Customer Dissatisfaction and Delight: Completely Different Concepts, or Part of a Satisfaction Continuum?

IntroductionCustomer satisfaction is one of the key elements of a company's financial performance and profitability (Anderson and Fornell, 1994; Fornell, 1992). However, although customer satisfaction has been a relevant concept since the 19th century (Hussain et al., 2011), literature abounds with confusing and often contradictory definitions. In fact, satisfaction has been conceptualized in time as a process, the result of a process, cognitive evaluation, affective evaluation, general sentiment of fulfilment and even as having conative elements. Still, none of these definitions has been accepted by the scientific community. In fact, in our opinion, the closest a researcher can get to defining satisfaction is by expanding on the framework provided by Giese and Cote (2000) for each individual study:1. Satisfaction is a summary affective response, based on a cognitive evaluation, which has a variable intensity - the holistic nature of satisfaction;2. The central point of satisfaction can be the moment of choosing, acquiring or consuming the product and/or the service;3. The determining point of satisfaction varies according to context, but its general duration is limited - the temporal existence of satisfaction.The proposed framework brings into focus the affective aspect of the defining satisfaction (Pizam and Ellis, 1999), but it does not eliminate the importance of cognitive evaluation in determining satisfaction - it underlines that although reasoning might form the basis of satisfaction, it is not satisfaction itself.However, even with this framework, the lack of scientific consensus on what customer satisfaction really is, creates three major problems in customer satisfaction research. The fact that there is no clear definition of the concept has resulted in not having an accepted standard regarding how the concept should be measured in a given context, and that in turn it makes the results provided by a particular research hard to compare with other results on the same subject. For a long time these problems have affected the structure and the outcomes reported by marketing research on customer satisfaction, as the degree in which study results from a specific research can be generalized, explained, justified and compared is limited.To make matters more confusing, customer satisfaction literature has also introduced two other concepts: customer dissatisfaction and customer delight, which also lack a proper definition. And while these terms are clearly linked with customer satisfaction, the nature of the relationship between them - if they are faces of the same construct of different notions - has yet to be determined.Because of this, the aim of the current paper is to make a thorough literature review that will provide the reader with a clearer view on the relationship between customer satisfaction, dissatisfaction and delight. And while the current study lacks a practical component, the theoretical aspects explored in it should help researchers develop better measurements for adequate research instruments, which in turn will lead to a better understanding of customer behaviour in general, and customer satisfaction in particular.Customer dissatisfactionWhen compared with the literature on satisfaction, the concept of dissatisfaction has been the focus of a far fewer numbers of studies. Usually analyzed in comparison with satisfaction, most of the articles have tried to discover whether there is a one-dimensional link between satisfaction and dissatisfaction, or if the concepts are actually different dimensions. Because of that, researchers have tried to conceptualize and operationalise dissatisfaction as either the opposite of satisfaction (e.g.: completely satisfied/completely dissatisfied (Mittal et al., 1999); very satisfied/ very dissatisfied (Spreng et al., 1996)); or as different dimensions (Mano and Oliver, 1993; Westbrook and Oliver, 1991). …