0 (2s):
Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like Being Boss. Today, we're pulling a timeless EOFire classic episode from the archives, and we'll be talking about call center secrets that make you money no matter what business you are in to drop these value bombs. I brought Kent Bickmore into EOFire studios. Kent is an internet marketer. He tried different outsourcing options and they were all disasters to stay in business. He had to redefine the concept of a call center and it's money making role in business. And today Fire Nation, we'll talk about why using scripts make you sound robotic and what to do instead.

0 (42s):
And when people buy from you once they'll feel comfortable buying from you again, if their experience is a good experience, so how to ensure that happens and so much more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors business made simple hosted by Donald Miller, takes the mystery out of growing your business. Recent episodes, like how to attract and retain top talent and how to make more money with your current products are straight fire. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts can say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know.

1 (1m 19s):
What's up Fire Nation. I'm looking forward to talking to you something that most people don't know about me is I was a DJ in college and I, and I, I DJ a lot and I'm a soul funk music geek. I can tell you anything you want to know about soul and funk music in the seventies, eighties through probably today, which is pretty rare for a while.

0 (1m 42s):
Totally. And can't, I feel closer to you already. I mean, besides your impending move to Puerto Rico, I went, my sophomore year of college rolled around, was DJ Dumas for an entire year. I was a DJ on my college as well, although I did top 40 music. So it wasn't nearly as cool, but we'll always have DJ together, brother.

1 (2m 3s):
Yeah, that's crazy. And that's the thing that screwed me up for life because I've never really had a job. And after, you know, I I'd make a lot of money. And after that, I'm like, I can't work for anybody I know.

0 (2m 16s):
That was your entrepreneurial spirit starting right there. And in Fire Nation, speaking of your entrepreneurial spirits, as I mentioned in the intro, we're going to be talking about all of the call center secrets that make you money, no matter what business you are in. So can't just break it down for us. Brother. Why is customer service the most important thing to get right in your business?

1 (2m 40s):
So many calls your customer service number. It's probably the first time they've ever talked to anybody in your company, right? Especially in the, in the online world where I, where a lot of my clients are from. So it's that first impression and that first impression better match what your, your online presence is, right? And so when you, when they call on the phone, most of the time, they're, they're not too happy if they're calling customer service, I'd imagine. And so it's, it's how you talk to that person and how they feel about you. And you're talking, you're talking to each other on the phone and that's what, that's what makes it, that's what makes a difference. Plus it gives you a chance to ups. You know, why it's important for your business.

1 (3m 21s):
It gives you a chance to upsell that customer. You know, that kind of thing. I mean, the first thing we teach our agents to do is to, you know, the only got a little bit of time, maybe 15 seconds or something to turn the call around to where you, you need that call to be. And that's a, that's a super valuable skill. And that's kind of where we, that's how we train our agents. And that's where I think we're a lot different than a lot of the call centers.

0 (3m 43s):
Now you're known for saying customer service should be a profit center. What do you mean by that?

1 (3m 49s):
Okay, good question. Yeah, here's the difference, John, we train all of our agents from a sales perspective, whether they're in customer service side of the business or the sales side of the business or the collection side of the business, it doesn't matter. So when you, when you have an agent that's, that's on the phone from, and they're thinking about sales and how to sell people and, and, and stuff necessarily sells on selling them another product, but selling them on staying with you as a customer, right? And so if you can convince them to do that, then you're going to make money from them. Long-term now a lot of our, a lot of our clients, we, we sell a lot of products. When people call in for customer service issues, we turn them around and sell them a lot more products.

1 (4m 34s):
Cause people, people feel comfortable once they bought from you once they're pretty comfortable buying from you again, if the experience is a good experience, you know, plus if you, if you're good, you're gonna, we, we prevent a lot of refunds. We've been a lot of charge backs, you know, and there's ways to do all that, right. There's ways and tactics that we train our agents to, to kind of control the call and control what's happening. And so if you're good at that, and you do that, you're, you're gonna make money in your call center, right? I mean, that's kind of the that's, that's our, that's our hook. And that's what we try to do.

