The Management of Customer Delight - Essay Example

 The Management of Customer Delight Table of Contents Title Page……………………………………………………………………1 Table of Contents……………………………………………………………2 1.0 Introduction…………………………………………………………………3 2.0 The Significance of Achieving Customer Delight………………………3 2.1 Reasons for Achieving Customer Delight……………………….3-4 3.0 Beating the Customers’ Imaginations………………………………….4 3.1 Measuring Service Quality……………………………………4-5 3.2 The Gradual Process of Customer Delight…………………5-7 4.0 Theoretical Explanations of Customer Delight………………………7-8 4.1 Human Feelings and Customer Delight…………………….8-10 4.2 Marketers’ Responsibilities and Customer Delight……….10-11 5.0 The Human Face of Customer Delight……………………………….10-12 5.1 Interpersonal Relationship………………………………………12-13 6.0 Disadvantages of Customer Delight Programs………………………13-14 Conclusion……………………………………………………………..14-15 References………………………………………………………………...16 1.0 Introduction Initiating and sustaining customers’ delight is an area of customer’s service that most organizations find quite intriguing. The reasoning is that if your customers could be carried away, this circumstance is likely going to increase their patronage. Simply, achieving customers’ delight has been described as surpassing the mere expectations of the concerned customers (Keiningham & Vavra, 2001, pp. 20-55). This practice has not always been easy for all organizations to successfully implement. Below are some reasons why; also, the advantages of achieving customer delight are enumerated in the following analyses. 2.0 The Significance of Achieving Customer Delight The main reason why organizations struggle to satisfy and maintain the interest of their customers is to increase their sales or command of the markets (Schlossberg, 1990, p. 10-11). Interestingly enough, the market size of the service industry is increasing every year. Many countries are now increasing their GDP based on the contributions mainly from the service industries. The United States is reportedly dependent on its diverse services, and this shores the American GDP by 74% (Henkoff, 1994). In the light of the above facts, organizations achieve customer delight for two basic purposes 2.1 Reasons for Achieving Customer Delight (i) The logic is very simple, when customers are satisfied and delighted beyond what they expected, they tend to be very loyal to the organizations. This means that they are willing and ready to purchase or patronize any services carried out by the organizations. Invariably, more financial gains would come from this relationship, if it could last for sometime (Herkoff, 1994). (ii) Organizations also consider their future expansion as the reason for doing everything to satisfy their customers. When the customers continue to patronize the organization, more revenues would be generated and this can aid the expansionism drive envisioned by the organization’s decision-makers. On the other hand, poor customer’s service could drive away even loyal customers. This condition will have a serious impact on the overall incomes generated by the organization. 3.0 Beating the Customers’ Imaginations The normal expectation of customers is to derive maximum pleasure in any service they are spending their money on. Take for instance, when people go to the shopping mall, their expectations may include but not restricted to: (i) finding cheaper services that could satisfy their taste; (ii) enjoy the services expectedly; (iii) derive maximum satisfaction from the service. However, organizations that are interested in winning the hearts of the customers would do more in attracting these sensitive customers. 3.1 Measuring Service Quality It is not a new concept that most organizations apply SERQUAL to measure their services’ quality and performance while attempting to offer satisfactory services to them, but to delight these pleasure-seeking customers require more than mere application of SERQUAL (Berman, 2005). Hence, giving customers some kinds of delight can only happen if their imaginations about price, quality of service or product, and service delivery are beaten by the organizations. In order to beat customers’ imagination, the organizations need to design and properly implement a delight technique that would make it possible for the customers to be joyously surprised as they patronize the services or products offered by the organizations. A common and practicable system to constantly detect if customers are delighted or not is to measure their level of delight. This can be carried out by giving the customers questionnaires to fill in order to register their service preferences (Berman, 2005). Several researchers have worked on this issue of customer delight, and their studies have pointed at the different reasons why customers seem to be satisfied with one service and not the other. Some of the discoveries include the fact that delight and surprise are closely connected. What this signifies is that customers seem to be so happy when they are surprised about the price, quality, delivery methods and after-delivery service (Berman, 2005). When they could not express their surprise in words, customers appear to have become quite delighted with the service they have enjoyed. 