Customer Communities to support Product Configuration

More and more enterprises use Internet and WWW to improve their contacts to customers and to enhance customer relationships. The link between e-commerce and customer relationship management is well-known and is discussed in different publications (e.g. Hagel/Armstrong 1996, Shaw 1999, etc.). But Internet and WWW can offer even more: It can be an enabler for new and innovative business strategies, like for example Mass Customization (Piller 2001, Pine 1993). Supported by online configurator tools customers are entitled to virtually assemble a product, by adapting values for the product’s «degrees of freedom» in accordance to their individual preferences and needs. But often the disadvantage of many degrees of freedom is confusion and uncertainty for the customer (Helander/Jiao 2002). Additionally in many cases customers do not clearly know, what they want (Wind et al. 2002) and the pure configurator tool does not really help them in making informed decisions. Therefore the main idea of this paper contribution is to overcome such problems by enhancing configurator tools with community support functionality. The paper discusses, how the community influences individual decision making and how different community functionalities could support customers in virtually specifying their individual products.