0 (5m 7s):
Fire Nation. If you are able to convince somebody to stay with you as a customer, you're going to win at such a high level, because it is so much more difficult to get a new customer than it is to keep an old one. And I just love that addition, you put in their cans about, you can turn things around. I mean, when you're good at what you do, you can actually be selling them more things by the end, you can say, Hey, listen, let me receive all of your struggles, your obstacles, your challenges, why you are mad or angry. And a lot of times it has nothing to do with you, your product, you know, they're having something going on in their life. If you can listen to them as a person, and you can just say, listen, we're here for you.

0 (5m 47s):
How can I make this? Right? What can we do? And then you gain their trust back by the end, man, you're their friend Joe's or buddy you're their trusted confidant. And you can turn that around with the right attitude. And that's why you believe Kant's customer servers should never use scripts. What should they do? Instead,

1 (6m 6s):
Again, it comes down to training, right? And you know, our, our, like I told you earlier, our call centers in Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica, and you know, in Jamaica, we're able to keep agents. Long-term. I mean, we started about four years ago. I still have most of the agents we started with. Right. That's an heard of. So with that ability for people to stay long-term John, then you can train them. Right? So we, we don't use scripts because if you do use scripts, you're going to sound super robotic. And then the, and you, as an agent will never learn the product. You just learn the script. Right? So we come at it from a totally different angle and we get new clients all the time.

1 (6m 49s):
Like, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. You're not scripted. No, we're not scripted. But now we know the products very well. Right. I always tell my clients, I'm going to know your products better than you do, because I'm talking about it 24 7 to different people. Right. So, you know, we have the bullet points, we know the product. Well, we just don't use the scripts and get that robotic sounding thing. We train the agents. So they have ownership of whatever campaign they're on or whatever products they're doing customer service for. I don't know if that makes sense to you, but, but yeah, that scripting is just a, it's just a bad way to go. Just bad. And the re it's, it's kind of a crutch. I mean, the reason people use scripting and call centers is because the turnaround is pretty high in that call in the call center world.

1 (7m 36s):
You know what I mean? So we, we just don't have those challenges and we're able to train people really well.

0 (7m 41s):
I got to imagine there's a little bit of a benefit to having that wonderful Jamaican accent. I mean, that just makes everybody happy.

1 (7m 48s):
Th they have that accent, but they're talking, you know, they speak English as their, as their language. If you're talking, if they're talking to each other though, you can't understand a word they're saying the different language it's called paddle on. It's just a, it's, it's an English, you know, just kind of a, a bad English. Right. But it's funny because yeah, you can't understand it, but they, when they, when they're on the phone with, with, you know, our clients, customers, they speak perfectly clear English, but they do have that slight cool Caribbean accent.

0 (8m 20s):
Cool. Caribbean accent, man. That's the island life down here. Just take a deep breath, relax a little bit. And I love that phrase that you used. If you use scripts, the agent will never learn the product. They'll learn the script and Fire Nation. You can't train for every single scenario. That's going to come at you. So when you train your agents to know the script, to know the product, then they're going to be able to be agile and adjust, and actually talk with confidence about this. Not just like, wait, wait a second. I'm not seeing on the script where the answer is here. That's not what you want. You want that confidence that ease. And let's talk about training agents from a sales perspective, because you've got a lot of success with this.

0 (9m 1s):
So talk to that fact,

1 (9m 3s):
I got into this customer service thing because I was selling products online. And I outsource the customer service that I was doing. And it was killing me. I realized really quickly that, wait a minute, if I don't take control of this, that I'm going to lose. I'm not going to have a business. You know what I mean? And so that's, that's what I did. And I started doing it myself. And then I hired another guy and that's when we, then I got too big and I realized, wait a minute, I gotta figure out a different situation. That's when I started looking near shore to find a place I could set up and do. And that's what brought me to Jamaica, you know? But anyways, what I'm telling you that for is because, you know, I, when I started doing customer service myself for our products, I looked at everything from a sales perspective, right.

