contracts. And so this individual, once again will ask who you are.
Richard Blank: So another with Buffer Boomerang, that's an excellent question, Mr. Decision Maker. My name is Richard Blank, and so we're having these conversations with the individual and if you're mentioning all the different services, options, and features of your real estate business, In your way. I just wouldn't do desert pitching Joe, because a lot of times people are so scared or reluctant to let someone speak for the fear of being hung up upon, So I believe pitch.
Richard Blank: Desert Pitchings. If you give a list of five things in a row and not even giving the person a chance to look at your dessert and make sort of reaction on it, there's no oasis in the desert.
Joe Killinger: I'm gonna learn a lot today, I can tell. Ok. And so
Richard Blank: it's almost like the MLS when you're talking about a house, you know, you're mentioned ways of the house.
Richard Blank: With the commercial real estate, you have to go over certain sections, and since it's a non-visual call, you have to gauge the positive or the negative reactions from. This potential client. And so I say slow down on your list of things that you're offering. Take the horizontal to a vertical because you are gonna find one or two things of interest, and then stack that with opened ended questions so they can explain to you.
Richard Blank: Why commercial real estate is important, why they may move forward. Okay. And so as we're continuing this conversation, my suggestion, cuz you're very keen on this, is that this is a first time phone call and there are certain tele signs you can get from somebody over the phone. Once again, I talked about 30 seconds to two minutes.
Richard Blank: My tone needs to be consistent of empathy and confidence, right? There's four sections to phonetics. It's tone, rate, pitch, and duration. Everyone talks about mirror imaging, but I'm not gonna mirror image someone that's negative, so I will always stay positive and always have the answer, but this is the part Joe.
Richard Blank: Of manipulation that you will enjoy if you pay attention to how fast and the speaking level, the pitch of somebody. In every 30 seconds to two minutes, you might see a spike or a dip, and you know perfectly well that's the perfect time to ask a tie down, pin down question. Or potentially if there's noise in the background because some people are working from home, that's still even within, uh, commercial real estate that you would passively, inadvertently and passive aggressively.
Richard Blank: Let them know the Me Too technique on how much you like dogs. Because the dog is making noise or there's a distraction. Someone's on a cell phone. In a car. And so you can always ask the follow up question, What's the dog's name? And so if someone says, Fluffy , Well, I love dogs. Yeah, Put fluffy outside. It's throwing in the call.
Richard Blank: And when they come back, Joe, and I know you're trying to lock in in an appointment, but this is the time that your audience can anchor the coal. You've already made your introduction and you're in the body of the call, but the fact that you and I could talk about your dog for a couple minutes, What that does is that's when you will usually ask me again, excuse me, what is your name?
Richard Blank: And then I'd say, That's an excellent question Joe. My name is Richard Blank. And then your name dropping me the rest of the call. And so when we finish it up, when we go to the conclusion, I want you to say, Joe, since you still have me on the phone, are there any other questions that you have? Cuz you showed me you like A, B, C, and d.
Richard Blank: I know you don't like 'em all, but you showed me you'd like two. Any other questions that you may have, You may or may not. But I always review the information, Joe in military. Because A is the cleanest way, but instead of ending the call, a lot of the times the people have served in the military, nobody's that has.
Richard Blank: Yeah. And then instead of ending the call, you're on the call for another five minutes. Yeah. But I'm still not done. When I'm doing the follow up email to the individual, I will definitely give a written positive escalation on Joe who assisted me. Mm-hmm. to transfer the call. So when I do the Richard Circle and I come back again making the follow up, call the individual yourself, that answer the call is gonna say, In 10 years, no one has ever written something like that about me.
Richard Blank: Yeah. Thank you. And so I'm not saying that you're gonna get the deal, but obviously going from half court to three point to foul line, Yeah. I think you've increased your odds and you've also separated yourself. A lot of people that are just trying to angle in on that goal. Yeah. Oh yeah.
Joe Killinger: You're not just.
