Satisfaction is all to do with the meeting of expectations - if you meet them I am satisfied - if you fail to meet them I am disappointed, but if you exceed them I can be delighted.

These expectation will be different from one person to another.

In fact, expectations are highly context-specific and changes depending on my individual previous experience - I would expect a nice restaurant to be faultless, but I expect a bank to be a right pain. Thus if a bank just does what is says it's going to do I am delighted rather then merely satisfied as I might be in the restaurant example.

It is the perceived satisfaction gap that defines the degree of satisfaction.

A negative gap means standards were less than you expected - dissatisfaction, a positive gap means you were delighted and no gap at all means you were satisfied.

In attempting to create customer delight, it will be greatly more efficient if a company first measures the expectations of its customers and the marketplace in general.

Once the level of expectation is known, then a judgement can be made on the level of effort required to create delight in the customer. This avoids the situation where a massive, but unnecessary, investment is made, for example where expectations are already low and so a high standard is not required.

The focus of a customer service strategy should be to first minimise the (more powerful) advertising from negative perceived satisfaction gaps and then to maximise the advertising from positive satisfaction gaps.

This also impacts in measuring customer satisfaction. Traditional surveys measure an absolute number by asking the customer to rate something out of ten. A more sophisticated tool would be to measure the gap between expectations and actuality by rating both out of ten. When you study the gap you can see both what customers think of something and how important is to them for you to fix it.

Some examples:






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