Interview : Thierry Moussu, Digital Relationship Manager
As part of the launch of our Martech Insider Newsletter, we will regularly feature an interview with a marketing and digital professional, who will tell us what technologies they use and with what objectives.
For this new year 2019, it's Thierry Moussu from Total Direct Energie who will take the lead about his "Technological Stack" and the Group's "Best of Breed" Strategy!
Hello Thierry,
Can you introduce yourself?
Since May 2015, I've been in charge of digital relations for Total Direct Energie, France's 1st alternative electricity and gas supplier, within the Marketing and Digital department. My role is twofold: I'm in charge of strategy and operations for Total Direct Energie's social networks, and I'm also in charge of setting up and continuously optimizing digital customer or prospect relationship tools (FAQs, Customer Reviews, conversational or community platforms, chatbots etc.).
Can you tell us how many solutions you currently use? Is your strategy for your techno stack Best of Breed or Suite Solutions?The paid tools that concern me directly and that I'm currently using are the following (all SAAS):
- Radarly by Linkfluence (social media monitoring and reporting)
- Amplify by Hootsuite (internal ambassador program)
- OuiBeat (social wall)
- Smart Tribune (FAQs)
- BazaarVoice (customer reviews)
- Dimelo (management of conversations on social networks and messaging on our mobile application)
- Dial Once (visual IVR)
- Chatfuel (creation of "standard" chatbots)
- Microsoft Bot Framework + a user-friendly Node-RED overlay developed by Viséo + LUIS (Microsoft's NLU (Natural Language Understanding) tool), all hosted on Azure, for the development of customized chatbots.
More broadly, my department uses a good twenty tools to manage our websites and mobile application, and for our PRM (Prospects Relationship Management) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management), including :
- JIRA and Redmine (project management)
- Balsamik and In Vision (prototyping)
- AB Tasty (AB testing)
- Content Square (user path analysis)
- Wannaspeak and Freespee (Web call back / click to call)
- Botify (SEA)
- Google Analytics Premium + Data Studio (analytics and reporting)
- Accengage (push notifications)
- Adobe Campaign (PRM / CRM)Comment vois-tu ce stack évoluer ?
How do you see this stack evolve ?
We tend to adopt a "best of breed" approach, i.e. we try to have the best tool in its category, rather than having a suite that does everything well but isn't excellent anywhere... We test a lot of solutions, we do POCs for 3 or 6 months and then we decide to industrialize or give up if the solution doesn't suit us.
Two exceptions to this:
- Adobe Campaign, which is a very high-performance software suite in all its components, enabling us to make real gains in terms of customer relations,
- and Prosodie's ODIGO, which we're in the process of deploying for multi-channel management of all our contact points (telephony, email, chat, social networks, in-app messaging). The written part of this solution is based on Dimelo, which we've already been using for 3 years, and which now gives our sales and customer relations advisors a (truly) 360° view of contacts with our prospects and customers.
How do you reconcile this best-of-breed approach for your Stack with your data reconciliation and consolidation challenges?
Most of the above solutions that I use on a daily basis are self-sufficient (e.g. the 3 social media tools or the one to manage our FAQs) and don't need to be connected to our IT system. The same goes for website and mobile application management tools, which almost all work in isolation. For those that manage interactions with our customers or prospects (customer reviews, digital conversation management platform, chatbots, push notifications etc.) - which were brought into compliance with the RGPD at the beginning of the year - we make the link with our databases via incoming or outgoing APIs, so that our internal software (PRM, subscription / contract management, CRM) automatically trace the various points of contact over time. In this respect, ODIGO and Adobe Campaign are very useful to us, as these two solutions bridge the gap between our databases and all the written (incoming) and oral (bidirectional) conversations we may have with our prospects or customers, and the other all outgoing written communications.
What is your tool selection process? What approaches have you been sensitive to?
In general, I find out beforehand about the different tools on the market that correspond to the need I want to address, to get an initial idea of the functional scope of each. I then contact the various vendors for a presentation/demo, and almost always ask for a test license to get a precise idea of the functions of their solution (I like to "get my hands dirty" and understand how a tool works, my engineering background no doubt J).
In the selection phase, I'm very sensitive to the technical skills of pre-sales engineers/sales reps. If the person in front of me doesn't know his or her product inside out, it can be a real turn-off. Having tested or used probably more than 50 or 60 different tools, I know perfectly well what to expect in general, and I can detect bullshit from a distance... Conversely, a sales person who won't try to oversell me his product by taking me for a dummy will have all the chances on his side!
For the tools mentioned, do you use add-on services or do you operate in Power User mode?
Most of the time in Power User mode, after a training phase of varying length, and if need be, ordering a few days of support a year just in case. As mentioned above, I enjoy exploring all software functions, reading documentation (functional and technical) to understand how to optimize the use of the tools. This may seem a waste of time at first, but it allows me to be much more efficient and rapid later on, and to be credible when I ask editors to upgrade their solution to fill an unaddressed need, which happens quite regularly and allows me to build a relationship of trust with them.
Can you name one or more tools you'd like to test or have available?
The next solution I'm going to test will probably be BuzzCasting from Touchflows, a tool that aggregates different types of feeds (social media, customer reviews, call center monitoring...) on the same screen. We plan to use it to bring the "voice of the customer" a little more into our premises, by displaying key customer relations information in different head office locations.
I'm also looking forward to testing Microsoft Teams for collaborative working, if only because I find that email exchanges are a huge waste of time when it comes to managing a project (I now work a lot with Trello, Google Sheet and WhatsApp with my service providers, it's so much more efficient than sending emails with Excel files attached!)
A favorite tool?
Yes: Dimelo, not only for the power, flexibility and modularity of the tool, but also for the attentiveness, availability and skills of all our pre-sales, sales and technical teams.
Thank you Thierry for your time and the precision of your answers.
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