(art/sa) News on Another Teleservices Company
bizjournals.com
"Vote still out on RMH Teleservices' moves"
Peter Key Staff Writer
BRYN MAWR -- RMH Teleservices Inc. has made three
distinct moves to respond to the changes in its industry
unleashed by the Internet, but two weren't particularly dramatic.
That, coupled with the fact that the company hasn't
tried to brand its Internet customer-service offerings,
has analysts divided on how well RMH is prepared
to face the teleservices industry's future.
"They've been a little behind the curve," said Stephen
DeLucia of the New York firm of Sidoti & Co. "As far as I know, they're still working on what they will be offering."
Adam Holt, who follows the company for Chase H&Q in
San Francisco, has a different view. RMH has equipped
500 of the 3,450 work stations in its call
centers so that the employees who staff them can
interact with callers and Web surfers. That, he said,
"represents a significant opportunity and one that is under-appreciated."
Among other things, RMH's technology -- like its
competitors' -- allows it to manage e-mail in ways such
as generating automatic responses when appropriate
and routing messages to the workers best-equipped to
handle them. And its employees can have real-time, text
chats with Web surfers and simultaneously view Web pages
with them, which allows the employees to conduct virtual guided tours of Web sites.
John Fellows, the company's chief executive officer,
isn't particularly impressed by the technology, however.
"While it sounds neat, it's something that basically you
could do with your home PC," he said.
RMH has made another move that Holt does thinks will help
it in an increasingly wired world. Over the past two years,
it has opened five call centers -- as well as a center
to monitor the service quality of its 20 call centers --
in Canada.
The Canadian centers, Holt said, "attract very
highly qualified labor, generally college graduates, at
a reasonable cost."
That's important because providing customer service over
the Internet as well as the phone requires more skills
than simply providing it over the phone. As a result,
Fellows said, the workers who do it tend to be younger
and more educated than their phone-only counterparts.
RMH's biggest nod to the 'Net, however, is in the form
of a joint venture that seemingly is only tangentially
related to its main business.
Last November, it and Advanta Partners LP formed
365biz.com to provide a variety of Internet services
to small and midsize businesses. Aimed at
companies that don't have the wherewithal to develop
a sophisticated Web presence on their own, 365biz.com
develops and hosts e-commerce Web sites for
as little as $24.95 a month. It also provides customers
with e-mail accounts and news customized according to
their industry and makes sure their Web sites
show up on search engines.
Fellows, RMH's chief executive officer, said 365biz.com
has attracted several hundred customers in the few weeks
it has had its service up and running.
"It's growing very rapidly," he said.
RMH's relationship with Advanta Partners goes back to
1996. That year, the venture arm of Advanta Corp.,
the Spring House-based financial-services
company, took a stake in RMH, and helped the company's
husband-and-wife founders, Raymond Hansell and MarySue
Lucci, take it public.
Advanta LP sold all its interest in RMH and Hansell and
Lucci sold most of theirs at the end of March, when R-T
Investors LLC of Hurst, Texas, bought 49
percent of RMH's stock in private transactions. RMH
didn't reveal how much R-T paid for the stock, but said
the price per share "was consistent with the
market price during the time the transaction was negotiated."
RMH shares traded as high as $13.25 in early March, but
were hovering around $9 at the end of the month.
They've since traded as low as $6, but recently
have been back around $9.
Fellows also bought RMH stock in private transactions
around the end of March, just about doubling his
holdings to 203,815 shares. |
