Dr. Darrel Edwards, Ph.D.
Founder and Chairman
Strategic Vision

Understanding that measuring satisfaction among new vehicle owners alone was not enough, Strategic Vision introduces the new Customer Delight Index (CDI). The concept and the Edwards Delight Scale were developed by Dr. Darrel Edwards, Founder and Chairman of Strategic Vision, Inc. a San Diego, CA based consultancy. The new metric helps product planners design Delightful vehicles that will create the commitment and loyalty their organizations need in a competitive marketplace. It also guides marketing and communication in creating a leverageable position for their brands. From the Customer Delight Index comes the Customer Delight Award. It is presented annually to vehicles deemed Most Delightful by consumers.

The key to understanding Delight was uncovering the fact that "Satisfaction" means that the manufacturer has fulfilled the basic contract with the customer. Even being "Completely Satisfied" does not capture the full emotional response of the customer to a product or service. "Satisfaction" thus becomes the midpoint of our Delight Scale.

Delight is a more positive emotional response than simply "Completely Satisfied," "Excellent" or "Outstanding." You can create an Excellent vehicle without Delighting the customer. When you Delight your customer, you create a strong emotional response that commits the customer to the product, brand or manufacturer. Commitment leads to loyalty. The customer chooses the brand or manufacturer whenever possible. A brand to which there is commitment is always considered if the manufacturer has a product to meet the needs of the customers.

Dan Gorrell, former Strategic Vision Vice President and Partner-in-Charge of Automotive, has been associated with the automotive for over 25 years. He has noted continually that the auto industry talks a lot about Delighting their customers, but nobody had created a means of explicitly measuring this facet of the customers' experiences. The Edwards Delight Scale has creatively met this challenge. Dan proposes that Delight is critical to all manufacturers forced to intensively compete in a full market place. For some, creating Delight is crucial. Otherwise, they face the risk of losing market share or even going out of business."

Strategic Vision's 2006 Customer Delight Index was calculated from the responses of more than 95,000 new vehicle owners who made their purchases between September 2005 and April of 2006. They had owned their vehicles for at least 90 days before they were surveyed. The primary driver of the vehicle is measured.

The Customer Delight metric is significantly different from the Total Quality measures that Dr. Edwards created in 1994. Customer Delight concentrates on the product experience. The firm’s Total Quality Index measures the outcome associated with Delighting your customers. TQI captures the response to the product, the dealership experience, and the overall emotional response to the Quality of the vehicle. CDI focuses on a "top box" response measuring the ability of specific attributes and benefits of the product to be "Delightful." This makes the calculation more sensitive to the intensity of the emotional response to specific product aspects that are necessary to create buyer commitment and loyalty. The key for manufacturers is to know your target and Delight your customers.

The Index captures the total impact that product has on the customers. Scores typically range from 400-700. The new metric refreshes the measurement that older scales were missing. Most reported indices in the industry are reported at the top between 800-900. Customer Delight has broken through these "topped" scaling procedures.

The interpretive summary of 2006 Customer Delight is available in Adobe PDF form

The Edwards Delight Scale

De•light (Webster) v 1: to allure 2: to give great pleasure (SVI) v 3: to take one beyond satisfaction 4: to create a significant emotional response in personally meaningful ways.

The computational model was designed to maximize the impact of the scores on purchase decisions, purchase intent and loyalty. In our model, a feature is either rated "Delightful," or it is not; only the top-box response from a 5-point Delight scale is used. Only the top box score measures Delight as a "stepwise" judgment above "Excellent." The customers readily understand the differences.

1 Failure

2 Unsatisfactory

3 Satisfactory

4 Excellent

5 Delightful

This scale has been proven in numerous studies to create a greater degree of discrimination and outcome validity, and yields a more useful result than typical "Satisfaction" scales (or variations of satisfaction scales). We measure how Delightful targeted aspects of a vehicle are. While all points on the scale can be used for various analyses and average measures are useful, the dichotomous nature of the Index has proven most useful.

Consumers have readily responded using the scale. They show an intuitive grasp of the meaning of the differences in measuring aspects of a vehicle that are "Satisfactory," "Excellent" or "Delightful."

Op•por•tu•ni•ty (Webster) n 1: moving forward toward a better harbor or place at the right time. (SVI) n 2: the art, politics, and practice of acting when a favorable juncture or circumstance presents itself.

Once we have a measure of Delight for each aspect of each vehicle, we can turn our attention to defining the Opportunity that a brand has to improve their position by enhancing those aspects of their product that will lead to a leverageable position.

• Opportunity is more than what your strength happens to be.
• You may have only a small distance left to improve your current strengths.
• Opportunity indicates what you can change to make the most positive gain for your product and with your customers.
• Correct opportunity (if taken) strengthens Delight creating Commitment and strengthening Loyalty.

Opportunity is the measure of the influence of specific attributes on overall Delight for each selected vehicle. Dr. Edwards has been a leading voice heralding that Opportunity is "leverageable": the change is "important" to the segment and there is room to move positively away from the segment competitors and towards the Ideal. How important each aspect of a vehicle is on a segment-by-segment basis is calculated. The influence of each variable is calculated to capture the impact of positive "improvement" of each variable and the influence of any other variables that are associated with targeted variables. When you improve one aspect of a vehicle, other positive impressions are often created about aspects of the vehicle that were not directly changed. For example: increasing acceleration may also influence perceptions of quality and durability of a vehicle. In addition, the measures also indicate what other factors might also be changed to maximize the impact of changes in a vehicle: if you opt to change interior door handles, you might multiple your impact if you also improve the intuitive orientation of the switches that lower and raise the windows or lock the doors. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

In the work being done at Strategic Vision, Inc., specific direction to Delight your customers is available and the Opportunity to create leverage is defined. Working hand-in-hand, these two concepts create winning positions.

From the concepts have come software to facilitate exploring hypothetical scenarios.