Promoting customer loyalty in the mobile service industry in South Africa: The roles of satisfaction and delight

Despite the widely acknowledged relationships between customer satisfaction, delight, and loyalty, there is a gap in the current literature of how they manifest in an emerging market context. This study seeks to redress this by examining customer delight arousal and delight pleasure as post-consumption experiences predicted by customer satisfaction and seeks to validate empirically the nexus between these factors and customer loyalty to mobile service providers in an emerging African economy. Using data obtained from self-administered surveys with 500 customers of South African mobile service providers, this study employs the partial least squares structural equation modelling technique to validate the measurement model and examine the theorised relationships between the constructs. The findings suggest that satisfaction has multiple associations with customer delight arousal, delight pleasure, and loyalty. The results pinpoint that customer arousal is positively related to customer delight pleasure. In fact, the results emphasise that delight arousal and delight pleasure are heightened levels of satisfaction and that satisfaction and customer delight are associated with customer loyalty. Furthermore, the findings show that customers’ delight pleasure and delight arousal are complementary mediators in the satisfaction-customer association. This study addresses a gap in current literature by presenting and validating an alternative model that investigates the interplay of customer satisfaction, delight arousal, and delight pleasure in predicting customer loyalty in a technology service context in an emerging African country.