Real Estate Jam Session Podcast has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding taking a chance by moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Joe Killinger discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
Joe Killinger has been an active member in the real estate industry for many years, wearing different hats, and at times multiple hats! Over the years he has been an Agent, Investor, Syndicator, Founder and Operator of companies as well as properties he invests in. His expertise has been developed over the past 30 years. During that time he has been personally responsible for the sale of and/or directly involved in the marketing of over 5,900 assets, resulting in closed transactions totaling over 900 million dollars throughout the United States.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgL4aBGjWqU&t=328s
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
Listening is how you find out what the customer needs on the phone. Positive Talk Radio guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center
Exactly and, and you're growing it enough that you can have a bunch of games that we're gonna talk about here in just a minute. but, uh, um, I, I wanted to, to ask you, because I believe that at least in, in the United States, actually listening is a lost art. And a lot of, I was a sales manager for a long time.
Mm-hmm and I had sales guys that I would go on calls with and they would be, we would be talking to the owner of the re. And he, and the sales guy would ask a question. The owner would answer the question, but I could see it in the sales guy's eyes that he was thinking of a rebuttal to what he was going to say next, rather than listening to the concerns of the person he was talking to and directly addressing those concerns, he was thinking about, okay, what am I gonna say next to?
And so he didn't even listen to 'em. So he would respond in a way that was completely different than what the. Um, owner of the restaurant was trying to get out of him. And so I would have to take him aside and say, you need to stop. You need to listen because listening is how you find out what the customer needs, how they, how you can best serve them.
Mm-hmm and what it is within your power to do for them once you know what they want. But if you don't listen, you'll never know what they want. That was my philosophy. Is that do, would you, can I, can I come work? Let me share some visuals with you and absolutely you can definitely come work with me. Never for me.
Oh, you know what I mean? You're my main man. You're starting with me starting center division one. um, this is what happens. My good friend. And you, and you saw it yourself. They're too well rehearsed. They're too commercialized. They're a print. They're not a painting. They're not raw. There's no essence to it.
Like what got them into this in the first place. They they're a character they're not in character. And so that's a shame because they have such potential and the moment that they can put their checkbook away and just start speaking with this individual at this restaurant or wherever else, that's how you're going to get the sale.
And I was mentioning before with the me too techniques, speaking about dogs and stuff. That's usually when I can anchor in and speak to somebody from the noises in the background from a child or music or a dog, that's when I know I got, because we can actually have a real conversation that's outside of what you and I were even talking about initially.
And so if they can find that sort of me too, Then a they'll be more active listening, then they can reduce any sort of friction and be a lot more comfortable to speak with them. But no, I do agree that they should be planning their rebuttals ahead, but they're, they're doing more acting. They're not reacting.
So I think once again, that has to do a lot more with dedicated practice. It's not about memorizing your script. It's about when to use it and how to use. And so as much as they're trying to impress you, they're depressing you by seeing that they're too stiff. And that bothers me. I, I think people should sway with the wind a little bit, and sometimes things happen naturally.
And instead of making 100 phone calls a day, why aren't you and I making 89? So we can be on the phone for an extra three to five minutes to look up a website to compliment an anniversary or promotion, or just to talk. Just just to see if I can get the pass to pitch in order to suggest my services. And so they have those skills, but right now people are more non-voice omnichannel.
They're doing things through chat, through email support and the challenges that they would have. My good friend is that when you don't speak to somebody on the phone, you're reducing the chances of a client retention. You're not able to upsell somebody, forget getting a referral, an even worse case scenario where let's say you're losing the client or their competition is getting, if they're willing to give you an exit interview and tell you areas in which you could improve or how your competition was able to earn your business, I sometimes find those calls to be even more valuable than.
Positive Talk Radio has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding taking a chance by moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Kevin McDonald discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
Positive Talk Radio with Kevin McDonald
"Evolving Ideas One Conversation At A Time"
Positive Talk Radio podcast was originally started in 2003 by Kevin McDonald and friends on KKNW 1150 AM in Seattle with great guests, dynamic stories and interviews, plus new thoughts on a wide range of topics. The concept is to provide positive informative content designed to educate, entertain, empower and inspire all who listen Our content includes positive thoughts and idea's and is truly unique in the podcast industry and now again on KKNW 1150 AM on Monday's at 9 and Wednesdays at 4 pm pacific.