3.2 The Gradual Process of Customer Delight Other findings support the fact that customer delight does not just sprout in a day, it comes from accumulation of satisfactions, positive surprises and beating the customer expectations (Berman, 2005). Other researchers had compared customer delight to arousal from intense emotional effects, as it is the case in romantic relationship between two lovers (Berman, 2005). On a more serious note, customer delight arises from the difference between performance and satisfaction. Extreme satisfaction does not translate into delight if the performance is clumsy and unappetizing (Berman, 2005. Take for instance, when a customer goes to a shop and discover that the workers there are friendly and do everything to make his or her shopping experience worthwhile. This may be categorized as providing extreme satisfaction to customers, but this does not necessarily produce delight if the shop attendants’ actions do not bring a lasting surprise or a good memory about the experience to the shopper later. Great performance will always produce memorable feeling in the minds of the customers; in the same way lovers tend to cling to memory of arousal moments (Berman, 2005). Judging it from this perspective, organizations must work hard with their marketing strategies that will beat the imagination of their customers—because it is through this process that they could produce delightful experience in their customers and hold on to them as they expand their lines of services. Finally, organizations or companies need to establish delight programs that would help them beat the imaginations of their customers. A typical delight program would contain directives for the company’s employees to change their service delivery system and adopt a new strategy that would let the customers feel highly respected and well loved. Delight programs are not easy to implement if the company does not change its previous organizational structure so as to accommodate the dynamism of the customer relationship. 4.0 Theoretical Explanations of Customer Delight There are some theories that have been explored in explaining the principle of customer delight: some of these theories are derived from the usual psychological, managerial, academic and sociological phenomena (Oliver et al., 1997). Socially, delight is described as the organic response customers give to the suppliers of services or goods when they perceived that they had been completely bought over (Oliver et al., 1997). To elicit this kind of reaction, service providers need to create serious satisfaction that could linger for a long time in the subconscious of their customers. In other words, the delight may result from sequence of satisfactions the customer has received over a long period of time (Oliver et al., 1997). These satisfactions would make more sense to the customers if they seem to provide their social or societal needs. So, from the perspective of the organizations, the services and goods offered to the customers must be those that would fulfill a social need. Dissatisfaction occurs when these needs are not met and customers are left to wonder about the poor performance of the service providers (Oliver et al., 1997). Interestingly, customers’s satisfaction grow with the rate at which service providers work hard to remain socially viable in helping the society solve many of its myriad problems through the actions of giving to the customers exactly what they required. Secondly, a lot of academic theories have been proposed by academics in the area of customer satisfaction/delight: academic researchers believe that when a customer exhibits high positive emotion, this may help move the customer to the next level of delight (Oliver et al., 1997). However, further work or research is still expected in explaining how service providers can successfully transfer the emotion of their customers from one level to another. Thirdly, a number of psychological theories have been applied to the issue of customer delight: it is generally believed that customers would show delight in a company if he or she has received positive surprises from such a firm (Oliver et al., 1997). It is possible for a customer to get a negative surprise from a company or a service provider; such an experience will only cause disaffection in the customer’s mind for the concerned goods or services. Researchers in the field of psychology perceive the concept of customer delight using the model of affect and emotion: this means that if a service has a positive effect on a customer, such experience could produce a long-lasting emotion that could produce delight in the customer (Oliver et al., 1997). 