FIRST CONTACT NOBEL BIZ PODCAST RICHARD BLANK TELEMARKETING CALL CENTER GUEST

⁣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.


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.

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

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