Kevin McDonald - Creator and Host. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington. This jovial fun loving man experienced life in a big way from star athlete, to actor, Voice Actor, Restaurateur, Sales and Sales Management, Transit Operator, Audio Producer, Talk Show Host, Creative Consultant, Motivational Leader and current podcast creator. (My Independence Report) Who’s mission is to Declare Our Freedom From Hate, Division and Fear, featuring positive motivational guest, music interviews and fun episodes. KM Media.pro is the parent site for, Positive Talk Radio. We are a live podcast/ Video cast that focuses on todays life challenges. In addition we are able to produce audio/ video products for other companies and people looking to find a voice in the crowded world of podcast journalism
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://youtu.be/V7dcFT-NZPY
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
https://positivetalkradio.podbean.com/e/richard-blank-ceo-and-amazingly-gifted-business-man/
https://www.positivetalkradio.net/richard-blank-ceo-and-amazingly-gifted-business-man/
https://www.positivetalkradio.net/191-richard-blank-chief-executive-officer/
https://www.positivetalkradio.net/191-richard-blank-chief-executive-officer/
https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=1736657096686275
https://www.positivetalkradio.net/guests/richard-blank/
https://www.positivetalkradio.net/208-richard-blank-ceo-of-costa-ricas-call-center/
https://www.positivetalkradio.net/160-richard-blank-ceo-and-amazingly-gifted-business-man/
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/positive-talk-radio-3982674/episodes/richard-blank-ceo-and-amazingl-141119081
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-positive-talk-radio-87062639/episode/richard-blank-ceo-of-costa-ricas-100280727/
I saved enough money to purchase and build a 300 seat center. Positive Talk Radio guest Richard Blank Costa Rica's Call Center
Should that have lost their way. We have, we have those encampments here now. And, uh, and it's, it's a, it is a big problem here. And it's because we, as a people, don't take care of each other as, as well as we should. Um, and, and there is some drug abuse and there is some, you know, uh, stuff like that, but.
it's interesting that if that people will, you know, give you a banana, if you're, if you're down there or whatever, and I, I think, I think it's great. And I, and I really applaud you for doing, for working the way you're working and doing what you're doing. It is really outstanding. I would say, by the way, we're talking with.
Richard blank. He is the CEO of Costa Rica's Call Center. They do everything under the sun, from web design to everything else. You can go to, uh, costaricascallcenter.com and you can get all the information about Richard, his team, the folks that are there, because I'll, I'll tell you I I'm. I am as a human and, and by the way, you're one of the most human people.
And by the way, that's a, that's a huge compliment. Uh, you're one of the most human people that I've ever met. Thank you be, I really appreciate you. And would you, would you come back so that we can have more of a conversation about other stuff and, and more about this? Anytime I'd love to be a guest that comes back a reoccurring guest on a TV show.
So it's like Larry from three's company. You gotta have me on, on a couple scenes. I definitely love to come back. Absolutely. Because the. The way that you word things, the way that you respect people and stuff is it can be really helpful and energizing to other people who may want to do the same thing, but just don't know how well let's break those stereotypes.
A CEO can be one that's empathetic. Someone can take the chance and move abroad, but I make it look easy. My good friend, I started my business at 35. I wish I was a teenager. That was a whiz kid or a genius in my twenties. But I'll be forthright with you after working at my friend's call center for four years, I learned the business, but I wasn't matured enough.
It took me to my mid thirties to have impulse control maturity and enough money saved where I was responsible. For those contracts and job stability. And also, I didn't take a loan now. I don't have a partner. I don't pay interest. I did slow and steady. I first started renting a seat at a opened air blended call center.
Then after a couple years, I rented space and built out 150 seats and bought the equipment. After six years, I saved enough money to purchase and build my 300 seat center. So it's more of the tortoise, not the. It's grandma telling me if you can't pay for it in cash, don't do it. And it's also me saving enough acorns for the winter.
So I could weather storms. I wish it was bells and whistles and shortcuts and exciting, but it's not, it's being very responsible and taking your time and just making sure that you are fulfilling the needs of these agents by giving them their job stability. And in this industry, that's so competitive, especially against.
