During COVID-19, Costa Rica's Call Center's CEO, Richard Blank managed to keep having succ

⁣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.

So I learned a very big lesson with NobelBiz as well. I also believe that a positive verbal escalation is important. That’s why in the beginning of the podcast, I made sure that everybody involved was thanked and, you know, once again writing it, I think that would separate you from any other company that’s contacting that individual.

And they will see how you work prior to a contract. So those are the sort of initial soft skills that I would talk about in let’s say, the first 15 seconds of a call, especially when you have your anonymity in the beginning, and you say the name of the company in a certain way that sounds great, you can almost get somebody out of that.

The balance of a phone call

I also talked about a certain sort of balance in the call. And I follow through with phonetics, that simple form of micro expression reading, you can usually read somebody’s body language. So since we don’t have the luxury of sight here, I decided that our other senses should be expanded. I believe that we should expand our rhetoric regarding our descriptions. And I also think our hearing should be expanded five times.

On the phone, you can’t taste, touch or smell. So once again, you’re in a controlled environment, it should be expanded, you just know how to tap into it. So this is the code that I think I cracked after 21 years in this industry. I have a phonetic lesson that I would like to share with you, one that can be manipulated, but then I have the ultimate lesson that I think is indisputable.

Phonetics: tone, rate, pitch, duration

Let’s begin with phonetics. The first four sections of phonetics are tone, rate, pitch, and duration.

The tone represents your emotion. In my opinion, it should always be confident and empathetic, like a doctor, like a lawyer or your caring parent that will tell you that everything is going to be okay. In focus groups studies, you need a consistent variable to see inconsistencies, I believe that your tone should always be confident and empathetic. You should match the client when they’re like that, but don’t match them if they’re in a bad mood, they’re angry or pessimistic.

Now here’s the part where you’d be able to mirror image your client I believe. And I brought some props to a party like this, my third grade teacher be proud, I gave you a simple XY chart, because this is how we’re going to be working here.

Your pitch here represent your speaking level. And you could be screaming at me, you could be whispering. Your rate here is how fast you speak and how slow you speak. And you can generally, it’s like eighth grade pre-algebra.

You can control your tone, you can control your pitch and your rate of speech. The one thing I believe subconsciously that you cannot control consistently is your answering speed.

And consistently with the work that I’m doing on the CRM, I could be active listening, I could be also typing. But after about three weeks of paying attention to this XY chart that you’re doing to see if there’s a spike or a dip, it makes habit. Why do I do this? Because sometimes you’re not sure when to ask a tie down question. Some people call it a pin down question, a rebuttal, or confirmation question.

The main goal of this Christian, I don’t know this individual with whom i’m speaking. So I’m able to at least adopt, how they might be reacting, and when it would be necessary for me to interject and get some sort of confirmation to move forward.

So I believe that for individuals that are just starting out in telemarketing, or even seasoned professionals. I think you could use this from time to time in your performances, that this will at least give you a focused group controlled study 30 seconds to two minute attention span.

The theory of ‘No, Know, Now’

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