Literature Review for Customer Delight in banking Sector
A Restaurant which provides the best taste food with ample of smiles from its staffs may not be consider as customer delight of the customer if a customer (who has take away food in his hand ) does not receive a courtesy of having a door opened when he is walking out. Achieving customer delight and experience requires the organization to realize that it is dynamics and merely represents a moving targets or ambitions. There is no flat target to accomplish customer delight. For example, hotel provides neat and clean room for every guest. The competition has forced the hotel management to offer room service such as room bar, bathroom accessories, and internet connection. But only few hotels providing the services more then customer expected from them such as microwave, weather forecast, real time flight information and so on. As the competition will increase, more services will be provided to the customer to ensure business, public reputation and hotel success as compare to its competitor. Only few well-recognized hotels are offering a microwave, plastic cover for leftover foods, next-days weather report, real-time flight information, and so on. In the near future, the challenges on quality management would be identification to the services which will insure the customer has positive emotional experience from the Product and services.
Customer satisfaction is defined as “the individual's perception of the performance of the product or service in relation to his or her expectations” (Schiffman and Kanuk, 2004).
According to Patterson (1997) “customer delight involves going beyond satisfaction to delivering what can be best described as a pleasurable experience for the client”.
Traditionally delight has been thought of a blend of joy and surprise (Kumar et al., 2001). However a recent study suggests that customers can be delighted without being surprised (Kumar et al., 2001). Although joy remains an important element of delight, the study suggests that a greater number of people are exhilarated, thrilled and to a lesser extent exuberant (Kumar et al., 2001).
Satisfied customers are not necessarily leave with a firm; they are purely at ease. Delighted customers on the other hand have greater admiration for the firm and its services. Paul (2000) states: Unfortunately, people don't talk about adequate service. Instead, they tell anyone who will listen about really bad or really delightful services.
Paul says that delight generate more positive word -of- Mouth for the company. Being only satisfied with a firm's product or services is not necessarily mean that customer will prefer the company or rejects it but its just simple expression of acceptance. Delighting customers is about providing a product and services that are outstanding and stimulates customer's preference towards a firm or its services.
Kotler and Amstrong (2001): Companies are also realizing that loosing a customer means loosing more than a single sale: it means loosing the entire stream of purchases that the customer would have made over a lifetime of purchase.
It has also been anticipated that as the level of satisfaction increases, so does customer become loyal to the firms product and services.
These studies found that customers who where absolutely satisfied were more likely to be loyal than customers who said they where satisfied (quoted in Kumar et al., 2001).
From many years customer satisfaction is used for the indicator of organization health and success. In recent times it has been argued that in order to succeed in red Blue Ocean of competitive environment it become a necessity to do more then just satisfy the customer but now organization have to delight the customer for staying alive in the competition.. Delighting customers is a splendid ideal, but what kind of impact does it have on the company? Does customer delight lead to increased success and good monetary health of the firm?
According to Rust and Oliver (2000):
Research reviewed here strongly suggests that delight cannot be achieved without surprisingly positive levels of performance, which as noted previously, require additional effort on the part of the firm or its agents. As Rust and Oliver (2000) explain that delighting the customer for organization can be harmful as the expectation of the customer extends and the customer does not get the level of services he is expecting from the organization. In the end the customer become dissatisfied from the organization.
In satisfaction and delight literature there seems to be conflicting views as to there role of satisfaction and delight. Some believe that they are autonomous, yet:
“Academicians have entertained the possibility that high positive emotions such as delight might supplement the satisfaction concept (Oliver and Rust, 1997).”
“Customer satisfaction is generally described as the full meeting of one's expectations (Oliver, 1980).” Customer satisfaction is the emotion or attitude of a customer towards a product or service after it has been used. Customer satisfaction is the result of marketing activity, which servers as a link between different stages of customer buying behavior. For instance, if customers are satisfied with a particular service offering after its use, then they are likely to engage in repeat purchase and try line extensions (East, 1997).”
“Customer satisfaction is widely recognized as a key influence in the formation of customers' future purchase intentions (Taylor and Baker, 1994).”
“Satisfied customers are also likely to tell others about their favorable experiences and thus engage in positive word of mouth advertising (Richens, 1983; File and Prince, 1992). “
“This positive word of mouth publicity is mostly useful in collectivist Middle Eastern cultures where social life is planned in a way to improve community relationships with others in the society (Hofstede, 1980; Hall and Hall, 1987).“
Customers who are dissatisfied, is more likely to switch brands and become active in the negative word of mouth advertisement of the brand. Furthermore, behaviors such as repeat purchase and word-of-mouth directly affect the viability and profitability of a firm (Dabholkar et al., 1996). A study was conducted by the Levesque and McDougall (1996) confirms and resistant the idea that unsatisfactory customer service results in a drop of customer satisfaction and hesitation to recommend the services to others. This would lead to large number of customer switching rate of customer to another brand as well as the negative word of mouth.
A well known academic article on customer delight is by Oliver, Rust and Varki (1997). The authors give delight both hypothetical and an applied perspective, “Delight appears as resulting from a Blend of pleasure and arousal (p 318).In their article they have presented a model and test it which has both “delight sequence” and a “satisfaction sequence” which leads to intentions of the customers.
Model was tested using two consumption experiences - a recreational wildlife theme park and a symphony concert. In the test the direct and indirect effects on both consumption experiences on both delight and intention were not constant for the both experiences. “His indicates the probable effect of the moderating variables on the impact of delight on behavioral intentions. Oliver, Rust and Varki (1997).
The model tested in Oliver, Rust and Varki is essentially a conceptual psychological model of the process of delight that can occur within consumption experiences of the customers. From the model of Oliver, Rust and Varki (1197) provide the evidence that delight has three direct antecedents such as Surprising consumption, Arousal or Heightened activation and Positive affect, all these three leads to customer delight. Model develops new insight concerning that produce delight when situation triggers surprise in a content of positive affect and arousal.
