Delighting Customers By Managing Expectations For Service Quality: An Example From The Optical Industry

Abstract

Customer satisfaction measurement and management has the overall objective of satisfying---perhaps even delightingcustomers. Exceeding expectations (i.e. going beyond basic customer satisfaction) is now widely recognized as an effective route to strategic, market-driven organizational behavior. In the current study, expectations of customers of a wholesale optical organization who were delighted with a suppliers total product and service offering were compared and contrasted with those who were not delighted but were still either satisfied, or somewhat satisfied, with the focal organizations performance.