Mapping customer delight by discriminating augmented communication technology for sustainable advantage

Abstract

The paper proposes to map customer delight experience through the firm’s product augmentation efforts. The study act as a juncture of conceptual insight, empirical analysis, and perceptual visualisation, classifying low (Chill), moderate (Smiling) and high (Feat) delight affect by using the product augmentation model. The present research aims to create a framework to assess smartphone customers’ delight by extending Kano (1984) and Fuller and Matzler (2008) proposal through product augmentation. The first section of the paper deals with the development of the conceptual model containing ten predictor variables of product augmentation along with the categories of customer delight experiences. The second section validates the model by using discriminant analysis. The last section substantiates the impact of predictor variables as vector quantity for profiling of customer delight categories by using a perceptual mapping technique. The proposal demonstrates and endorses the consistency in the delineating nature of product augmentation by identifying each predictor variable’s discriminating power in the respective category. The salience of the study affirms the conceptual and practical implications through behavioural segmentation based on augmentation efforts for technology enhancement.