Community Defined
A commercial virtual community is a group of people with common interests who interact through an Internet Web site and whose common interests are related to the business of the sponsoring company. People use commercial virtual communities for a variety of reasons — to get answers to questions, collaborate on projects, and to learn best practices. Community members interact via multiple online venues — such as message boards, chat rooms, and instant messaging.

Community CRM
CRM is a crucial business strategy that involves the combination of people, processes, and technology across all customer touch points, including marketing, sales, and customer service. CRM solutions typically focus on interactions between a company and its customers and partners.

Online communities complement and enhance CRM by allowing companies to extend their CRM initiatives to include many-to-many interactions among customers, partners and employees.

PeopleLink defines this new market segment as Community CRM.

Community CRM Benefits

• Lower customer support costs by up to 90% per incident.
• Attract and retain up to twice as many more customers.
• Increase revenues as community users are up to twice as more likely to buy.
• Improve services as customer collaboration and save up to 30% in product development.

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