Social Media Spotlight: Eric Dos Santos, Cofounder and COO of Dimelo

Eric Dos Santos (@ericdossantos) co-founded Dimelo in 2006 with Stephane Lee. They are both considered among the early pioneers in Europe in the community platform and Social CRM space.  In 2008, they raised 2m euro with Innovacom and since then kept on collaborating with large enterprise clients in France such as BNP Paribas, Danone, Barclays, Bouygues Telecom (recently with B&YOU) and Renault with a team of 15 employees. They are now mainly focused on expanding their offering within EMEA from their Paris-based headquarter. In this interview, Eric talks about Dimelo's solution in more depth and explains how it helped corporations such as Peugeot take full advantage of online conversations to improve customer care, brand loyalty, SEO... 

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• Can you tell us briefly about your background and how you got the idea of launching Dimelo?

Back in 2006, Stephane Lee and I created Dimelo after the idea that social media was about to deeply transform relationships between brands and their customers. Prior to that, Stephane had been involved in several projects based on the social web and was convinced that there was a real potential in leveraging the social web conversations for businesses.

We ended up supplying companies with a community platform enabling them to engage in the user-to-user dialogue (on message boards, blogs, and later on Facebook and Twitter) and, most importantly, to help them turn these conversations into profit. For the past six years or so, we have been working with lots of trusted companies.

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• How do you ensure that Dimelo "drives profitable conversations" to your clients? How do they typically measure success?

With our self-help and customer care platforms, we measure profitability in terms of ROI: what it means for the brand is a 24/7 customer service, fewer email and phone interactions, a self-growing customer knowledge base, and all the content produced is indexed by Google. As for the customers, they are only a click away from the answer they are looking for.

For our marketing offer, it’s all about ROO (return on objectives) since we aim at nurturing brand loyalty. Our conversation platforms help create a rich, positive, unique experience between the customers and the brand. The more time one spends on these sites (e.g. voting for the next flavor of a yogurt on Danone et vous, or exchanging with real people who work at BNP Paribas to get a better grasp of their jobs), the more interactions one has with the brand, the more it fosters brand preference. And in the end it should translate into increased sales.

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• Any concrete and recent success story to share with us?

Last summer, we launched B&YOU’s customer care and co-innovation platforms (B&You is a French low cost mobile carrier). After 5 months, the results speak for themselves: a community of 25000+ fans, more than 16 000 Q&A items and 2300 ideas suggested by the users. As the operator likes to say, their bet on building a smaller customer service team (compared to a traditional mobile phone company’s) paid off.

Among our last references, we created the Forum 208 with Peugeot as part as the car maker’s conversational strategy to launch the 208, their new vehicle. The idea was to make the dream of automobile aficionados come true: the forum allowed them to exchange with the very people who made the car, the experts (motor engineers, designers, project managers) who are normally out of reach. 

In 10 days, we registered 228 questions and 3714 votes. The Peugeot experts were delighted to be in direct contact with the future drivers of the vehicle they made, and they would answer questions within the day they were asked. It a fine example of our Experts Q&A module: delivering an exclusive and exceptional experience to the brand’s fans.

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• At LeWeb11, Jeremiah Owyang reported that most businesses are still very unprepared when it comes to social media integration. Would you agree with him?

I believe it is true however, it tends to be less and less the case as businesses are becoming more aware of the urging necessity to engage in and drive conversations on social media.

From our experience at Dimelo, the higher social media and conversation are on the CEO’s roadmap, the better and the faster the business can benefit from it, and the more they will steer in that direction.

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• Frank Eliason, formerly working @ComcastCare, claimed at Social CRM 2011 in New York that "most companies don't know how to handle social media crisis like Comcastmustdie.com". How can Dimelo help companies better deal with crisis?

Although I share Frank Eliason’s insight, we can fairly say that 80% of businesses who had to manage a crisis on social media have had previous experience in customer service and/or marketing on these channels.

In order to help companies handle these situations, Dimelo provides crisis management (in both curative or preventive mode). We open a platform focused solely on the crisis – and all our client’s communications related to the issue will be re-routed towards it – in order to engage the conversation with the spokespersons the brand has committed to answering the questions.

As everything can go really fast in that type of situations, the Dimelo crisis management platforms can go live rapidly (it can take as little as 3 hours to 3 days, depending on the formula the client chooses) to allow a better control of all crisis-related messages with the media and the public so that they do not take over other communications from the brand.

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• What big trends have you identified internally for social CRM in 2012?

We are experiencing two trends first hand:

1. The first one is the new importance of the customer value. Given the economic situation, it is essential to pamper the customer. Listening to and engaging with them is the very best way to do so because it gives you prime insight on their expectations, improves customer service, enables co-creation, and provides you with rich data.
2. The other big trend we are already witnessing at Dimelo is the interconnection between CRM and Social CRM. Taking a major, critical step, businesses will integrate all the data gathered while engaging with a customer in their CRM systems: their influence, reach, presence on conversational platforms, the number of answers they gave on a self-help site… These are so many elements that should and will weigh in, at least as much as the customer spend, or the number of visits on a point of sale for example.

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• How do you plan on growing internationally? Is US, Brazil or China on your roadmap?

We indeed have a short-term objective of growth in Europe first, while keeping an eye on BRIC.