ISSN : 1738-3110
Purpose - Customer Delight is an important issue for firms and academia since delighted consumers reveal higher repurchase intentions than merely satisfied consumers and become loyal consumers. This research investigates customer delight, especially focusing on the role of surprise and attribute importance via experiment. Research design, data, and methodology - An experiment consisting of experiment, reference, and control group was performed with virtual online bookstore. For the analysis, one-way ANOVA and post-hoc analysis (LSD) were performed. Results - The experiment group that was delighted with surprise revealed the highest repurchase intention and recommendation intention among the other groups (H1 supported). Then each group was divided into attribute importance high and attribute importance low. For the group that was delighted in important attribute revealed higher repurchase and recommendation intention than the group that was delight in less important attribute (H2 supported). Conclusions - This research contributes academically for investigating the research area of customer delight and focusing on the role of surprise and attribute importance. For practical implications, this research provides information about customer delight and its several moderating variables that it is important to delight customers with surprising experience and focusing on an important attribute that consumers perceive not on a less important attribute.
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