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It goes without saying that PGi is proud of this community and its accomplishments. As such, we are submitting the site for a Forrester Groundswell award. As part of the Forrester process, the following blog post represents our public application for this prestigious recognition.
Regards,
Sara Pilling
Description of entry:
As a global provider of applied, on-demand communication technologies, Premiere Global Services (PGi) allows organizations, businesses and users to connect and collaborate anywhere, anytime.
PGi launched PGiConnect, a software developer community, in October 2008. The community enables employees, customers and partners to collaborate and build applications in near-real time. With capabilities to tag and search for appropriate content, PGiConnect provides it’s registrants quick answers and access to the company’s full API Suite, development materials and code samples to create business applications using audio conferencing, voice, e-mail, fax and SMS messaging technologies.
PGiConnect is geared toward PGi’s enterprise customers, system integrators, resellers and partners worldwide. Sharing knowledge in a virtual workspace allows PGi to embrace ideation and collaboration using Web 2.0 tools.
As an example of how this community supports customers, partners and developers, when a client recently posted a question about sending voice notifications in foreign markets, answers and code samples were available in a matter of hours. This highlights how rapidly a developer went from thinking about a concept to deploying a test application. Not only is this a great example of the speed with which clients can build and deploy custom applications, but also an insight into how PGi streamlines its support resources in one community where sharing information is the standard. PGi’s core team of API support specialists are answering fewer help calls and now able to focus on providing their knowledge and expertise in the online forum.
Embracing Web 2.0 social media technologies has given PGi an advantage and helped the company more closely align with a key audience – software developers. Connecting people and connecting thoughts in the online community allows developers to build and deploy applications in real time.
How PGiConnect helps accomplish business goals:
The ability for PGi to scale support resources for large client integrations and third party development has lead to greater return on productivity and shortened time to market. In this economy of shrinking budgets, the group of PGi FTE’s that work on integrations and development projects are able to instantly reuse and share information across customers and external resources. Additionally, we're beginning to see self-sustaining activities taking place within our community, which is helping us scale further.
PGiConnect has supported over 100 unique apps built compared to half that number in the prior 12 months. Support costs have been reduced by about 20 percent and from Q208 to Q209 apps built on PGiConnect have generated 1.5 times the revenues. With more than 1124 registrants - all building communication-enabled business applications that either improve their customer's experience or increase operational efficiencies – PGiConnect has housed more than 3,000 discussions and created more than 350 documents for community use.