Call Center Culture and The Secret Sauce of a Successful Phone Call, with Richard Blank

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08/04/22

⁣When it comes to call center turnover, Richard Blank (Costa Rica's Call Center) shares insightful advice on how to keep the staff engaged in the industry with the highest attrition - all from a training perspective.
It starts with setting the right mindset and the relationship you have with the agent.
Find out more from our latest podcast episode: Call Center Culture and The Secret Sauce of a Successful Phone Call, with Richard Blank

This is episode 2 of the third season of First Contact. 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 over 5000 employees for one of the larger call centers in San Jose. With a mix of motivational public speaking styles backed by tactful and appropriate rhetoric, Richard shared his knowledge and trained over 10 000 telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique jukeboxes in Central America, making gamification a strong part of CCC’s culture.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro / Richard Blank Presentation
1:35 Fortune Favors the Brave: The beginning of a Call Center Journey
3:14 People and moments that made you start your call center career
5:04 How do you build a call center culture and grow call center agents
08:03 Addressing conflicts within the call center**
10:41 Adequate Training for Omnichannel Personalization
13:54 The Engagement Toolkit to Fight Attrition
17:05 Rhetoric and Phonetic Delivery: The Secret sauce of a Phone Call
26:54 AD
28:54 What Got Taken Away During COVID
32:41 Old School Retro Gaming Turned Into Gamification
38:40 The 30s Rule Technique
42:22 Positive outcomes after Covid
46:36 Keeping up with the team remotely
48:47 Being an agent at the Costa Rica’s Call Center
52:45 Looking forward into 2022
54:42 Ending thoughts

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 over 5000 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 telemarketers. Richard Blank has the largest collection of restored American Pinball machines and antique jukeboxes in Central America, making gamification a strong part of CCC’s culture.

Rhetoric and Phonetic Delivery: The Secret sauce of a Phone Call

Phonetic: a term ‘representing the sounds and other phenomena of speech’ (Merriam Webster Dictionary).

Why is this useful in the realm of call centers? Phonetic is a great contact center tool a fundamental part of good customer service, one that is designed to clarify communication part of a trainer’s toolkit.

Rhetoric: ‘the art of speaking or writing effectively’ (Merriam Webster Dictionary. In combining these two, you get the combination that prove itself to be very helpful in coaching and has a lot more benefits than just clearing up conversations. When a call center agent is paying attention to details, like introductions and descriptions.

Christian: One of the things, Richard, that you’ve said before is about integrating rhetoric and phonetic delivery and trainings, what is the methodology behind that that makes it unique?

Richard: It’s my favorite question and my secret sauce. And since you and I are friends, I’m definitely going to share it with you and your audience.

Positive verbal escalation

So it takes a lot of steps, but I’ll break it out for you simply: I always believe the beginning of a phone call, that somebody can start off the call by introducing themselves with a company name, that individual’s name. And you might say better than either the gate picker or the owner themselves. I also believe in introductions to gatekeepers or filters like Anda for example.

My communication with you was from an email after I listened to so many of your podcast, I was inspired to write you Anda wrote me back. And if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be here today with you. So when people think, well, you probably just got Christian directly. No, no, I most certainly did not. In fact, I communicated with Anda about four times prior to you and I am reaching out on LinkedIn and then meeting today, not like we weren’t excited to meet one another. But once again, there are certain channels and individuals in organizations that are in charge of these things.