Investigating the Employee’s Perspective of Customer Delight

With ever-increasing expectations from customers, sales managers need to assess if trying to delight customers is a worthy pursuit. While the concept of delight has been studied from both customer and management perspectives, the employee’s perspective has not been evaluated with the same intensity. To explore this underresearched area, the authors performed critical incident studies of frontline employees (FLEs) to understand their perceptions of what it means to delight customers, and how in turn these perceptions affect psychological and behavioral states of employees. The results of this analysis revealed that employees who delighted customers experienced improved customer orientation and increased job skills. In addition, many FLEs experienced an emotional contagion of positive emotions from a customer during a delightful experience. The authors also investigated the difference between employees’ perceptions of delight and satisfaction, thereby providing a comparison of how the two levels impact employee performance.