The best thing that I can do once again, is as you say, just have these sort of ethics and put my best foot forward and you don't owe anybody any money. And which means that your business is growing slower, but it. In order, you know, sometimes in, as you know, sometimes in order to get really RevD up and to really take out a big loan and then grow it and stuff you may have to, at one point in time, compromise your ethics and to do things that you don't otherwise wouldn't otherwise do because of you're chasing the almighty dollar.
At that point, you don't have to do that. So it makes it, it must be really freeing to be able to be an employer of 300 plus people. And their families and by, uh, jute boxes and, and, and, uh, and things, and, and to have a, a happy, a happy life, even if you're not a multimillionaire or a billionaire, well, it made the most sense.
I wanted to sleep at night and imagine if I lost an account, I don't want to be pissed off on the floor and then, you know, stressing about it. And it was very simple. As long as I was making my margins, renting this seat made. Then after you got to four dozen agents, it doesn't make sense to spend five grand a month to some guy when I could have my own place and buy the equipment and build it out.
And instead of buying brand new, you know, computers can be excellent secondhand. And a lot of the call centers were going out of business. So they bought it new. I pretty much got it with the wrapping on it, even though it's second a it's not out of the store, but it's pretty much brand new with the furniture.
Also, since I am a guest here and you look at me in my suit, there's a very good chance. It might charge 20% more. So I'd have local representatives for me with connections that would go and get me the best prices and bring me things. So you gotta build a team around you. You can't do it all on your own, and you gotta trust people to represent you and to speak for you.
And have I been disappointed a few times, but I've also been amazed. By some people that have been with me over a decade and have grown with my company. I have two people with me that have been with me over 10 years. One is my chief technical officer, another one's my floor manager. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
I could bring someone in with 10 times the amount of experience, no way these people wore my stripes. They walked with me, they know my culture. I will allow them to learn, facilitate their on the job training. As long as it takes, I'll bringing specialists for the it depart. But there's no way I'm gonna bring in a, a, a general manager or supervisor from another call center, no way they need to earn their stripes.
They need to work with me for a little while and have the respect of the agents. If not, it's just definitely not gonna work out. And have I said, we experienced that never. I never brought in an outside supervisor. Everything is always promoted from within that is that, and it's the only way to go, because especially if you've got a unique.
Because you're gonna have somebody that comes in that is, comes from a different style of culture, and they're going to try and change that culture that has been so successful. And that would you you'd probably have a, like twenty two hundred and eighty nine people at your house the day after you hired that guy.
saying, get rid of that guy. We can do, you know, it, it it's, it's just amazing. So. I Richard, I really appreciate your time today and it's, it's been awesome. And I gotta, I gotta tell you I'm my team is growing as well. Mm-hmm and I I've got a, uh, a young lady that we just, that we just hired. She's a, an assistant she's just dynamite and you're right.
You have to have the right people and slow and steady. So, um, what is her name? Your new assistant. Her name is de. Well, Demi's getting a positive escalation, cuz I'm sure she's doing an excellent job. Oh, she's fabulous. As a matter of fact, the ending that you're about to, uh, um, watch she did yesterday and Demi.
All right. She's she's. She's awesome. So, and we, we appreciate having her and I, I subscribe to your philosophy of management and management style and company culture and philosophy. I, I, I tell you, I wish I would be sitting at, if we were in the same room, I'd be sitting at your feet. We'd be high fiving, each other, and telling each other how great we are.
But my good friend water seeks its own level. That's why, when I first started watching your podcast, it inspired me enough to write. Here we are. And mind you, this, there were a couple times back and forth because of scheduling conflicts and stuff. It was a mutual goal of ours was to get on a show together and to share ideas.
And we fulfilled that today. And so I am very humble and I'm very thankful for your time and your audience is time as well. We will do this again. Oh yeah, because we, we got more to say and I sounds more, I really, I really appreciate. You you coming here and again, Richard blank has been our guest go to Costa Rica, call center.com.
If you need remote services, he can provide you with all kinds of stuff. So it's just, I so much that, that I can't, I can't describe it all. So it's just really good. And by the way, thank you. You, you watched some of my, some of my other podcasts. You're good. You're addicting. And I can't wait to put this episode on my Facebook page with 98,000 Ticos that are gonna love to meet you.
