Thanks for your comment, and sorry for my slow response. For some reason, I failed to notice your comment on my blog dashboard and just now saw it.

I think to some degree what we’re each discussing differs only in semantics. In the end, we’re both talking about the need to deliver quality experiences for our customers as the best way to grow our businesses.

Unfortunately, the term “customer satisfaction” has been overused to the point that its definition is now fairly muddy. I like to look at it as the degree to which the actual experience matches a customer’s expectations.

Of course, how you define satisfaction also dictates how you measure it. At ForeSee Results, we have some very strong data that shows our way of measuring customer satisfaction (using the American Customer Satisfaction Index methodology)is absolutely predictive of someone’s likelihood to become more loyal, buy more and recommend.

All that said, I like the term “customer delight” as well. I think it has some emotional impact that helps us all understand the importance of a quality experience. The better the experiences we provide, the more likely we will be to generate customer retention, loyalty and referral. In the way we measure “satisfaction” I think “delight” would be a very high point on the scale. And the higher the score, the more likely to retention and referral.

As the Wikipedia article said, “Satisfaction is simply the foundation, and the minimum requirement, for a continuing relationship with customers.” That statement might be even clearer in its opposite form: It is not possible to continue relationships with customers without satisfaction.

Thanks again for your excellent perspective and for reading and contributing to my blog.

I enjoyed your post, after being directed to it by a post from Bryan Eisenberg. It may be that we are simply using different terms for the same concept, but there is plenty of research that has found ‘satisfied’ customers do not display higher-than-average levels of retention/loyalty.

I believe that a more useful concept in evaluating customers’ views on the service they’ve received is that of ‘customer delight’. Satisfaction suggests to me a fulfillment of needs, rather than positive and emotional response to a customer experience.

Customer satisfaction, in my view, is equivalent to possessing ‘order qualifiers’ or ‘hygiene’ factors. Customer delight is an experience worth of remark – or referral to others – and is commensurate with ‘order winners’.

If we simply aim for customer satisfaction as retailers we will fail our customers, only ‘customer delight’ can generate referrals, loyal customers and experiences worth sharing on Facebook, Twitter et al.

That said, I am ‘delighted’ with your blog and will be reading it on a regular basis.

Best wishes

Dan Croxen-John
Applied Web Analytics