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FEATURE
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Is customer delight enough to inspire loyalty?
Feeling connected is more important
CUSTOMERS
DELIVERING service so excellent that the
customer’s expectations have been met
and exceeded has long been the goal of
businesses.
On the scale of service, the aspirational
pinnacle has been to delight the customer
because delight, after all, is a step above excellence
and way beyond plain satisfaction.
Modern consumers like to identify strongly
with the brands and businesses they engage
with, and in many cases customers have a
significant input into creating the experience
through their own interaction with the brand,
employees and other customers.
More than ever before, customers are
investing themselves in the brands they use.
If the customer is delighted the business
assumes they will come back again, and not
only that, they will tell their friends and family
about their experience, too.
But while it might be the top of the
service delivery hierarchy, does delighting the
customer actually serve the ultimate purpose:
which is to drive loyalty to the brand and
ensure repeat business?
It was in this context that three researchers
from UNSW Business School decided to test
the hypotheses that making customers “feel
connected” might actually be more productive
than making them “feel delighted”.
Senior lecturer Mathew Chylinski and
associate professor Liem Viet Ngo worked
with PhD candidate Jake An to examine three
real-life examples to discover whether delight
or connectedness were the best drivers of
loyalty.
“Although 89% of service firms aim to
delight customers by exceeding customers’ expectations,
delighting customers does not lead
to measurable gains in repurchase intention or
word of mouth,” the team reports.
New sensibility
The researchers focused on three business
operations where customers were heavily
involved, and had a significant investment in
the outcome through their own participation
– higher degree research education at UNSW,
a fitness gym, and a US online gaming community.
Detailed questionnaires were created and
distributed to each group, with 191 respondents
from UNSW, 142 from the fitness gym,
and 316 from the online gamers.
“The initial position we had was to look at
the different kinds of emotions customers can
feel,” explains Ngo.
“They can feel satisfied and delighted, but
ultimately the goal is for them to feel connected
and have an emotional attachment to
the brand, and we wanted to understand what
the drivers for this were.
“And we wanted to look at examples where
customers actively engage with the service,
where they have to put in effort to receive an
outcome, and understand which emotions are
most influential in driving their loyalty.”
According to Chylinski, the “new sensibility”
in marketing is around engaging the
customer.
“Passive services have been well studied,
but we wanted to study active participation
where the customer has to put effort into
the service to achieve some kind of outcome
for themselves because active engagement
is what both firms and customers strive for
these days,” Chylinski says.
Fellow researcher An makes the point that
the customer can be “much more powerful
than ever before largely due to social media
and the internet”.
“Customers today can be content creators
and distributors, and that is one reason why
marketing has changed its thinking on some
issues, and our project is around some of
these changes,” An says.
Arms race against expectations
From the results, the researchers were able
to measure the behavioural intentions of loyalty.
Customer delight was consistently outperformed
as a driver of loyalty by measures
of customer commitment and participation.
Feelings of community and closeness to
other students, gym members, gamers and
also staff were found to be more important
factors in the context where customers actively
engage with the service.
An overall finding was that “focusing
on building customers’ emotional commitment
is more effective than trying to delight
customers for achieving a long-term business
success”.
“
Affective commitment
Affective commitment
to a brand is a stronger
predictor of repurchase
intention and brand
advoc acy than customer
delight. Evidence suggests
that connectedness
between customers and
service employees can shift
to a brand or service.”
According to the authors: “Affective commitment
to a brand is a stronger predictor
of repurchase intention and brand advocacy
than customer delight. Evidence suggests
that connectedness between customers and
service employees can shift to a brand or
service.”
As Chylinski describes it, “delighting the
customer is not all it’s cracked up to be”.
“Delighting the customer is also costly
for a business,” he says, noting that it often requires
significant resources and in many cases
the feeling of delight is difficult to repeat.
“So when you understand that it doesn’t
have as much of an impact on loyalty as
befriending a customer and building relationships,
it is probably something of a misguided
approach.
“Every firm has limited resources and has
to invest them in the most effective way, and
though delighting customers will generate
happiness, it won’t necessarily generate a lot
of loyalty.”
By delivering “delight”, adds Chylinski,
businesses run the risk of “setting the bar too
high”.
“Not only do you have to anticipate the
customers’ preferences, but you have to exceed
them every time you interact and that is
very difficult for businesses to achieve.
“As what you deliver increases in its quality
and delight, the customers will simply
adjust to getting additional benefits and
[expect] them. So in many ways it puts you in
a constant arms race against the customers’
expectations,” says Chylinski.
Relational bonds
According to Ngo, a more productive way
forward is for businesses to be more “parsimonious”
in terms of the resources they allocate.
“Our research shows that encouraging a
sense of relatedness is less costly, and more
cost effective than investing in delight,” he says.
“Delighting customers is about providing
more benefits, and that is very different to
establishing a relational bond where you show
a sense of caring.”
In creating this bond, the two major factors
were social media and positive interaction
with employees.
Social media creates a community in
which people are able to actively participate
and find a sense of identity. It means the customer
has something of themselves invested in
the brand, and is a key part of the engagement.
Employees are also critical points of contact
who, in many situations, are the brand’s
key representatives.
“A brand is an abstract form of relationship,”
says Chylinski.
“The most concrete relationship is between
the customer and employee, and that is
the starting point for the relationship with the
brand.
“Businesses still have to provide quality
services and products, but the lesson is that
the best way to form lasting loyalty is to foster
this sense of relatedness, and invest in building
these relationships.”
This article was first published in Business
Think, the online business analysis journal of
UNSW Business School.
WESTERN SYDNEY BUSINESS ACCESS SEPTEMBER 2015
UWS Internship Program
Celebrating 20 Years 1995 – 2015
We can arrange for a motivated student
or recent graduate from any of the range
of disciplines offered at UWS to complete
a short or long term work placement at
your organisation for a modest cost.
The UWS internship program is a flexible
service and we are happy to tailor a
program to suit your requirements.
http://uws.edu.au/internship_program
If you would like further information, please
contact Judy Holman, Business Partnership
Facilitator via email at j.holman@uws.edu.au
or phone (02) 4736 0388.
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