I've I'm humbled. Thank you so much. I, I, I really appreciate the time that you've spent with me and the, and thank God. There are people out there like you, that's all. I gotta say you too. Powell. That's why we're together. And we're gonna keep on grow. Absolutely. And thank you, Richard, and stay right where you are.
I've gotta do this and I'll be right back. Hey, thanks for enjoying this episode all the way to the end. Please give us a like, and subscribe to this channel. This has been a production of positive talk radio.net. Please visit our website, oddly name positive talk, radio.net for more details about us and our mission, which is to provide great positive programming designed to inspire us.
I'm Kevin McDonald's and I'm proud of these shows. And I truly hope that you'll like them and share them with friends and family. So on behalf of our entire team, remember be kind to one another because each other's always.
Positive Talk Radio has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding taking a chance by moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Kevin McDonald discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
Positive Talk Radio with Kevin McDonald
"Evolving Ideas One Conversation At A Time"
Positive Talk Radio podcast was originally started in 2003 by Kevin McDonald and friends on KKNW 1150 AM in Seattle with great guests, dynamic stories and interviews, plus new thoughts on a wide range of topics. The concept is to provide positive informative content designed to educate, entertain, empower and inspire all who listen Our content includes positive thoughts and idea's and is truly unique in the podcast industry and now again on KKNW 1150 AM on Monday's at 9 and Wednesdays at 4 pm pacific.
Kevin McDonald - Creator and Host. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington. This jovial fun loving man experienced life in a big way from star athlete, to actor, Voice Actor, Restaurateur, Sales and Sales Management, Transit Operator, Audio Producer, Talk Show Host, Creative Consultant, Motivational Leader and current podcast creator. (My Independence Report) Who’s mission is to Declare Our Freedom From Hate, Division and Fear, featuring positive motivational guest, music interviews and fun episodes. KM Media.pro is the parent site for, Positive Talk Radio. We are a live podcast/ Video cast that focuses on todays life challenges. In addition we are able to produce audio/ video products for other companies and people looking to find a voice in the crowded world of podcast journalism
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XO0R1aN1WU
https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/
https://positivetalkradio.podbean.com/e/richard-blank-ceo-and-amazingly-gifted-business-man/
https://www.positivetalkradio.net/richard-blank-ceo-and-amazingly-gifted-business-man/
https://www.positivetalkradio.net/191-richard-blank-chief-executive-officer/
https://www.positivetalkradio.net/191-richard-blank-chief-executive-officer/
https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=1736657096686275
https://www.positivetalkradio.net/guests/richard-blank/
https://www.positivetalkradio.net/208-richard-blank-ceo-of-costa-ricas-call-center/
https://www.positivetalkradio.net/160-richard-blank-ceo-and-amazingly-gifted-business-man/
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/positive-talk-radio-3982674/episodes/richard-blank-ceo-and-amazingl-141119081
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-positive-talk-radio-87062639/episode/richard-blank-ceo-of-costa-ricas-100280727/
Dave Lorenzo: Where I live in Miami is I, I live, uh, probably 15, not even maybe 10 miles. The Western border of Miami-Dade county, uh, you know, heading toward the Western part of Florida. And this particular area is, uh, was settled by, uh, a lot of Cubans. So when we go to the supermarket, where in my neighborhood, we, more than likely we speak Spanish.
Dave Lorenzo: Um, when we go to get our car washed, we speak Spanish. When we, uh, go to the doctor's office and the, and the, the receptionist greets us, she'll greet us in Spanish. She speaks English in Spanish, but it's just the, it's the dominant language here in, in my neighborhood. Now, when you get toward the toward Miami beach, It's a tourist area.
Dave Lorenzo: So people there will, you know, the default there will be English, but the, the specific reason that my family and I moved to this part of Florida is because we wanted a, a culturally diverse experience for our kids. My kids go to a bilingual school. They speak English half the day. They speak Spanish half the day.
