The Aftermarket Co. will provide inbound teleservices on an infomercial campaign for a Dremel hand tool.
Phoenix-based Aftermarket will dedicate approximately 200 agents to the campaign. The infomercial, produced by Script to Screen Productions, Santa Ana, CA, is running in limited markets and will begin nationwide showing in mid-May.
“We're getting ready for it to be one of our bigger campaigns,” said Steve Pittendrigh, Aftermarket president.
Dremel, Racine, WI, tested the infomercial for its high-speed rotary tool in the Philadelphia-New Jersey market late last year. In that test, Aftermarket competed with teleservices provider West Corp., a company with approximately 22,000 employees nationwide.
Aftermarket, which employs more than 700 phone representatives in two contact centers, won the contract in part because of its highly tailored approach to inbound teleservices, Pittendrigh said. For example, the company operates thousands of toll-free numbers and assigns a unique number to each campaign it handles.
When callers dial the Dremel toll-free number, they are met with a greeting specially tailored for Dremel products rather than a generic greeting, Pittendrigh said. The company also spends time training its agents to have hands-on familiarity with the products and to familiarize them with the target audience, which in this case is very broad.
“It's an easy-to-use, really fun tool, not a tool somebody could get hurt with,” said Eric Stracener, account manager at Aftermarket. “They say the age range is from 20 to 70.”
Aftermarket declined to reveal details about the success of its testing for the product. The length of the infomercial's run will be determined by how successful sales are, Stracener said.
“Because they're such a retail-driven company, they're using the infomercial to see how much it will drive to retail,” Stracener said. “How much it drives to retail will dictate how much media they're willing to buy.”
