Although the long-running comedy show Saturday Night Live has countless memorable sketches, the ones often most beloved by fans, are the ones in which the characters “break”. In acting, “breaking” is when an actor breaks character (due to laughing or messing up a line), and it can often lead to a calamitous disruption of the whole scene. It is curious, one might notice, that the most revered sketches of this TV show are the ones in which the writing, acting, and premise of the scene go completely off the rails. This strange positive reaction to a major deviation in expectations is not just present in the world of late-night comedy, but also the service industry, and the first two chapters of this text provide an understanding of why it happens, …show more content…
Information overload occurs from the abundance of stimuli bombarding consumers in their day-to-day life, and the unhealthy stress that feeling overwhelmed created. Thus, to combat the stress, the brain creates certain defense mechanisms which help us ignore a large portion of these stressful stimuli. Satisficing, specifically, is the process of taking only just enough information to meet a need. This concept is important in the service industry because most routine service transactions occur while the consumer is in this “just attentive enough” state, ignoring most of their service transaction. Like the actors on SNL, consumers rely on scripts to tell them how to perform. However, the scripts consumers follow are hardwired sets of expectations and outcomes pulled from their memories of previous experiences. According to script theory, consumers retain memory about past service encounters and uses that as the script for their approach to any service process. Essentially, they have a schema for their role as customer, and then an expectation for the exchange that will occur, only shifting out of this predetermined script for dynamic …show more content…
As noted above, expectations are a part of the scripting process for consumers, meaning that they are so ingrained in the mind that they have become part of an autonomous decision making step-list. This is the baseline for Customer Satisfaction, a meeting of, and then exceeding of, predetermined expectations for the service transaction. The feeling of having one’s expectations exceeded is a cognitive feeling, based on perceptions, and elicits a more mechanical response. On the other hand, a script derivations create experiences and drive reactions, since you have a consumer’s full attention once they have been disengaged from auto-pilot. Positive surprises have been coined by service researchers as Customer Delight (which even sounds more fun than Customer Satisfaction), because they not only exceed expectations, but they provide something entirely new and unexpected. Customer Delight is marked by feelings of joy and excitement, and is accompanied by an affective response. Furthermore, reactions to positive surprises are immediate, and create a connection between the consumer and your offering, while feelings of being satisfied take longer to build loyalty. The jolt of a positive surprise makes a consumer feel surprised, connecting the experience to an actual sensation. Finally, perhaps the most fascinating piece of advice to take