Thanks for the compliment, bc (and Bull)- you guys are quite the patient crowd.
A few days ago on the thread Nicholas Rauch brought up a link to a story about John Hough, Director Corporate Communications, being interviewed over on Vcall. The piece is now archived at:
vcall.com
Vcall is a great site, BTW, and IMO any reasonably serious investor would do well to check it out and sign up for the free registration. Anyway, the interview was ok, but I would only bother spending the 25 minutes or so to listen to it if you are either new to the company and looking for an easy way to get an overview, or if you're a die hard Egghead. IOW, there's was very little new here, and Hough is a bit difficult to hear and, shall we say, "low key". So is Orban for that matter- "corporate culture" isn't what I would have expected of this company in the frenetic world of e-tail.
One thing however that was new to me was the progress on their GeoCities affiliate program. Apparently the company is pleased with the program's rapid growth. The first 10 days generated over 10K new affiliates, and in the first 4-5 weeks it garnered about 25K affiliates.
Hough emphasized that customer service is their priority right now. Egghead hopes to foster customer loyalty and improve their brand with competitive pricing, product selection, and again, customer service. They are striving to improve the latter both electronically (with rapid e-mail response to inquiries) and telephonically (with quick pick up of phones when it is necessary to actually talk to someone).
Insider selling is mostly a legacy of their acquisition of Surplus Direct (I've forgotten the name of the dang thing, but I think that's it) and other insider selling is basically a "normal" result of their compensation program.
Hough said several times that the AtCost biz model being tried by some at this point (unnamed competitor, but clearly ONSL is the leader here) will "fall by the wayside" in time; customer service is the "value add" that will keep EGGS on the highway.
Well, so much for the company line.....
Anaxagoras |
