The Negative Effect that Benefit Delay in Service Consumption Causes to a Customer and the Countermeasure Against It

Abstract

In the consumption of services such as education and medical care, there exists a time gap between when service activities to produce benefits are actually performed and when, as a result, a customer can really enjoy benefits generated by that service. We have conceptualized such time gap as Benefit Delay and categorized it into three types: Occurrence Delay, Perception Delay, and Achievement Delay. In cases where any or all of three types of delay occur after the service delivery process, Benefit Delay has serious negative effects on customer satisfaction and customer participation. Thus, the objective of this research is to develop a framework to systematically assess Benefit Delay. Furthermore, our research aims to uncover the negative effects that Benefit Delay may cause for customers, and to seek ways to reduce these effects. By literature review and pre-survey, we posit three types of benefits associated with services, which we label Functional Benefit, Emotional Benefit, and Perspective Benefit. We conducted the survey by questionnaire for patients with chronic diseases in Japan to discover which types of delay occurs in the enjoyment of each benefit, and how these delays in turn affect customer satisfaction and customer participation. We found that when any or all types of delay occur in delivery of Functional Benefit, customer satisfaction and customer participation can be still maintained by providing Perspective Benefit.