4.1 Human Feelings and Customer Delight In this case, delight is considered to be a complex human feeling, and it goes along with the assumption that it combines both joy and surprise (Oliver et al., 1997). The question is: what could produce a sensation of joy and surprise in a customer. The first thing that could make a customer has joy is when the price of the service or good is moderate, and the quality of the service is within expectation and the service delivery is superb. However, positive surprises are caused when the service provider goes an extra mile to raise the satisfaction level of the customer. This could be done by offering a rare discount price or offer free service that will let the customer enjoy the service the more. Similarly, it has been proved that psychological responses customers gave to the services or goods they had paid for are based on two factors—valence and activation. Valence denotes expressing the feeling of pleasantness/unpleasantness, while activation explains about inaction/arousal (Oliver et al., 1997). When these factors combine together, for instance, pleasantness and arousal, it is possible for the customer to be quite satisfied with the outcome of the service he or she has been offered. It is at this level that one can be talking of heightened satisfaction which, if sustained for a long time, could produce emotional rollercoaster that will lead to delight (Oliver et al., 1997). Some hypotheses have been put forward by researchers on the possibility of creating arousal in a customer most of the time. Though, the results or findings of these researches point to the fact that arousal is an emotional issue—customers needed to be joyfully surprised or amazed before such a service can cause arousal within their psyche (Oliver et al., 1997). Lastly, managerial theorists believe that it is the primary responsibility of the managers or the marketing managers to design the appropriate way to encourage shopper or customers to show serious interest in the products or services offered by the companies (Oliver et al., 1997). 4.2 Marketers’ Responsibilities and Customer Delight One important observation here is that marketers are responsible for setting up Customer Delight Programs that would help their organizations achieve their sole purposes, which are to keep their customers satisfied and delighted, as long as possible in order to make them continue to patronize the company’s products. Since this is the main organizational goal of many companies, managerial performance is quite essential to maintain this organizational expectation. Customers, on the other hand, will do everything in their power to display loyalty to the companies that seems to care about their social needs, emotional needs as well as psychological needs. The theories described in the foregoing are helpful when analyzing the impacts of customer delight on the organizational goal of a company. There are other theories that may also be applicable to this matter—like the theories of welfare, customer rights and so on. However, the theories discussed here are enough to demonstrate that customer delight does not come spontaneously, but requires some forms of continuous actions from the service providers. In conclusion, before customer delight could be attained, there is a sequence of actions that must be taken beforehand: these include but not limited to companies carrying out surprising performances that will catch the attention and minds of their customers; customers enjoy having positive affect from their service providers because, to them, it is a measure of personal satisfaction; the customers must be pushed into the state of arousal, where they will become emotionally connected with the goods or services offered them; the companies must endeavor satisfy the intention of the customers; this alone is able to push the customers up the scale of delight (Oliver et al., 1997). 5.0 The Human Face of Customer Delight It is almost impossible to achieve customer delight if the human aspect of this phenomenon is not properly recognized and consequently managed (Kumar & Iyer, 2001). Even though an organization establishes Customer Delight Programs, these efforts may end up in complete failure if the human parts of the procedure failed to execute their respective duties as outlined in the programs. For example, the human parts of a shopping mall are the staffers, employees, salespersons, cashiers, shop assistants, and so on. These people are direct contacts with the customers. If their actions are unfavorable to the customers, they may discourage them from patronizing the shopping mall (Kumar & Iyer, 2001). The following four significant issues must be taken care of at the shopping mall if the manager of the mall wants to encourage the customers from patronizing their products and services: (i) Interpersonal relationship between the mall’s employees and the customers must be cordial—this condition is necessary to create satisfaction for the customers (Kumar & Iyer, 2001). When a customer feels respected and well- attended to in a shopping mall, he or she is likely going to find some satisfaction in that service. 