Let's Talk About It Podcast by Jeff Arnold. Customer Service with guest Richard Blank. Episode 33.
Episode 33 of Let's Talk About It: Conversations with Industry Shapers is live! Your host, Jeffery Arnold, interviews Richard Blank, CEO and President of Costa Rica's Call Center. From studying at the University of Arizona to building his own business, Richard shares his incredible journey.
He dives into the importance of interpersonal communication, the impact of AI, and the ethics behind client selection. Richard also discusses mentorship, personal growth, and the unique challenges of running a nearshore call center. His story is one of perseverance, adaptability, and ethical success.
Are you an industry shaper? Tune in now to learn from Richard's insights!
Welcome to Let’s Talk About It:
Conversations with Industry Shapers means celebrating your unique contribution to bridging generational divides, mastering the art of the difficult conversations, and demystifying the complexities of the insurance world. We delve into your experiences to share invaluable insights with a community of listeners looking up to you. Your episode is not just a podcast: it's a legacy piece, inspiring current and future generations of leaders
https://youtu.be/DjFgaHg6Dz8
Richard Blank hired bassist Garry Gary Beers of INXS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieGjN5H4xPQ
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Meet Jeff Arnold
I am originally from a small town in Western Kentucky (much smaller than you are thinking).
My family was a combination of Preachers, Farmers, and Career Military with a sprinkling of some new kind of thing called Entrepreneurs.
I am currently married to Laura Lee Arnold and ” YES, I Over Married ” as she is much smarter than I. She is a stay at home Mom (toughest job ever ) and we have four children ranging in age from 26 to 12.If you have children, perhaps yours also live to annoy each other.
In this wonderfully captured moment of sibling bonding, we simply asked my son to watch his sister while we ran an errand. Not content to just have brother and sister bonding time, he chooses to educate her on the different snap chat filters. ( but not really )
My Career in the Insurance Joint Ventures vertical started completely by accident. After serving our wonderful nation in the United States Army, I pursued Drama & Acting and was returning from Hollywood ( North Hollywood NOT The Glamorous Part You Are Thinking About ) to visit my Mom in Tucson Arizona.
I had been doing minor local tv stuff, stand up comedy in different clubs throughout the southwest and a few military base tours. I had zero gigs lined up and needed to ( eat, pay rent, put gas in car, Insert other necessity ). So, like any young man desperate for work, I responded to an ad for Insurance Salesman (It’s cliché I know) in beautiful Tucson Arizona.
From day one of my new career, I was hooked. I could not read enough, learn enough or digest enough about this wonderfully exciting industry you casually refer to as Insurance, but I call giver of life, dream fulfiller and industry of all things sexy, exciting and just plain awesome.With the same missionary zeal of the preachers in my family and the military discipline from other parts of my family I began to tell everyone about Insurance. I also began to apply this crazy theory of Entrepreneurship into insurance and my first joint ventures were born.
Ventures
I have been fortunate to do joint ventures with Banks, Credit Unions, Mortgage Firms, Online Search Engines, Auto Dealerships, Privately Held Money Funds, Publicly Traded Aggregators, and some really neat Reinsurance stuff with billion dollar companies.
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.
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/
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august 13th 2024
Business Ethics and Market Selection
What is the primary, like if you had to do the 80-20, is 80% of your business in the service industry or is it medical? Is it finance? What's kind of your target market for companies? How about this? I'm going to tell you five I don't do. Sportsbooks, casinos, stocks, pharmacies, or sweepstakes. I have nothing against it, but I'm in a very strict Catholic country. So I just want to make sure people can go home and tell their parents what they do for a living. I'm very selective of what comes in. I turn down more than I accept, not because it's gray area or shady, just because maybe their list isn't large enough. I can't work a whole month on 400 leads. If you have nobody in the office to pick up on a transfer, you're not following through. How are we going to do business?
AI's Impact on the Call Center Industry
And you still need that 10% human touch, approach, empathy, relationship to put that ball in the end zone. And so do I think my industry is going to change dramatically? I think 40% of the people are probably going to be replaced with very simple level one and level two AI that will perfect answering, you know, certain questions and doing QA and setting it up for you, teeing it up. But I tell you what, the specialists, the ones that really go above and beyond, the ones that can really be coached and trained, they'll be there. They'll be overseeing those bots that will bring in the leads for them to call to close or to be transferred to. And so, Look for it for appointment setting, lead generation, sales, customer support, back office support, non-voice support.
Mastering the Art of Call Center Communication
And a call center is very interesting. You can learn retention, customer support, sales, onboarding, training, human resources, labor loss, search engine optimization. And so I said, this is very interesting. And as long as I was stimulated and I saw these English second language agents completely engaged on the phone, I don't know, maybe you get the butterflies or you say, wait a second, this looks like wiffle ball to me. I think I can handle this. And so when you get on a phone and you've never been trained before, guess what happens? You don't have bad habits. You could be molded accordingly. Thankfully, I had some excellent mentors that guided me into the structure of a phone call. I then took it into my own. But I saw the results and I understood the play. And I love the fact that strangers are friends you haven't met yet. And if you're eliminating three of your senses, your taste, touch and smell, and you're doing it in controlled environment consistently, your hearing and especially your image streaming, your visual, your metaphysics has to kick in. I mean, who does this? And so if I could master the sight unseen speech and really focus on phonetics, I might be able to crack some code, see some tell signs, and really perfect the beautiful sound of speech.
Cultural Connection Through Classic Movies
I love classic movies. My favorite actor is Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney. I mean, Basil Rathbone, that's my mentor. He was doing stuff in the thirties and forties. So when the client called me and said, Richard, do you know anything about classic movies? Yes. Wiffle ball pitch. Here we go again. I started rattling off all my Alfred Hitchcocks and Steve McQueen's. And I mean, come on, man, I'm all over the place. And the guy's like, man, you know this better than I do. I go, could you imagine how I'm going to be pushing this and selling this? Yeah, absolutely. Getting excited over the spaghetti Westerners of Clint Eastwood. I mean, you've got to be kidding me. These were classics. But I tell you what. One of the greatest things people can do is to watch these movies because if you're speaking, let's say for an example, you're 20 years old now and you wanna call someone like myself a business owner, You should be watching Fast Times at Richmond High and Failure Spielers Day Off. Why? Because that's what I grew up on. That's right. So when you call me up, you go, come on, man. You know Mike DeMone's five-point plan. Or you mentioned Scotty Palmer from the movie Hard Bodies when he talked about the BBD, the bigger, better deal. If you say that to me on a phone call, I have my credit card at the ready. It's yours to lose.
Gratitude and Paying It Forward
I've been very, very fortunate to have made certain high-risk decisions, but they paid off. And so I have enough dinners to eat the rest of my life. And so if I've taken that worry out of the equation, what does have value? Where are your priorities? And I've mentioned it multiple times about paying it forward. You know why, Jeff, my boy? Because if the late principal Norman Schmidt, my dedicated Spanish teacher at Abington, didn't write me that recommendation, they would have not offset my bad grades to get me into Arizona. If I was not given by my cousin Joe this one in a million opportunity to move to Costa Rica, would have never met the girl of my dreams or had this opportunity. So if you think that I'm doing this all on my own, You're out of your mind.