"How to Delight Your Customers"
California Management Review
Fall, 2005, pp. 129-151
The author first explains the key differences between the concepts of customer satisfaction and customer delight:
- Satisfaction is cognitive, and based on perceptions; delight is based on emotions such as joy and excitement
- Satisfaction is based on meeting or exceeding expectations; delight comes from the surprise of a welcome out-of-the-ordinary experience
- Satisfaction is only somewhat remembered; delightful experiences are more memorable
Some of the potential positive consequences of customer delight are:
- Increased word-of-mouth promotion by customers
- Lower customer acquisition costs
- Lower selling and advertising costs
- Higher initial and repeat sales
- Increased brand equity
- Increased ability to withstand new market entrants
Some common ways that companies delight their customers are:
- Emphasizing courtesy, empathy and effort to understand customer needs
- Delivering exactly the right product or delivering unanticipated value
- Looking for ways to go beyond merely satisfying customers
- Providing novelty and entertainment
- Focusing on multiple points of contact with customers
- Delivering solutions instead of products and services
The article identifies seven organizational changes that are necessary to better deliver customer delight:
- Awareness of the need for organizational change to establish customer delight objectives
- Linking customer delight to bottom line results
- Benchmarking world-class customer satisfaction criteria
- Listening to customers to better understand what is important to them
- Empowering employees to do what is necessary to delight customers
- Emphasizing the measurement of customer loyalty and delight
- Linking performance rewards to customer satisfaction scores
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