Investigating the Key Routes to Customer Delight

Abstract

Recent empirical research has shown the benefits for the service firm of providing customer delight. With this link established, it is now important to garner a greater understanding of the drivers of customer delight from the customer's perspective. In response, this research addresses three focal issues: (1) evaluating the types of employee behaviors in a service encounter that lead to delight, (2) assessing consumers' expectations prior to their delightful encounter, and (3) ascertaining the differences between satisfactory and delightful encounters at the customer level. The findings indicate that employee affect and employee effort are the strongest factors in producing delight. These factors were both ranked higher than employee skills with regard to delight. Importantly, it seems that the power of these factors has not been fully revealed in previous research. Further, this research provides support for the usefulness of both the disconfirmation paradigm and the less-utilized needs-based model for evaluating customer delight.

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