5.1 Interpersonal Relationship and Customer Delight On the other hand, dissatisfaction may creep in if the mall’s employees show disrespect and lack of good manner to the customer. Basically, good interpersonal relationship between customers and a company’s employees will help to increase the customers’ confidence in the products or services offered by the company (Kumar & Iyer, 2001); (ii) lack of working guidelines may allow the employees to avoid their occupational responsibilities. The shop assistants are not only expected to sell their products to the customers, but they should also cater about their customers’ feelings and work had to surpass their expectations—by doing this, they will be able to raise the emotional level of their customers, which is very instrumental to reaching the emotional stage or the state of delight (Kumar & Iyer, 2001); (iii) constant disagreements with customers on prices, conditions of delivery and services could propel a customer into the state of dissatisfaction. And when this occurs, it will be difficult to encourage the same customer to believe in the service of the company, hence, it will also be difficult to achieve delight in this harsh circumstance (Kumar & Iyer, 2001); (iv) lack of proper information processing may lead to a break in communication that will jeopardize the ability of a company’s employees to successfully attend to the needs of their customers. And in such a situation, the interest and loyalty the customers have showed to the company will vanish—it will be difficult to move the customers into a state of delight, where they will be emotional carried away with operational surprises from the company’s employees. The four factors explained in the foregoing are quite important to maintain the loyalty of customers to a company and keep them patronizing the company’s goods and services (Kumar & Iyer, 2001) 6.0 Disadvantages of Customer Delight Programs The findings from many practitioners are that establishing and implementing customer delight programs require a lot of financial resources (Schlossberg, 1990). It takes a great deal of hard work to succeed in encouraging customers to show emotional interest in the products or services they are introduced to. On most occasions, the customers appear to be carried away with the quality and usefulness of the products and services, only to dislike them after a brief period of dissatisfaction (Schlossberg, 1990). Another disadvantage of heavily investing on customer delight programs is that it diverts the attention of the firms from other important activities like administration, employment motivation and other vital responsibilities that the firms should also be concerned about that. But the saddest news about this is that administration and employee development are likewise needed to encourage the employees to act in their best interest to satisfy the needs of the customers. And if customers realize that they are mainly targeted by customer delight programs in order for the firms to increase their revenues, they may likely dislike the firms and their products and services. Therefore, the idea of customer delight program needs to be practical and in conformity with the standardized methods of marketing. Most importantly, the firms should think about their social responsibilities while advertising or marketing their services. Although, there is also some huge hidden cost firms have to pay in order to continue to hold the emotional connection of their customers with their products and services. Since there is no static estimation for how much customer delight program will cost, firms must be pragmatic when budgeting for these programs. Conclusion Customer delight is an elusive concept that many service providers can do anything to get hold of; however, this phenomenon requires seriousness on the part of the companies, their employees, and other human parts that are directly linked to the customers. Some of the advantages of the successful customer delight include constant patronage by the customers, increased sales and better revenues. These advantages point to the fact the business will be good for the service providers. But it is imperative that the customers must be considered as the priority of the company and its employees. This involves fulfilling the customers’ psychological, social, and physical needs through the actions of employees that have been trained well in catering for the customers. On top of it all, there must be great interpersonal relationship between the customers and the company’s employees for the process of customer delight to realizable. Some companies also establish Customer Delight Programs in order to handle this sensitive part of their businesses wisely. Finally, companies need to do more research and investigation about how to keep their customers’ loyalty intact by investing in processes that could heighten their customers’ delight. References Berman, B. (2005). How to delight your customer. California Management Review, 48 (1), 129-151 Herkoff, R. (1994 June 27). Service is everybody’s business. Fortune, 129. Keiningham, T.L., & Vavra, T.G. (2001). The customer delight principle: exceeding customers’ expectations for bottom-line success. New York: McGraw-Hill Professional. Kumar, A., & Iyer, R., 2001. Role of interpersonal factors in delighting customers. Marketing Management Journal, 11(1), 49-57. Oliver, R.L., Rust, R.T., & Varki, S., 1997. Customer delight: foundations, findings, and managerial insight. Journal of Retailing, 73(3), 311-336. Schlossberg, H. (1990, May 28). Satisfying customers is a minimum; you really have to delight them. Marketing News, 24. Read More