“The conventional wisdom is that if you have satisfied customers you will have loyal customers. Sounds right, but its wrong (Dr. John T. Self).” Not only satisfaction of customer can create loyalty but it's more then just satisfying the customers. As further he explains that in his opinion loyalty frequently develops when customers get involved with the company over the ordinary transaction, mean that all the companies are providing the homogenous services and now customers require other then normal services provided by the company, customers looking beyond then they expects so that they can felt delighted and over whelmed.
Berman in 2005 suggested that organization have to do more then what the customer expects from them and delighting the customer rather then just satisfying them. Berman differentiate customer delight and satisfaction .As satisfaction relate to the meeting the expectation of the customers or exceeding their expectations as customer delight on the other hands “customers receive a positive surprise that is beyond their expectations” (Berman, 2005).While comparing the satisfaction, customer delight is more toward the customer positive and emotional response against the service. In customer delight the emotional response as compare to the satisfaction has less memory for customer as compare to the delight.
Berman in 2005 identifies changes in the organization which was essential for the delighting of the customer. It include that the organization need to change itself to establish the customer delights objectives. Outcomes of the organization should be linked to the customer delight for giving the incentives for the employees. Walking in the feet of the customer as what they really want from you is more important then what organization in thinking about the customer requirement. As customer delight requires “customers receive a positive surprise that is beyond their expectations” (Berman, 2005) requires empowerment of the employees in the organizational to take decisions to make customer delighted from their services. Constant feedback from the customer gives blueprint of what is the level of customer is delighted and loyal to the organization.
Berman 2005 provided the ways how the organization can delight their customer, which were more toward the building the face to face contact with customer as provide the customer the services before they ask for it. Highlight politeness, empathy and attempt to understand customer needs. Look for the ways to go beyond satisfying customer. Providing innovation and entertainment and provide the solutions rather then product and services.
Customer delight is a rising concept in marketing and little work has yet been done on it. As such, no consensus is reached about delight but it is generally posited as customer response to unexpectedly good performance from a service firm (Keiningham and Vavra 2001; Kumar 1996).
It represents the highest level of satisfaction, leading to a stronger intent to repurchase (Jones and Sasser 1995).
Customer delight is never happened without high performance and such performance brings not only benefits to customers but also makes them excited (Kwong and Yau 2002).
To delight customers, it requires a superior and uninterrupted effort from firms to deliver extraordinarily good services. This effort has to be acknowledged and cherished by customers.
Customer delight is, therefore, defined as an emotional response creating a much pleasured state concerning a firm's high performance in service delivery, which is then highly praised (Kwong2006).
“The major reason to chase delighted customers is the belief that they are more profitable to serve because they are more loyal, that is to say, they tend to have a stronger intent to repurchase. In general, they are apostles who give unfailing support to the firm” (Oliver H. M. Yau and Kenneth K. Kwong 2007).
The delightful experience is like a lasso to capture these customers for exit (Jones and Sasser 1995; Keiningham et al. 1999).
Behaviorally, delighted customers tend to view the firm positively and prefer to buy from it (Keiningham et al. 1999; Schneider and Bowen 1999).
Financially, this preference translates to a profit and represents a stream of future income to the focal firm (Rust et al. 1994).
In sum, these positive implications imply that customer delight is a worthy business goal to pursuit (Rust and Oliver 2000).
When people talk about customer delight then they start talking about customer delight. Customer service is what companies do for the customers but customer delight is what the customer has felt when he has been treated with way he wanted to. Customer delight does not come from giving more services but comes from the quality of services provided to customer at the time he or she required most.
Delight is a positive consequence of exceeding the customer's expectations (Keiningham and Vavra, 2001),
For example, if a hotel recognizes a guest as a repeat customer and thanks he/she for returning and offers a courtesy upgrade to show appreciation, this unexpected surprise would create customer delight. The hotel has virtually ensured future customer visits. FedEx uses technology to route repeat customer calls to the same dispatcher who can access a detailed customer profile prior to answering the incoming call. The customer is thus greeted by name, and the dispatcher, understanding the customer's preferences and needs, can efficiently and effectively please its customer (examples from Keiningham and Vavra, 2001).
Delight is going beyond merely satisfying the customer to delivering a “higher level” of satisfaction through exceeded expectations (Oliver et al., 1997).
Opportunities to delight customers also lie in service providers' abilities to go “above and beyond” in service delivery. Long-term relationships with customers provide the opportunity, through personalized service, to exceed the customers expectations and delight them (Zeithaml and Bitner, 2003),
Delight is more likely to occur in situations where customers are highly involved, where service quality is variable, and where overwhelmingly outstanding performance is unexpected (Oliver et al., 1997).
The delighted customers may also be more likely to increase their own spending with the delighting organization, and exhibit increased customer loyalty (Keiningham and Vavra, 2001).
Customer satisfaction has long been identified as an important issue in marketing (Oliver, 1997). Indeed, it is at the heart of the marketing concept (Howard and Sheth, 1969) and marketing researchers report strong evidence of positive effects of customer satisfaction on repeat purchase (Szymanski and Henard, 2001), retention (Bolton, 1998), loyalty (Anderson and Sullivan, 1993) and even profitability (Anderson et al., 1994; Bernhardt et al., 2000).
For example, Xerox is reported to have found its “totally satisfied” customers are six times more likely to repurchase during the following 18 months than its “merely satisfied” customers (Jones and Sasser, 1995). It is increasingly argued that what is really important to intentions, future manners and customer loyalty is the emotional response to the experience (Schlossberg, 1993; Schneider and Bowen,1999)
