Customer Delight: An Effective Weapon at Retailers to Fight Against Global Recession

Abstract

During this crucial period of global recession it is very essential for all businesses to maintain their loyal customers and save cost of new customer creation. The purpose of this study was to examine customer delight in a retail-shopping context. Specifically, the research was conducted to determine the sources of delightful shopping experiences for retail shoppers. Critical incident analysis of 200 depth interviews with shoppers revealed several factors associated with delightful shopping  experiences. Interviews with 25 retail outlet staff and owners revealed some interesting facts about the awareness and practices in the direction of customer delight. The first section of the paper addresses the  importance of customer delight especially on the background of global recession, and in second section the analysis of survey results and a number of strategic implications and suggestions are discussed. It is  found that store attributes such as quality of merchandise, cooperative sales staff, surprise gifts, discounts, availability of rare product delights the customer. Further limitations and directions for future research are  also addressed.