The Power of Pausing for Better Decisions

The Business Vitality Podcast. Starting With A Clean Slate with Costa Rica's Call Center, Richard Blank. Episode 137 Catherine Cantey’s goal is to partner with individuals and teams to create positive and measurable change. She brings more than 20 years of professional experience in sales, consulting, and coaching with focus on results. Some of her experiences include strategic planning with board and leadership teams, training, and speaking. Her ability to facilitate, collaborate and share ideas has earned her exceeding results. Business Vitality® and the Business Vitality® podcast are owned by Cantey Advisors. Your host, Catherine Cantey talks with Founder, Richard Blank, of Costa Rica's Call Center. Richard started his journey at 27 years old teaching English at his friend's call center. It wasn't long before he built his own call center company, and now shares with us his experience with providing the best employee experience, delegating, and so much more. Business Vitality podcast has accepted Richard Blank's invitation to join the audience for a solid discussion regarding starting a company from scratch in Costa Rica as an expat. Topics include: advanced telemarketing strategy, conflict management, interpersonal soft skills, customer support, rhetoric, gamification, employee motivation, phonetic micro expression reading. Effective Communication and Vocabulary Sensitivity Sure, regardless if it's a first time connection or the person you've known your entire life, the best bit of advice that I could do would be more for conflict management and strategy. We can always go into other topics later, but this is probably the starting point for me. It's better defense than offense. I believe in two ears, one mouth, double listening to one speech. You can still participate in the conversation, but there's some sort of hedging that you can do in order to let you lead and I could still dance with it. When you confirm things with people, they don't need to repeat it. So there's no rabbit holes. It shows active listening. Once again, you can refer to yourself possibly in third person or even mentioning things that could be done together just to get their attention again, to show that you are seeing a progression or something that is moving forward. Vocabulary is the most sensitive topic. And I always believe that a word like help, as simple as it sounds, could also provoke emotion or just knock you off. That could be the last straw. From Employee to Owner: A Journey of Empathy and Understanding Well, yeah, the best podcast. What an amazing question. Let me cut the pizza, okay? Because there's about four or five nice slices there. Let me go back to August of 2000. When I was 27 years old, I came to Costa Rica for only two months to work at my friend's call center who wanted me to teach English. I took this opportunity to stay and to learn the business. So I did not start at a C level. In fact, I wasn't even at manager supervisor level. I was with the people. I might have been friends with the owner, but I was with the proletariat with thousands of call center agents. So I would break bread with them, sit in the cubicles with them. And throughout those years, I learned every department of a call center, minus the C-suite. But you saw the good and the bad, the happy and the sad. And for me, I cracked a couple of codes in regards to empathy and making sure these individuals have their dignity and not to feel like a number and expendable. So I went from just being an employee at my friend's center to now owning a call center. Inspiring Life Advice Fortune favors the brave because if you can get past your parents' guilt, you can live anywhere in the world. That's number one. And number two, there's a lot of naysayers and grave believers out there. And these are the people that love you, but they may not understand you. And as long as you're willing to die with your boots on, and you have a certain vision quest, a certain destiny that you feel you need to do while still being responsible with your family and your health, then by all means, live your life because you only get 100 years. Live Bravely and Stay True to Yourself Richard, this is fantastic. Okay, so as we're kind of wrapping up, can you give maybe your best one or two pieces of advice? You have so much to offer. Is there even a way to give one or two pieces? Sure. Fortune favors the brave because if you can get past your parents' guilt, you can live anywhere in the world. That's number one. And number two, there's a lot of naysayers and grave believers out there. And these are the people that love you, but they may not understand you. And as long as you're willing to die with your boots on, and you have a certain vision quest, a certain destiny that you feel you need to do while still being responsible with your family and your health, then by all means, live your life because you only get 100 years. And the greatest thing you could do is look at yourself in the mirror and be very pleased