1 (9m 48s):
They're either going to sell me on giving them a refund or whatever else it might be, or I'm going to sell them, you know, on keeping the product and buying more product, or just be an ha I might sell them on just being happy with the refund. But yet they still like me. They still like the business. They still like what we do. Right. So I, everything I do and we train our agents is from a sales perspective. And when you do that, but another thing that happens is the agents gain confidence. You know, I gotta tell you, it's funny. Cause you know, I I've been down to Jamaica many, many, many, many times, right. And some agents will pull me over in there. They'll say, Hey, he can't, you know, I, I used, I used what you've taught me in the stuff.

1 (10m 29s):
You're teaching me here in the center on like my boyfriend, you know? And so it totally changes their, you know, these are, these are people that like, they might not really have a sense of a lot of stuff or have confidence or whatever, but the way we train them, it builds confidence. And they, they, they know how to like, you know, control their, the conversation or go, you know, control their boyfriend or whatever. It's always the boyfriend by the way. Anyway. So they have that confidence where they, they know that they can, they're not scared of the phone. You know, when the phone rings, they're not scared, you know what I mean? And they are prepared to turn that around to where they want it to be.

1 (11m 11s):
Then they can control the call and that's so from a sales perspective, that's what you do. You want to be in control of what's what's happening on the call. You know, you've been on, you've been on a customer service call where you, you know, you're controlling the agent and they don't know what to do, and you're totally in control of it. Right.

0 (11m 27s):
I know, by the way, I've been on the opposite with the Asians taking control and I've been like, heck yeah, that's exactly what I want to be on a call with somebody who knows what they're talking about is going to take control. Who's not going to take my snarky attitude because yes, I'm probably being snarky to them and it's going to be like, listen, sir, help me help you. Let me do this. Let me take the lead. So I definitely love that perspective.

1 (11m 49s):
It's gotta be a win-win for everybody. When they get off the phone, everybody's got to feel good about the whatever happened on the call, right? And so that's, you know, that's what we do. That's what we train them. I mean, we, we, you know, there's a lot of get back to the money thing, saving money. There's a lot of ways to save money. If somebody wants a refund, do you need to give them a full refund? If you can, if you can talk them into taking half refund and keeping the product or whatever, I can't tell you how many times we do that. And people go, okay. And then they use the product and they call us back for more product,

0 (12m 25s):
Oh, Fire Nation. You're getting value bombs here. I love this. Just being able to turn the conversation, own the conversation, control the conversation and add value to the conversation. These are all great tips, tools, and tactics. And if you think Kent is done dropping value bombs, you ain't seen nothing yet. When we get back from thanking our sponsor. Watch outs, customer expectations are at an all-time high and making things easy as how you'll win. If you're can accomplish easy, you'll turn one-time customers into lifetime customers. So how can you make things easy for your customers? It starts with knowledge like having a 360 degree view of how your customers have interacted with your business in the past, what their buying preferences are and how likely they are to become a repeat customer.

0 (13m 8s):
But how do you gain these insights with a HubSpot CRM platform? That's exactly what you'll get easy to use tools that give you and your teams, the full picture of your customers. Just one example of how powerful having that full picture can be. Well HubSpot's intuitive payment tools allow you to help your customers have a seamless purchase experience with full access to payment data, your teams get the full customer story, meaning they can provide the best possible service. And with directly embedded payment links, your customers can quickly and easily purchase and pay from emails, live chats, and more, learn more about how has SWAT can help your business grow better@hubspot.com. So Kent we're back in, you have been dropping value bomb after value bomb, brother.

