MIT Sloan Management Review

Service and Quality

 

Understanding Customer Delight and Outrage

By Benjamin Schneider and David E. Bowen

October 15, 1999

Service businesses can retain customers and achieve profitability by building reciprocal relationships founded on safeguarding and affirming customer security, fairness, and self-esteem.

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Delivering quality to customers in a competitive marketplace dictates the need to continually enhance a customer’s experience and satisfaction. However, evidence indicates that satisfying customers is not enough to retain them because even satisfied customers defect at a high rate in many industries. For example, Xerox found that its “totally satisfied” customers were six times more likely to repurchase Xerox products during the following eighteen months than its “merely satisfied” customers were. “Totally satisfied” ranks only two scale points higher than “merely satisfied,” although it earns six times more loyalty. Apparently, the scales that researchers commonly use to measure satisfaction do not translate linearly into outcomes such as loyalty in terms of purchases. This also suggests that businesses must strive for 100 percent, or total, customer satisfaction and even delight to achieve the kind of loyalty they desire.1

Current studies attribute a higher degree of emotionality to the opposite end of the satisfaction continuum — that is, to dissatisfaction — than was true in the past. For example, Bell and Zemke suggest that customers who have experienced service failures fall into two categories — annoyed and victimized. They define “annoyance” as minor irritation associated with a promise not fully realized; a feeling of “victimization” is characterized by a major feeling of “ire, frustration, and/or... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

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