Consequences And Antecedents Of Customer Delight In Service Context

With the rapid development of the service industry, service companies face with the serious challenge in the competitive environment. The practice experiences have confirmed that customer delgiht is a critical factor influencing customer consumption psychology and consumption behaviours, which is also the real source of improving customer loyalty and increasing profits for service companies. Hence, it is essential to explore consequences and antecedents of customer delight for service companies. Ther are too many studies on this field. Even though, the researchers need to examine existing research findings in order to identify difference between conclusions.Based on the existing research findings, therefore, this study further explores consequences and antecedents of customer delight in service context. The primary works are presented as follows:(1) The study discusses the moderating effects of service context, switching cost, and social relation of customer with service firm on the relationship between customer delight and customer loyalty. Based on a customer survey for the service of supermarkets and beauty parlor, the results by structural equation multi-group analysis show that these moderator variables have significant effects on the relationship between customer delight and customer loyalty. Also, service context has significant interactions with other factors on the relationship.(2) This study develops a scale of service esteem need based on the methods of critical incident analysis, content analysis, and surveys, which includes two dimensions and13items to be used to measure service other-esteem need and service self-esteen need. Additionally, this instrument has been tested to have good performance on content validity, internal consistency, convergent, and discriminant validity.(3) The study discusses the effect of service esteem needs on customer delight. Based on a customer survey for the service of supermarkets, this study explores the effect of service esteem needs on customer delight.The results by structural equation model show that service esteem need negatively and significantly affect arousal and pleasure level, which the latter mediates the effect of arousal on customer delight.(4) In terms of customer process flow, this study explores its effect on customer delight. Taking present fruit as an example, given the explanation for supporting the validity of presenting fruit at the fore-end of dining based on sequences of events preference mechanism and variety-seeking mechanism, experiment studies are conducted to see if it is reasonably valid in terms of customer delight utility evaluation. The results indicate that the customer delight utility evaluation for presenting fruit at fore-end of dining is higher than that at middle-end and back-end. Additionally, result shows that the high effect of customer delight at fore-end of dinning is not dominated by variety-seeking mechanism but sequences of events preference mechanism. That is to say, customer process flow has significant effect on customer delight utility.