How firms can create delightful customer experience? Contrasting roles of future reward uncertainty

The recent emergence of customer experience management has sparked renewed interest in customer delight. Building upon social comparison theory and the uncertainty literature, this research examines a dual-path model (surprise and exclusivity) for creating delightful customer experience through bolstering self-enhancement and a contrasting moderating effect of future reward uncertainty in reward programs. We posit that a surprise (vs. exclusive) reward has a positive effect on customer delight through self-enhancement, but only when perceived uncertainty of receiving a similar reward in the future is high (vs. low). We verify our predictions with data from a laboratory experiment and a field survey, supplemented with multiple waves of customers’ actual behavioral loyalty data and confirm the impacts of customer delight on attitudinal (repeat and WOM intentions) and behavioral (both short- and long-term) loyalty. Our findings offer companies actionable managerial guidelines for building customer loyalty through creating delightful customer experience.