Satisfaction vs Delight

Excerpts from Reassessing the Foundations of Customer Delight
Adam Finn, University of Alberta in Journal of Service Research

• There is strong evidence of positive effects of customer satisfaction on repeat purchase, retention, loyalty, and profitability.
• However, the 1990s saw some questioning of the value of treating satisfying customers as a business objective. One explanation is that the rating scales that researchers commonly use to measure satisfaction do not translate linearly into desired managerial outcomes, such as repurchase and loyalty.
• Only when satisfaction scores exceed the upper threshold of a customer’s zone of tolerance does a service experience have a lasting impact by creating customer delight.
• What is really important to intentions and future behavior is not satisfaction itself but the emotional response to the experience.
• Although meeting expectations can satisfy, it is the emotional response to a surprise—whether delight or outrage—that has a real impact on customer loyalty.
• Cross-sectional consumer behavior research found that the cluster of consumers reporting the highest levels of surprise and joy were more satisfied than others.
• Customer delight is conceptualized as an emotional response, which results from surprising and positive levels of performance. As such, it could provide an explanation for the observed variation in the intentions and subsequent loyalty of customers reporting the same level of satisfaction.