"The Customer Delight Principle presents a step-by-step program for taking your company further up the customer satisfaction continuum, from a reliance on the satisfaction-maintaining characteristics that customers increasingly take for granted to a focus on unexpected, customer delight-creating attributes. Timothy Keiningham and Terry Vavra unveil a customer delight principle based on real-world findings that include: perceived costs of negative outcomes to a customer and how they far outweigh the perceived benefit from expected outcomes; the nonlinear relationship between perceived performance and customer satisfaction, in which customer attitude changes follow a classic diminishing-returns model; and case studies of FedEx Custom Critical, Toys "R" Us, Mercedes-Benz USA, and others on determining the delight-creating attributes of a product or service - then concentrating performance-improvement efforts in those areas."--BOOK JACKET.