that you were true to yourself when you were making these dreams and these promises back in the day. You didn't quit 80% in. And so that, my friend, if I could wrap it up in a nutshell, would be my best advice. And Captain, thank you so much for this time today. I really enjoyed our conversation. Specific Recognition in Leadership When it comes to the quality control, just circling back, if I pull a phone call from you and I walk by, I go, Hey, Karen, Catherine, you're doing a great job. You're like, okay, great. Catherine, last Thursday, when you spoke to Mrs. Jones for 12 minutes, turned it around, helped her out. The grandson came on and said, you were the greatest customer support representative. She just wrote into the company. I mean, doesn't that show that I'm legitimately not just saying good job, Catherine. I specifically mentioned exactly the kind of work that you've done. And I will try to do that. Not good job, Ace and Champ and Chief. I will specifically talk about a time that you rocked and I'll let you know why you were the greatest ever. And they go, wow, you really do listen, Richard, you really do. And I go, of course I do. Of course I do. And so for your supervisors, why don't you look at one of their plays, get the real detail of how they did it. That's when you give the high five in front of everybody. and letting them know why they're the chain. And then you start nicknaming them things, you know, the time that they won, when they had a coming of age moment. That's where you build the environment. You start becoming Maverick and Iceman. That's how you build things there. The Importance of Thinking Outside the Box These are all of the best practices of leaders and opportunities that have been coming up decade after decade. And a lot of this stuff has been in practice for more than 20 years, 30 years and beyond. And what we're learning is a lot of these folks that are remaining vital in business today are having to think differently. And to share a quote from one of my CEOs that I've worked with in the past, he told me all day long he can hire folks, but what he needs more of are people who think outside the box. The Power of Clarity Breaks I love what you said about self-reflection and that being one of the best learnings that we can have is taking that time to pause and reflect. And I very often call it clarity breaks. And I emphasize to my clients to just take, in the beginning, I said, just take five minutes. And they're like, five minutes? It's five minutes to do what? I said, nothing. Just sit there and just take five minutes. They're like, do you know how long that takes? It's like, it's five minutes out of your entire day. And then if they do try it, they come back and they actually share that this is working and they can actually gain thought and traction and planning. And there's just this kind of aha moment that they're starting to experience. I'm like, okay, if you can do five, what can you do next month? And just keep challenging them. To be able to take that time and have that self-reflection and allow themselves to grow and not to constantly respond, respond, respond, react, react, react, because I think we have too much of that out there. The Power of Pausing for Better Decisions If there is no time sensitivity, and you want to say something, if you're allowed to sleep on it, walk away from it, write a draft, and then the following day decide to send it or make that phone call, do it. Because if you don't need to make a decision right, right, right, right now, even though they might be offended you didn't respond, the best thing to do is absorb it, take it, take it, When you have a moment to be able to walk away, to separate it, prioritize it, get rid of the fat because why do we want to go there? Address what needs to be addressed, figure out a way in a calm and cool way to reiterate it, to make your point because you might've overextended or not done enough in the moment. And then as generals do with Intel, they bring it back. And even Sherlock Holmes, he needed clues to solve the case. Give me a little bit of Intel. Let me process it, sleep on it, eat on it, work out on it, play pinball on it, drive to work in the convertible on it. And then when I'm at the office, forget about it. I'm going to solve this thing before my first cup of coffee. And that would be much more effective for me than getting Philadelphia angry yesterday and saying something that I would be regretting. https://youtu.be/tIp0F9mZlB4 https://youtu.be/3Xe4s6dKMnQ https://youtu.be/nkPtgFqvNgU https://youtu.be/sf1i0waKNts https://youtu.be/4RROnc7d5Vs https://youtu.be/YV7xswEQ3wc https://youtu.be/RLBZu62iy0Q https://youtu.be/WLDVNmjH5a4 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. 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. https://costaricascallcenter.com/en/outbound-bpo-campaigns/ #RichardBlank #CostaRica #CallCenter #Outsourcing #Telemarketing #BPO #Sales #Entrepreneur #B2B #Business #Podcast #Leadgeneration #Appointmentsetting #businessvitality