CallTalk™ Radio

Answering services have been around for 100 years. But times are changing, and today, customers want to text companies. Businesses are text-enabling their business lines every day. But often, they’re too busy to respond to customers themselves. Join Bruce Belfiore as he interviews Gary Pudles about how easy it is to make your business “textable,” as well as being the first answering provider with on-demand live agents to respond to texts and chats when companies can’t.

 

With Guest Gary Pudles, President & CEO of AnswerNet.

Gary founded AnswerNet in 1998.

He’s a recipient of the prestigious "Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year" award for business service providers, and was named a 2022 “Philadelphia Titan 100,” for CEOs who demonstrate exceptional leadership, vision, passion, and influence in their field.

Also in 2022, Inc. Magazine named AnswerNet a “2022 Inc. Power Partner” in telecommunications.

Hiring agents has become more difficult and managers are looking for new ideas and approaches to increase success.  Join Bruce Belfiore as he interviews Ravin Shah about today's market for contact center agents - and how to win with top candidates using a structured, speedy methodology. 

 

Ravin Shah is the Founder & CEO of Hellohire, a software platform that helps contact centers hire the best agents faster, while reducing recruiting time and costs. Ravin is a serial tech entrepreneur on a mission to expedite and humanize the hiring process

Join Bruce Belfiore for the first CallTalk episode of 2023, with the theme "Maximizing the Human in the Call Center".  He will be interviewing Nicholas MacDonald, director of Customer Experience at C-Lect Consulting.  Nicholas will draw from a career in contact center leadership at Machias Savings Bank in Maine, where he put employee culture first, fostering employee engagement and teamwork that empowered his colleagues to provide excellent customer experiences.  He is a believer in the power of incremental changes, and will share his approach and results.

 

Air Date: Wednesday, January 4, 2023

Host: Bruce Belfiore | CEO & Senior Research Analyst | BenchmarkPortal

Guest Speaker: Nicholas MacDonald

Season: 14 | Episode Number: 1

 

Guest: Nicholas MacDonald

Director of CX at C-Lect consulting, Nicholas MacDonald transferred from a career in contact center leadership for Machias Savings Bank in Maine where he fostered a culture built on employee empowerment and growth, allowing agents to develop exceptional experiences for themselves and for customers. Nicholas will share insights from projects that brought significant efficiency gain and customer experience improvement, including implementing a unified contact center solution, Voice Authentication, and Workforce Management. He is a national public speaker in Customer Experience and coaches leaders to grow their teams  He also owns and operates a small goat dairy farm and spends his downtime training his young Quarter Horse. Nicholas holds his B.A. and MBA from Ashford University.

Join Bruce Belfiore as he interviews industry veteran Mark Brody about getting your center "unstuck" by supporting your front line agents - - and making them stars. Providing the right technology, training and leadership, combined with dedication to data-driven decision making will smooth the path to better performance. You will take away insights into CX, AX, VOC from an expert in contact center transformation."   - - or something like that

 

Guest: Mark Brody

Mark Brody has worked for and with several industry leaders during his 32-year Contact Center career. His consultancy, Brohawk Solutions, LLC, was born out of Mark’s passion to help organizations become more effective and efficient through understanding how their people, processes, and technology impact the employee experience and ultimately the customer experience.

In Mark’s spare time, he currently leads The Austin Contact Center Alliance and works with The United Way of Greater Austin’s Community Impact Council. Mark is a graduate of The University of Kansas and currently resides in Round Rock, TX with his wife, daughter, and two dogs. He is a relatively new hacker in the world of golf and is an avid Jayhawk Basketball and New England sports fan.

This episode of CallTalk will have Keith Fiveson talk to Bruce Belfiore about boosting your customer experience and employee engagement using leadership techniques he has developed over a lifetime of experience. Use these techniques to empower greater resilience and create positive experiences using breathwork approaches based on science.

 

CallTalk is a monthly internet radio program for the customer service industry featuring the most innovative managers and thought leaders in the customer contact field, interviewed by BenchmarkPortal CEO, Bruce Belfiore. Broadcast monthly, directly over the Internet to your desktop, CallTalk covers hot topics that impact today's call center. CallTalk airs without the participation of vendors so that topics will be free from their influence and guided by the needs of its listeners. If you have a topic you would like us to cover, send it to [email protected].

