On this episode of Grow Your Damn Business!, we sit down with entrepreneur Lisa DeFalco, who shares her journey in building a successful business. Lisa emphasizes the importance of having resilience and grit to overcome obstacles, especially in the early days of starting a business.
She also discusses how she used her listening skills to create a marketable product. Lisa talks about her experience founding TPG, which introduced the popular tagline ‘This call may be monitored for quality assurance.’ DeFalco also shares how the concept of grace has helped her through difficult financial times and the importance of staying true to a corporate mission. Lastly, Lisa shares her experience as the first female chair of an association and facing personal questions rather than professional goals.
Key Take Aways:
- [00:01:18] CEO started TPG 26 years ago, focused on improving contact center experiences by listening to calls, and introduced “this call may be monitored for quality assurance”.
- [00:05:59] The entrepreneur’s superpowers are listening and grit, which are important for leadership, sales, and servicing. They listened to multiple banking institutions and had positive feedback from clients.
- [00:07:47] The speaker unexpectedly learned to define phone calls and later Six Sigma, leading to a successful product.
- [00:12:34] Overcoming fear, building resilience in the early days of business.
- [00:16:49] Different types of projects: those that help evolve the model (good) and those that dilute the focus (bad). Stay true to the mission and don’t take detours.
- [00:21:17] Clients are encouraged to think in 90-day increments to celebrate accomplishments and reevaluate progress. Resetting every 90 days is important to celebrate achievements.
- [00:25:13] First female chair, challenged for the role, and faced gender-based questions during an election.
- [00:29:17] Community requests automated speech evaluation tool. Previous attempts failed but the community was willing to support development.
- [00:32:39] Grit, gratitude, and grace meet to double down on investments during economic hardships, with clients who still stand with us.
- [00:35:48] Discussion about Lisa’s insights and favorite sports team.
About Lisa DeFalco
A recognized thought-leader in the Customer Experience and Quality Assurance market, Lisa has more than 29 years of experience assessing contact center interactions, diagnosing quality gaps and improving communications to drive business returns. As the founder of the Independent Quality Assurance market, she coined the term “IQA” and worked to establish a diagnostic product methodology that would result in the creation of a linguistic model that is statistically linked to corporate performance indicators (to allow for predictive business intelligence modeling).
Lisa’s expertise is the result of years of call listening experience coupled with hands-on contact center improvement experience. Having conducted supervisor and agent training, calibration and coaching in more than 70 contact centers for more than 40 BPOs and corporations throughout her career, she has gained significant insight on how to affect behavioral change with the insight gleaned from customer experience linguistic diagnostics.
Prior to her launch within the quality assurance market, Lisa had operational oversight for a domestic BPO with training, quality assurance, operational delivery and performance management responsibility for more than 250 agents.
Today, Lisa serves as TPG’s Chief Executive Officer and its Chief Product Designer, guiding TPG’s product teams in the design and delivery of products that Evaluate, Predict, Educate and Improve Customer Experience.
Connect with Lisa DeFalco:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-defalco-7785651/
Website: https://lisadefalco.com/