0 (13m 53s):
And I love saying that you have the phone is still the killer app in your business. Tell me, tell Fire Nation, which you mean to buy this

1 (14m 2s):
Well. Okay. So in, in the, all my world, you've probably had the same experience as I have where you want to talk to somebody about the product that you're seeing online. Right? And there's just no way to get somebody on the phone. And, and to me that just drives me bananas. And I can't tell you how many times I would have ordered the product. If I just could have asked one simple question to a real person, right? And, and I think people online lose tons of business that way. Well, I know they do because we, we deal with it. So the killer app is still, somebody's able to call you and some re a real person answers the phone that knows what they're talking about.

1 (14m 42s):
Right. And it's, it's shocking when you, when you call customer service or something, a phone number and somebody answers, you know, it's not, we never do the, you know, press one for here, press two for there for people. No, we, we answer within like 15, 20 seconds, you know what I mean? So that to me is still the killer app in any business. If, if you can get somebody on the phone to talk to it's invaluable.

0 (15m 9s):
My trust level goes through the roof. When I see a customer service number and I call that number. And within even a minute, I mean, 15 to 20 seconds would be unbelievable. But within a minute or two, if I'm talking to a real person and they're talking intelligently coherently with authority and confidence about that product or service, holy crap. I mean, I'm just like, okay, this is a real company that I can trust. I can get behind. I can support. And I can recommend all of these things for our nation. Absolutely huge. And now this next point can, this could literally be quite controversial for some listeners here, but the belief is you believe in-house customer service is always talks to your business.

0 (15m 53s):
Why do you believe in this so strongly?

1 (15m 55s):
Okay. So in-house means you have a customer service situation in your office right now. It's, it's amazing. John, how many, how many businesses interact customer? There's a guy that takes a customer service calls and he also does some other job and another job. And one of his jobs is just taking customer service calls. Well, if that's the case, you know, most, most customer service calls coming in are negative. They're coming in and they're negative to your product, right? For whatever reason, it's most of the time, it's not your product. Like you said, they might be having a bad day or whatever it happens to be, but it's negative. And the last thing I want it, anybody should want is negativity in their business.

1 (16m 38s):
Right? And so when you got guys who are taking these negative calls, it just spreads. And then you have that same guy doing something else with your business. It just spreads throughout your business.

0 (16m 47s):
I caught a residue. You can't not, but take some of that with you, period.

1 (16m 51s):
It's just, it's just bad. So if you are insisting on doing it in house, put that customer service section in a totally different location. So they're not even interacting with other people in your business. Now, if they need to talk to somebody else in the business to help that customer that's on the phone, that's fine, but just do it, do it on the phone or whatever. But to infect a business with customer service is just, it's just a bad move. I've seen it so many times when we, when they outsource it to us, it just changes their whole kind of, you know, whatever their mood is in the business. It just changes. Right. And it's, and another thing too, it's hard to keep it. It's hard to keep good employees on customer service.

1 (17m 32s):
It just is, you know, in the states, it's just hard. That's why, that's why I went to Jamaica. You know, I would love to have a situation in the states, but it's just very, very difficult to do that. You know? So that's, that's why I think it's toxic. It's, it's, it's very bad to have that in, in your, in your office where everybody else is. Can you imagine to have a customer service right. With the sales guys and they're trying to sell a product, but yet they're listening to people on the phone that are telling them negative stuff about your product they're trying to sell. That's crazy.

0 (18m 1s):
Yeah. I mentioned it before financial man. I want to say it again. It's called residue. You can't help, but take things with you like that. I mean, it's just going to leak over into these other areas, period. End of story. Because that is us, we're human beings. We, we don't just move on to something else and completely forget about what just happened. So having that separate, having that out of house can really add to the overall happiness of your in-house team for all the reasons that can't just talk about. One thing that you do believe can't is that call centers can help entrepreneurs find new money, as well as stop, hidden money leaks that we didn't even know about. So give us some examples on both of those ends about finding new money and also about stopping hidden leaks with that money.

