Austin Skaggs, Community Manager, PDI (Professional Datasolutions Inc.)
Categories
  • Future of Work
  • Next Generation Customer Experience
The Project

We created an online community, called PDI Connections, to support our customers and enable them to share ideas. We reduced support costs by enabling customers to ask and answer questions in the community, within a matter of minutes. For example, recently a customer on the East coast asked a question answered by another on the West coast within 2 minutes. In addition, everyone can see when a customer’s idea gets implemented into the software (sometimes within a matter of months), and information exchange is a quick and easy process, for both our customers and vendors. ​

The Technology

Telligent Community, Telligent

Metrics Matter

Our goal is to grow engagement 25% per year for the next 5 years (factoring in number of posts, new active user accounts and more). In the past year, we've already achieved 34% growth on post count and 39% on the user count, signifying a massive uptake in adoption. It’s a testament that our video promotions and personalized community outreach strategies are exceeding our expectations. As an added benefit, we’ve seen a 10% reduction in support calls and a large decrease in support costs. Combined, these two improvements allowed us to reallocate 2 ½ support resources to other business areas. 

Customers are also excited when they see their ideas implemented into new versions of the software, and it happens quite often. Just this summer, an enhanced lottery scanning feature was added to our store-level handheld because several customers expressed a need on PDI Connections. The new feature, which fully automates inventory tracking for scratch-off lottery tickets, eliminates a manual entry process that was costing one customer nearly 100 hours a week.

Disruptive Factor

With PDI Connections, we took the support team and expanded it 400 times over – we have only 12 support technicians, but with 4,800 customers participating in the community, we can literally show that each person  is supported by 4,811 people. We've had support calls get answered in a matter of minutes by another customer, and many other people find answers in our archived knowledgebase. We’re also building stronger, more meaningful bonds with our customers by having one central place to discuss support issues, share product ideas and talk about the industry in a social, fun (and private) space.

Shining Moment

Competitively speaking, nobody has what we have. There's no direct competitor that has a community portal, which is why the way we use this technology with our customer base is so pioneering. Only the top two other businesses in this space have a support website (featuring call logs, the ability to search documentation), but none have a thriving community where customers can interact and share knowledge 24/7. 

Our industry is headed by the National Association of Convenience Stores. Recently, they asked us to give a presentation about our community, social media and related business practices because that's where they’re trying to take the industry as a whole. PDI beat the entire industry to this new way of engaging in social business to create better customer experiences.   

 

ABOUT Professional Data Solutions (PDI)

PDI provides software, hardware and professional services to convenience retailers and wholesale petroleum marketers. Worldwide, approximately 330 companies and more than 28,000 retail locations rely on PDI's systems for retail automation, fuel and warehouse management, business intelligence, and financial management.