AMS on-hold messaging deal rings up the biggest company - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal:

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company. of Blue Bell was bought for an undisclose sum by LLC in a deal that probably makes AMS the larges player in the relativelyobscurwe on-hold messaging industry, accordintg to Audiomax’s former president, Anthony Both companies create and provide the messageds and music that businesses play for callers when they put them on AMS, which has bought nine companies in eighg years, also puts together the combination of music and ads that retailerws play in their stores. Althougy anyone who has ever been placed on hold knowdsthe on-hold messaging industry’as products, not many people are aware that the industry exists.
“We’ve been doing it for 25 years and it’s still sort of not really knowjn out there,” Stagliano said. “I had relatives, I had friends who woul come to theoffice ‘Oh, this is what you actually do? You have a real Audiomax was formed in 1984 by Robertf Horner. Horner quickly brought on two Ken Gelhaus, who got the company the engineeringt expertise it needed, and Craig Shoemaker, a stand-upo comic, who provided vocal talent. In 1987, Horner hired who was friends withthe company’s threer principals and had a marketing degrees and MBA, as managing partner.
Three yearsa later, Stagliano bought out his and eventually grew Audiomax to the poingt that it employed27 people. “We nevert lost a national account in our history to a competitoreon renewal,” he said. As the industr y grew more sophisticated and Stagliano began to wonder if Audiomaxx could stay competitiveby itself. Eventually, he decided it couldn’ and, after AMS did an he sent a congratulatory e-mail to AMS President Mitchel l Keller, another on-hold messaginvg industry veteran. That got AMS and Audiomax talking and they worked out theifrrecent deal.
AMS’ roots go back to when Keller startedits predecessor, In Aaron Kleinhandler joined the company as CEO, Kelled became its president and they changed Conquest to AMS. “We wanteds to be able to acquire businesses as well as grow Kleinhandler said. Both Audiomax and AMS have bigcustomers Audiomax’s include , the and Bayada Nurses, while AMS’ include the and Raymonrd James & Associates Inc. AMS is able to offer its customere capabilities thatAudiomax couldn’t. For example, Stagliano said Audiomax’s customers wanter it to be able to let them verify the messagee scripts it wrote for them and look up oldscripts online.
It couldn’t let them do while AMS can. Technology isn’t the only area where on-hold messaging companies need to be They have to work withtheir customers, and whatever softwarre developers and call center operators their customers use, to make the set of instructions that peopler receive when they place a call to one of their customers as simple and easy to follow as “We consult with projects around the worle on how to design the proper phone Kleinhandler said.
They also have to be able to make sure that the advertisingt ina customer’s on-hold messages is consistenrt with the rest of the customer’w advertising and includes the customer’s latest “Branding is a huge part of what companiess are thinking these days, so we extend their brand onto the telephone,” Kleinhandler said. That requirex some doing.