1 (18m 45s):
One of the ways to find new money is to when you, when people call in and want a refund, they want a whole refund, but you necessarily have to refund them 100% of what they're asking, right? So, you know, if you have the right call center, and if they're asking for a hundred percent refund and you're able to refund 50% and they keep the product and end up liking it, that's new money to you because that customer, and like I said it earlier, I can't tell you how many times people we do that in the clients call us back to order more product, right? That's that's new, that's hidden money that you didn't, even if you would've just said, yeah, I'll refund you send me back the product or whatever. They would've never had been able to have that experience right.

1 (19m 27s):
To use the product. All of a sudden they go, oh, okay. Yeah, I'll be okay. I'll keep it. And I'll use it. You know? So that's what happens. Another thing is, you know, we have a lot of clients that are online sellers, right? And, and most guys sell and stuff online. They might have affiliates that are, that are selling their product for them. Well, through, through a call center, we can pinpoint really quickly John who the bad affiliates are. So if you're getting bad sells and bad traffic from one affiliate, we, we had a call center can pinpoint that really quick and let you know, Hey, these Pete, this guy, you need to eliminate him as one of your affiliates. You see what I'm saying?

1 (20m 8s):
Otherwise you'll just have charge back after chargeback, back after charge. I mean, it's just crazy. So that's, that's another way to save money that nobody even thinks about, right. Another way is, is just sells. You never, you, you never, would've got, I mean, it's pretty shocking if you, if you're talking to people on the phone, how much you can sell them, if you, if you turn them around and they, and they like you and they like, like your business, you know, that's, that's just people that don't use the phone in their business. It just shocks me because they're losing so much money. I just can't even tell you. It's really weird. Cause I, I talk to people all time, different businesses and they're like, I can't, I, I can't use the phone in my business.

1 (20m 52s):
I mean, how could you help me in my business? I haven't found a business yet where it using a call center couldn't couldn't increase that business or help that business. I just, I get to find one. Right? So even, even a local business. So anyways, yeah. That's just some of the, some of the ways to find money and to make sure you're not losing money, you know, and, and there's leaks. I can't even get into it a lot, a lot of what we do, but we find a lot of leaks in, in what people are doing and they're losing money and they don't even, they're not even aware of it.

0 (21m 25s):
Fire Nation, you hear about optimizing website pages and sales pages and copy and headlines and all these different things. How about optimizing your direct point of contact with your customers? People that are actually wanting help or wanting information or maybe wanting refunds, but what they really want is just an answer of like, oh no, sir, if you would just actually push the button over there, like that would do exactly what you wanted to do. And then they're like, oh wow, this is the best thing in the world. I want 10 more like you just never know where the money leaks are and what you're missing out on until you actually train people to do it correctly. What are your thoughts? Can,

1 (22m 3s):
Oh, no. Well, you don't know until you use it, use a call center that's that's effective, you know, Mo and that's why I look at John. That's why we, we say customer service should be a profit center is because most customer service that people hire and use are, are they're, they're paying them big money, right? I mean, it costs money to use a call center, but if the call center offsets what you're paying them, which that's what we try to accomplish with every client we have or, or minimize what their, their, their outgo is and, and create a long-term customer. You can't even quantify the value of that. Right? So, and that's the stuff. If you have a bad call center, or you're not using that at all, or doing it in house, it don't know the ways to, to make, you know, to make those things happen.

1 (22m 48s):
Then you're just, you're just missing a huge opportunity.

0 (22m 51s):
What else do you want Fire Nation to know about what it is that you do? I mean, just take this time, kind of share anything you think that we might've missed along this conversation.

1 (23m 2s):
I feel like having a live person on the phone in your business, no matter what you're doing is super valuable. You know, and people always say they, they hate getting the phone calls or whatever, but nobody hates being able to pick up the phone and call somebody and somebody answers. That's never going to go out of style. You know what I mean? And so that, that is the, that's the value point here is making sure when, when you have your number on whatever you, your customer service number on the product that you're shipping out or selling or whatever, that somebody picks up the phone that knows what they're doing to take care of your customer. I mean, that's, that's it, I mean, that's, that's the thing. So, and like I said, I like any good business or any big, any business that's that's born is usually out of somebody's need.

