Content area
Full Text
When Roche Diagnostics adopted a strategy to move customers beyond satisfaction and market share, profitability soared.
Throughout this decade, interest in monitoring and improving customer satisfaction has intensified among both academics and practitioners. For practitioners in particular, customer satisfaction matters only to the extent that it affects customer behavior, through higher customer retention, favorable word-of-mouth, or increased purchases (e.g., increased share-of-wallet). As a result, considerable research has been done to understand the relationship between customer satisfaction and perceived service quality and consequences, including behavioral intentions, customer retention and product/service usage, word-of-mouth, and financial outcomes.
Recently, researchers and practitioners started to theorize that different levels exist beyond "mere satisfaction" that can result in significantly better behavioral outcomes (i.e., retention, word of mouth, and shareof-wallet) and therefore have important financial implications for businesses. It has been proposed that customers have a range of satisfaction, referred to as a "zone of tolerance," and within which differences between firms with regard to customers' satisfaction doesn't produce much change in customer behavior, and therefore business results. However, it is believed that moving satisfaction scores beyond the upper threshold of this zone of tolerance creates exceptional results. For managers, this level of customer satisfaction commonly is referred to as "customer delight." And for many companies, customer delight has become a strategic imperative. For instance, Michael Bonsignore, CEO of Honeywell Inc. has said: "Only when we were able to link quality process means to the customer delight end were we finally able to integrate TQM (Total Quality Management) into our culture."
Colby H. Chandler, former chairman and CEO, Eastman Kodak Co. has said: "Going beyond satisfaction to customer delight will provide a distinct advantage to the company that does it first and does it well consistently."
Some evidence supports the behavioral benefits of moving customers beyond mere satisfaction. As reported in Jones and Sasser's much cited Harvard Business Review article (see Additional Readings, page 63), for example, researchers found that Xerox Corp.'s "totally satisfied" customers were six times more likely to repurchase the company's products over the following 18 months than customers who rated themselves as merely "satisfied." Despite the increasing managerial emphasis on customer delight's benefits, however, little exists in corresponding research in the academic literature. Academics have long...