Dave Lorenzo: They speak Spanish with, um, their grandmother on my wife's side, they speak English with my parents and they have tested out. My son is in seventh grade. He's tested out of high school Spanish. My daughter is two years behind him. She's tested out of high school, Spanish. So they're taking other languages now in school.
Dave Lorenzo: My, my point about that. We were kind of forward thinking and we, we understand the global nature of the workforce today. And I think 20 years ago, when I visited Costa Rica, it was like a novelty to offshore your call center. Now, I think nobody, nobody would even think twice. And in fact, you may have people in Texas who have a heavier, uh, you know, who have a heavier accent than people in Costa Rica.
Dave Lorenzo: So I don't think it makes any difference today. I don't think people would be put off in any way, as long as they can get the level of service that they're accustomed to Richard. But before we get into the details of all the types of services you provide and. Do that? Tell us your story. How did you come to you now?
Dave Lorenzo: You've been in Costa Rica for 20 plus years. How did you come to be in Costa Rica in the first place?
Richard Blank: Well, my story began in Northeast Philadelphia. When I graduated Abington high school, you were very fortunate. Uh, Dave, because in my family, my grandparents were speaking Romanian, Russian, Polish, and German.
Richard Blank: And so I'm the first person in my family that decided that Spanish should be my major. all of my friends were going to Ivy league and they were studying law in medicine and architecture engineering, or going into their family's business. I chose to double down on languages and go to the university of Arizona.
Richard Blank: I chose a communication major, which made it a lot of fun for those five years, but I also realized that I could pick up public speaking skills, rhetoric skills, and nonverbal communication, micro expression, reading. I was able to get an internship at Telemundo. Jake home was kind enough to give me in 1995 and 96, my senior and super senior year, I worked for promotions and public relations at Telemundo and Tucson there.
Richard Blank: I was able to meet, and this is dating myself gentleman by the name of Pedro SEK and Miguel Kitana. One was in charge of the news out of Los Angeles. And the other had the main talk show in Miami, across from Christina, from uni. . And so imagine a 22 year old boy that is doing public speaking events with these players, these professional men that have made it and have taken the time to mold my confidence and to give me the self-assurance to stand in front of 5,000 people at a Tucson Toro's baseball game and do a Halina Cantina Chile in contest.
Richard Blank: And so given these opportunities that a young man, it molded my confidence that I could do. and I knew that I could do it in two languages. And so postgrad, I landed a job that was for the importers of Corona beer. So I worked that in the Southwest of the United States and that was incredible. And when I was 27, I had the opportunity to move to Costa Rica for a couple months to do some training at a friend of mine, from college, his call center.
Richard Blank: And as you know, when you fly here and you're here, you fall in love with Costa Rica. So everything of mine got put in storage. If you can get past your parents, guilt, Dave, you can live anywhere in the world. And I decided to take a chance. I worked at my friend's call center for four years, and this was back in the day when we were making calls with Cisco phones and printouts of Excel sheets with highlighter pens.
Richard Blank: And it was a young environment. It was a fun environment, a bilingual environment of, of artists, of speech. And I got to see the highs and the lows and the gripes and the successes of it. But. Between me and you. I also saw areas of improvement and the areas of improvement that I saw the most was how people are treated.
Richard Blank: Not saying my friend didn't do a good job, an amazing job, but a lot of people felt like numbers, where they felt like robots. And my other friends and supervisors from other call centers tell me that sometimes agents are not properly onboarded or they're not prepared, or the S scripts are shody. With spelling in grammar mistakes, and maybe some over aggressive language that you would see in a Glen Gary boiler room Wolf of wall street movie, that might be completely out of character for somebody here because we're, we're in a very strict Catholic country, Dave and these young men and women have to go home and tell their parents what they do for a living.
Richard Blank: So we are extremely selective of the campaigns that come in. Not, not only can I fulfill your needs, but I gotta make sure I don't have an attrition. And I gotta make sure that the, that the agents that come in, that we invest in that are able to stay here and build upon that. So we just don't waste that.
Richard Blank: And so my thoughts about how I got here, you don't say you're gonna be a call center CEO for a major in college, or when you're seven years old, you tell that to your mother, but I definitely knew this. I was the only one out of my group of friends that could speak Spanish. And not only that, but every job I had, I was the one that could go out to the Southwest Phoenix when I was selling telecommunications and sell a T1 to somebody and translate it for my supervisor.
