Costa Rica: A Call Center Powerhouse

The Inside BS Show by Dave Lorenzo interviews Entrepreneur Richard Blank. The owner of a call center in Costa Rica. How to Build a World Class Call Center | Richard Blank | Show 95 description On this episode of the Inside BS Show, Dave Lorenzo interviews Richard Blank, the owner of a call center in Costa Rica. 00:00 How to Build a World-Class Call Center 01:02 What are the unique qualities of Costa Rica? 03:01 How well does the English accent of Costa Ricans sound? 05:06 Why did Dave's family choose to relocate to Miami? 07:19 Richard's journey to Costa Rica 13:25 What are the benefits of people speaking English and Spanish in the business world? 18:47 What services does Richard's Costa Rica Call Center offer? 24:33 What are the business procedures Richard uses in Costa Rica for clients in America? Costa Rica: A Call Center Powerhouse Well, not only are we a powerhouse in the call center industry, but we have an incredible labor force. We have a 95% literacy rate here, so there's no standing army. All that money was put back into education. We have the best infrastructure in Central America. We are below Nicaragua, north of Panama... have family in the United States, or there's a lot of expatriates that live here, including myself as an expatriate for the last 21 years. Inside BS Show 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. 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. Impact of Language Skills on KPI It's very interesting you bring that up because the certain key performance indicator, the KPI, is talk time and also conversion ratios. There's two metrics that are increased by at least 20%. When you're on a phone speaking in Spanish with a client, The call goes longer. They make less calls that day, but their conversion ratio is higher. Obviously, it's their native tongue. Or, as you were mentioning about certain dichos and certain mannerisms that people use, they might be able to connect better with somebody on the phone speaking Spanish. I almost see it as like Popeye with spinach. Once they switch over to Spanish, all of a sudden they're calling you Don David or Don Ricardo Perseverance and Values And if anything of nothing, taking that away today is that if you... If you reject more than you accept, if you stand tall to your beliefs and you do things to make your great-grandparents proud, you're going to preserve. You're going to last. You'll have the endurance. You'll make it through the tough times. Because those are the times you look in the mirror and you ask yourself, is this still worth it? Well, it is worth it. I have a luxury trade. This should have never happened. The fact that I'm here in Costa Rica for 21 years and I have a company with my wife after 14 years, it's a long shot from Northeast Philadelphia. So I smile every day. Is It Still Worth It? Because those are the times you look in the mirror and you ask yourself, is this still worth it? Well, it is worth it. I have a luxury trade. This should have never happened. The fact that I'm here in Costa Rica for 21 years and I have a company with my wife after 14 years, it's a long shot from Northeast Philadelphia. So I smile every day. I've learned to do that Sales as Education and Ethics My friend, I just wanted to discuss with you the ethics of how I am and how I was raised. 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. 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 table. I think it's a wonderful way to start relationships Ethics of Phone Communication I always believe that lying on the phone is not ethical. I'm not saying I'm lying, and I'm not saying that we're being slick. There's nothing wrong with being clever. And as long as you say a person's name a certain way, or a company's name a certain way with your anonymity, they can kind of maybe reduce the fact that you're a telemarketer or you're selling something and you make a different sort of first impression approach. Detailed Exploration of Call Center Techniques So before we went to that break, I asked you to think of a case study for us. Have you come up with one? I have. In fact, I can make it easy for you. I could do it across all verticals. How does that sound? So it applies to every account that I have. I always have an answer for that. A couple things we can do. The first thing is there are certain words that you have because the vowels in Spanish and English could give away. So we write certain words out phonetically for them. Even though they need to know how to spell it properly, that can eliminate any sort of confusion or any sort of guessing. The second thing is, let's say for an example that we're representing a company that's out of Chicago in a certain suburbs. What we like to do with a lot of the times is just take a Google map right around the block. And just to see the local pizza parlors, the parks, the churches, and what's going on around there. So instead of just giving a specific direction, we can talk about Mike's Pizza, which everybody knows more than anything. And finally, we have to ensure that if people do follow up or even subcategory questions, that we need to have every single sort of vocabulary for that account. Doesn't mean that we need to have it memorized, but we should have a glossary of terms. So just if something comes up, we're skilled enough to say that's an excellent question, Dave, and we could look it up while we're answering that question for you. Many people are capable of doing that. So as long as we're on a level playing field and we're given all the resources to, as you say, make it assume like we're in the United States and we know what the shore is and cheese fries and things like that, then maybe tell us a couple more local flavors that we have or things that we should be aware of.