Contact: Phil Hearn
Satisfied customers may not be enough to keep businesses turning a profit in today's competitive marketplace, where discriminating shoppers increasingly seek more intense emotional rewards.
They want more than satisfaction, a new study reveals. They want delight.
"While many retail firms have focused on improving quality to satisfy their customers, the changes in the retail landscape in recent years now demand much more of retailers," researchers from three universities point out in their joint marketing study.
Jason E. Lueg and Nicole Ponder, assistant professors of marketing in Mississippi State University's College of Business and Industry, are two of the study's four authors. Their collaborators include Mark J. Arnold of Saint Louis University's Cook School of Business and Kristy E. Reynolds of Louisiana State University's Ourso College of Business Administration.
Their study, "Customer Delight in a Retail Context: Investigating Delightful and Terrible Shopping Experiences," will be published in an upcoming Journal of Business Research.
"Generating satisfied customers simply may not be enough in a marketplace characterized by intense competition, broad product assortment, convenient retail locations, and 24/7 shopping anytime, anywhere on the Internet," the researchers say, pointing out modern customers "expect to be satisfied."
"Hence, while retailers have built an acute understanding of how to create satisfied customers with quality goods and services, the results presented here provide firms with specific factors to concentrate on in going beyond satisfaction and creating delighted customers," the researchers assert.
The researchers performed a critical incident analysis of 113 in-depth interviews with shoppers in a qualitative study aimed at determining the sources of delightful and terrible shopping experiences. They discuss a number of strategic implications designed to help retailers who experience trouble connecting satisfaction to the "bottom line."
As the report outlines, "Customers are satisfied when the company can avoid problems (i.e., the 'zero defects' mentality). But to keep customers for the long run, companies must do more."
Going beyond satisfaction efforts to achieve customer delight in a retail setting, the researchers maintain, requires business managers to adopt new marketing approaches that not only ensure basic customer needs for security, justice and self-esteem, but evoke such secondary emotions as joy, surprise, arousal, and pleasure.
According to their findings, "The key to deploying delight-producing strategies lies in the selective use of such approaches. One way this can be accomplished is by empowering employees to take advantage of opportunities to go the 'extra mile' or do something special for a customer when the opportunity arises.
"Retailers such as Kmart, long plagued by poor customer service, are beginning to build such 'customer centric' service organizations by focusing on hiring extra associates per store and increasing the contact time that employees spend with customers," they say.
The study identified two major groups of factors apparently associated with delightful shopping experiences: interpersonal, often attributed to the actions of a salesperson or service provider; and non-interpersonal, usually related to product procurement or value attainment.
"Interpersonal effort and interpersonal engagement, or lack thereof, each account for large percentages of the total number of critical incidents for both the delightful (39.8 percent and 25.7 percent, respectively) and terrible (28.3 percent and 35.4 percent respectively) shopping experiences," the report says. "Information such as this can be useful in frontline employee training and performance rewards."
Unique product assortment, alignment of assortments to match targeted consumers, desire of customers to identify with certain stores, hands-on shopping accessibility and entertainment are cited as "other delight factors" in the study.
"While consumers are often fickle about the brands they buy and stores they patronize, they are adamant about the ones they do not buy," the report states.
MSU's Nicole Ponder said she found it interesting that study respondents reacted more strongly to negative shopping experiences.
"When asked to recall a terrible experience, respondents got really animated and detailed," she said. "They were much more passionate about their terrible experience than they were about their delightful experience. That likely stems from the perceived injustice they felt as a result of the service, or lack of service, they received from the retailer."