Richard Blank: And I knew I had something that was different and it was wonderful for me cuz I enjoyed it and that I was embraced. I might had a grammar mistake in my subjunctive tense, but people would invite me in correct me and feed me and then recommend me to 10 of their. So why do you think that every environment that I was in when I was able to make these calls in Spanish, that I ran the board, I could do it in English and I did, but I also did it in Spanish.
Richard Blank: I could double gun it. I did two boards, English and Spanish. My point being is that you can show this sort of the first impression, respect Dave, when not only are you bilingual, but so am I, and we're doing this without even knowing each other. It. And so it really assisted me in having these sort of engagements and finding a lot of these things in common and really reduced any sort of defense or anger or setting a tone of aggression that that was eliminated immediately when I knew exactly what to say.
Richard Blank: And, and these are gonna be some of the additional selling techniques we'll talk about later and stuff. But my friend, I just wanted to discuss with you the ethics.. Of how I am and how I was raised. I'm when someone calls me a salesman and I take that as a compliment, I might look and sound like one, but Dave, I'm an educator.
Richard Blank: I don't ever force a hand from an educated point of view. My clients, my agents, my friends, and anyone I relate to then makes a decision. And I feel that if given the chance to explain how I feel and to answer their questions, everybody can leave with something on the. I, I think it's a wonderful way to start relationships.
Inside BS Show has accepted my invitation to join your audience for a solid discussion regarding taking a chance by moving abroad and starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica. Dave Lorenzo discusses with Richard advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation and phonetic micro expression reading.
Richard’s journey in the call center space is filled with twists and turns. When he was 27 years old, he relocated to Costa Rica to train employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking style backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 bilingual telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique Rockola Jukeboxes in Central America making gamification a strong part of CCC culture.Richard Blank is the Chief Executive Officer for Costa Rica’s Call Center since 2008.
Mr. Richard Blank holds a bachelors degree in Communication and Spanish from the University of Arizona and a certificate of language proficiency from the University of Sevilla, Spain. A Keynote speaker for Philadelphia's Abington High School 68th National Honors Society induction ceremony. Giving back to Abington Senior High School is very important to Mr. Blank. As such, he endows a scholarship each year for students that plan on majoring in a world language at the university level.
Costa Rica’s Call Center (CCC) is a state of the art BPO telemarketing outsource company located in the capital city of San Jose, Costa Rica. Our main focus has been, and will always be to personally train each and every Central America call center agent so that we may offer the highest quality of outbound and inbound telemarketing solutions and bilingual customer service to small and medium sized international companies, entrepreneurs as well as fortune 500 companies.
We encourage you to visit one of our call centers on your next personal vacation or business trip to Central America’s paradise, Costa Rica. While you are here, we would recommend taking an extra day of your trip to visit breathtaking virgin beaches, play golf next to the ocean, try your luck at deep sea fishing, explore tropical jungles, climb volcanos or just relax in natural hot springs. Come and see for yourself why call center outsourcing in Costa Rica is a perfect solution for your growing company and a powerhouse in the BPO industry.
https://youtu.be/dbAl7gwXUEA
https://getinsidebs.com/how-to-build-a-world-class-call-center-richard-blank-show-95/
https://player.fm/series/inside-bs-with-dave-lorenzo/how-to-build-a-world-class-call-center-richard-blank-show-95
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/inside-bs-with/how-to-build-a-world-class-y0jPVSM64FX/
https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/how-to-build-a-world-class-call-center-richard-blank-show-95/id1506769228?i=1000567719961
https://www.audible.com/pd/How-to-Build-a-World-Class-Call-Center-Richard-Blank-Show-95-Podcast/B0B54HPXGK?ref=a_pd_Inside_c1_lAsin_1_7
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0lGBT4kd7026zRzP3C8mlu
https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/Inside-BS-with-Dave-Lorenzo-p1258770/?topicId=173106229
https://www.ivoox.com/en/how-to-build-a-world-class-call-center-audios-mp3_rf_88970286_1.html
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