1 (23m 50s):
Right? So that's how this all came about for me is I just needed to take it in-house and do it myself, because I knew that the people that I was hiring to do it was just, it was just going to be a huge problem. And I didn't know what they were doing. So anyways, that's look at the phone again is still super valuable, especially when somebody actually answers it.

0 (24m 12s):
So can break this down for us, brother. What's one thing you really want Fire Nation to take away from this entire conversation. I mean, we talked about the money leaks, the profit center opportunities. Why you should train your agents on the product, not just scripts. We talked about so much, so much value, so many things that we can patch up in the entire process, but of everything. If we can just make sure that we have one thing that Fire Nation really absorbs, what is that one thing?

1 (24m 39s):
Okay. Here's the one thing, make sure that your phone number or the phone number you want people to call is prominent everywhere in your business, on your website, on products, just everywhere. So people, even if they never call you, they feel super comfortable going, oh, here's the number. You know what I mean? So that's, to me that would be the takeaway. No matter if you do, if you decide to do an announced fine, but just leave a number on, on there so people can get ahold of you. And I, and I know there's a lot of websites that I have noticed that didn't have numbers before, that are starting to have phone numbers on their websites, pretty prominent.

1 (25m 21s):
So that's my, that's my one takeaway, you know, make sure people see a phone number and can call you,

0 (25m 28s):
Give us a call to action. How can we find out more about what you have going on? Is there anything specifically you would like Fire Nation to do, take it away?

1 (25m 36s):
The name of my company is called Customer Service Collective. You can go to website, customerservicecollective.com. I mean, I, I, as far as I know, a lot of times people give away stuff, you know, when they're on your show. And, and what we decided to do is when we, when somebody's new customer comes on board, we charge them an onboarding fee of $1,500. And we do that because we, we do a lot of work to get, get people on board. And if they flake out and decide not to do it or whatever, we, we didn't waste a lot of our time and effort, you know, to do that. So we decided to waive that $1,500. If anybody clicks on EOFire on our website, we'll put it up there after today, or, you know, and they can click on there.

1 (26m 18s):
And, or just tell me if they talked to me or one of my guys, they can say, Hey, I heard you on entrepreneurial fire, blah, blah, blah. We'll just waive that onboarding fee, which is pretty good. You know, if you're interested at all in using the call center in your business,

0 (26m 33s):
Fire Nation, not only is this podcast free to listen to, but it basically paid you $1,500 today by just being able to take action on this. And one more time Kent, what's the website. They're going to

1 (26m 44s):
Customer Service Collective

0 (26m 47s):
customerservicecollective.com, head over there, Fire Nation, see how you can integrate this kind of customer care, this type of customer support because your business deserves it, your customers, they definitely deserve it in Fire Nation. You deserve it. So you are the average Fire Nation of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with KB in JLD today. So keep up the heat. And of course, head over to EO, fire.com type Kent in the search bar. His show notes page will pop up with everything we've been talking about. Best show notes in the biz, timestamps, you name it in Kent.

0 (27m 27s):
Thank you brother, for sharing your truth with Fire Nation today, for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by Kent ins. If you're ready to discover your big idea in less than an hour, I'm talking 60 minutes or less. I created a completely free training that will take you step-by-step. It will literally walk you through my process, my personal process in less than an hour. And you'll have your big idea, Fire Nation. Visit your big idea.io, and I'll catch you there, or I'll catch you on the flip side.

0 (28m 7s):
Business made simple hosted by Donald Miller, takes the mystery out of growing your business. Recent episodes, like how to attract and retain top talent and how to make more money with your current products are straight fire. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.