Does customer delight matter in the customer satisfaction-loyalty linkage?

Abstract

This research focuses on the relationships among customer satisfaction, delight, and loyalty. Although customer delight is one facet of an affective evaluation that can be predicted from customer satisfaction as cognitive component of the evaluation, there is no empirical examination on the casual relationship among customer satisfaction, delight, and loyalty. This study aims at addressing this gap in the service literature. The research questions are (1) How is customer satisfaction related to customer delight? and (2) Does customer delight matter in the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty? Data from a survey of consumers across upscale restaurant and retail bank in Korea were obtained. Our results show that customer satisfaction contributes positively to customer delight, and that customer delight plays a significant role in the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty. This chained relationship from customer satisfaction to customer delight to customer loyalty suggests that achieving customer delight represents one of the underlying pathways through which basic or core requirements expected by customers are satisfied. Our finding suggests that service firms need to monitor and manage their levels of customer delight as a performance metric, and delighting customers may be an important strategy to build competitive advantage through customer loyalty.