Compare two companies within the automobile industry: one that is known for exceeding expectations (delight) and another that reflects simply positive satisfaction.What influenced the customer perceptions of performance (expectations, quality, responsiveness, price)?

Jan Carlson, a former Scandinavian Airlines executive, was famous for promoting the concept of "delighted" customers. Carlson's idea was that delighting customers by exceeding their expectations should result in both repeat business and positive word of mouth for a firm.

Establishing appropriate expectations in the minds of customers is a function of the prepurchase communications the seller has with them. If you set the expectations too low, people won't buy your offering. But if you set the expectations too high, you run the risk that your buyers will be dissatisfied.

A common saying in business is "underpromise and overdeliver." In other words, set consumers' expectations a bit low, and then exceed those expectations in order to create delighted customers who are enthusiastic about your product. A seller hopes that enthusiastic customers will tell their friends about the seller's offering, spreading lots of positive word of mouth about it.

One customer satisfaction strategy that grew out of Carlson's idea of delighting customers is to empower customer-facing personnel. Customer-facing personnel are employees that meet and interact with customers. In a hotel, this might include desk clerks, housekeepers, bellmen, and other staff. Empowering these employees to drop what they're doing in order to do something special for a customer, for example, can certainly delight customers. In some organizations, employees are even given a budget for such activities.

Ritz-Carlton employees each have an annual budget that can be spent on customer service activities, such as paying for dry cleaning if a customer spilled red wine on clothing in the hotel's restaurant. Sewell Cadillac dealerships in Texas are noted for customer service. An employee will even pick up a customer up on a Sunday if a Sewell-purchased car breaks down, and the same salesperson who sold the car might be the person who handles such a task. To Sewell, customer service is too important to trust to another companya company that perhaps won't feel the same sense of urgency to keep car buyers as satisfied as Sewell does.

Companies like Ritz-Carlton also monitor Twitter and other social media so that any problems can be identified in real time. For example, one newlywed tweeted that the view outside her window of another wall was no way to spend a honeymoon. A Ritz-Carlton employee caught the tweet, and employees at the hotel responded with a room upgrade.