One Take with Neal Topf

👉 The Scoop – For many of us involved in direct response marketing, Proactiv is a legend and the call centers who work with Proactiv are considered to be the absolute tops. So, none of us were surprised when Neal Topf’s Callzilla won the entire business for the U.S., Neal transformed Callzilla into a national powerhouse by delivering top notch service to its clients and its callers.

👉 Decisive Moment #1 – Graduated with an MBA in 2003, middle of the economic crisis, a headhunter took a chance on him and he went to work for a call center based in Colombia who needed to grow in the U.S.

👉 Decisive Moment #2 – Expands away from the U.S. Hispanic Market into national.

👉 Unexpected change or event – AI, of course.

👉 What did he do? – Implement LLMs, as AI assist tools. It's called Agent Assist to help the call center agent who's sitting in the contact center in real time. So, there's an engine that's listening to a call or reading a chat. This AI bot will tell the call agent the answer to the customer’s question; it will fill out all the fields related to the customer and much more, including deep data analysis.

👉 About older workers – I think, and this is a bit of a cliche, but I would hire for grit. I would hire for perseverance, for tenacity, for desire, for willingness, for loyalty. Age is not a determinant of that. I value the experience that someone older will bring just as I value the energy, hopefully, that someone young might bring. But for me, it's not a factor of age. It's a factor of willingness and desire and I think grit.