Managing work-at-home agents has moved from pandemic emergency mode to representing a long-term challenge for most contact center managers. This episode of CallTalk will focus on tips and best practices that you can use immediately to improve performance. Bruce Belfiore interviews Marcia Presberry and Shannon Smith of National General for a half hour of valuable insights.

We have dedicated courses and CallTalk episodes on coaching for agents - an important topic indeed. However, contact center managers need coaching as well - - coaching that may go beyond the training curricula that are in the market. Tune in to this episode of CallTalk for some real insights on how you, as a manager, can benefit from coaching.  

Guest: Mitchell Levy | Author, Speaker, Global Credibility Expert

Global Credibility Expert Mitchell Levy is a 2x TEDx speaker and international bestselling author of over 60 books. After interviewing 500 thought leaders on credibility, he created the Credibility Nation community, published a 5-country international bestselling book, delivered a TEDx, created courses, and is working on getting the definition of credibility rewritten in the dictionary. He's an accomplished Entrepreneur who has created twenty businesses in Silicon Valley including four publishing companies that have published over 750 books. He's provided strategic consulting to hundreds of companies and has been the chairman of a board of a NASDAQ-listed company. Mitchell has been happily married for thirty-one years and prior to covid-19, regularly spent four weeks a year in Europe with family and friends.

A place For Professionals Who Want to Be Seen as Credible

The keys to success and happiness in the global village are credibility and relationships. Since technology has enabled us to connect with more people, how we live and do business can easily be seen. Thus, presenting ourselves as credibly as we can allows others to want to get to know, like, and trust us.

           Credibility Nation is The go-to community to learn/grow your credibility with the "right" people on a similar journey.

Imagine coming to a place where you can immediately know, like, and trust

those around you.

Where you can be safe in an environment where others want to support you.

This is Credibility Nation.

            All those in Credibility Nation live by the following pledge:

           "I pledge to live credibly every day without hate in my life. I strive to be a good human and make this a better planet for myself, my family, and for other people’s families             in this generation and the next."

A big part of credibility is clarity.

How do you answer the question when someone asks, “What do you do?”

Does it take you five or ten minutes to answer?

In a world where we're inundated with content, somebody who takes ten or twenty minutes to answer

this simple question may not be considered someone who is likeable or trustworthy.

If this is you, you need CredClarity.

Video Link: Why You Matter as a ​C​ustomer ​S​ervice ​P​rofessional https://youtu.be/CBOALI_98uc

An experience guarantee goes beyond merely warrantying a product against defects. It encompasses the entire customer journey to promise an experience that never falls short of expectations.

Customer loyalty skyrockets when people trust your brand, product, or service. That trust is earned not by the occasionally wow moment, but by being remarkably consistent.

…And that’s why we wanted to talk more about how to guarantee an amazing customer experience, and we have brought in an expert on the topic for you, Jeff Toister, author of The Guaranteed Customer Experience. 

 

Guest Jeff Toister:

Jeff Toister is an author, consultant, and trainer who helps companies develop customer-focused cultures.

He's written four books including The Guaranteed Customer Experience. Thousands of customer service professionals around the world subscribe to Jeff's Customer Service Tip of the Week email. More than 500,000 people on six continents have taken one of his video-based training courses on LinkedIn Learning.

Jeff has been recognized as a top influencer by many organizations:

Top 30 customer service professional in the world (Global Gurus)Top customer experience influencer (Unymira and Panviva)Top contact center influencer (ICMI and ProcedureFlow)

The pandemic has intensified many of the challenges facing contact center managers.  Join Bruce Belfiore as he interviews Bob Kobek of Mobius SVP for a lively episode of CallTalk centered on issues of worker recruitment and attrition and other remote management challenges in this new age of at-home workforces.  

 

Guest: Robert Kobek | CustomerCount

Prior to forming Mobius Vendor Partners in October of 1999, Mr. Kobek spent more than 30 years in the direct marketing industry and government. Specializing in the design, implementation and marketing of products and services, Bob has designed more than 150 outbound telemarketing, inbound customer service and order processing operations and interactive information systems. In 2007 Bob and Mobius launched CustomerCount℠, a cloud-based survey solution providing intuitive real-time reporting, designed for the contacy center industry. Mr. Kobek is a member of the American Resort Development Association and sits on numerous committees. He is a board member of PACE and serves as the chair of the Government Affairs committee. He attended Holy Cross College at Notre Dame, Indiana and Indiana University.