Customer delight during a crisis: understanding delight through the lens of transformative service research

Abstract

PurposeThe unprecedented dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced firms to re-envision the customer experience and find new ways to ensure positive service encounters. This context has underscored the reality that drivers of customer delight in a “traditional” context are not the same in a crisis context. While research has tended to identify hedonic need fulfillment as key to customer well-being and, ultimately, to invoking customer delight, the majority of studies were conducted in inherently positive contexts, which may limit generalizability to more challenging contexts. Through the combined lens of transformative service research (TSR) and psychological theory on hedonic and eudaimonic human needs, we evaluate the extent to which need fulfillment is the root of customer well-being and that meeting well-being needs ultimately promotes delight. We argue that in crisis contexts, the salience of needs shifts from hedonic to eudaimonic and the extent to which service experiences fulfill eudaimonic needs determines the experience and meaning of delight.Design/methodology/approachUtilizing the critical incident technique, this research surveyed 240 respondents who were asked to explain in detail a time they experienced customer delight during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed their responses according to whether these incidents reflected the salience of hedonic versus eudaimonic need fulfillment.FindingsThe results support the notion that the salience of eudaimonic needs become more pronounced during times of crisis and that service providers are more likely to elicit perceptions of delight when they leverage meeting eudaimonic needs over the hedonic needs that are typically emphasized in traditional service encounters.Originality/valueWe discuss the implications of these findings for integrating the TSR and customer delight literatures to better understand how service experiences that meet salient needs produce customer well-being and delight. Ultimately, we find customer delight can benefit well-being across individual, collective and societal levels.

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Customer-perceived service wellbeing in a transformative framework: Research propositions in the area of health services

“…The combined lens of TSR and marketing logics on CPSW offers a sustainable and integrated view of addressing a more challenging context, i.e., COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing compels firms to redesign service platform and find ways to ensure positive service experience (Barnes et al, 2020 ). This crisis context has underlined the truth that drivers of customer satisfaction in a “traditional” context are not the same in a crisis context (Barnes et al, 2020 ; Prentice et al, 2021 ).…”

“…The COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing compels firms to redesign service platform and find ways to ensure positive service experience (Barnes et al, 2020 ). This crisis context has underlined the truth that drivers of customer satisfaction in a “traditional” context are not the same in a crisis context (Barnes et al, 2020 ; Prentice et al, 2021 ). The aspects of firms and customers factors reviewed and discussed in this paper are those associated with TSD.…”