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WOM (Arndt, 1967). Technical Assistance Research Program (1986, p. 4), for example, reported that dissatisfied customers are likely to tell twice as many people as satisfied customers. Desatnick (1987), citing research conducted especially for the White House Office of the Consumer Affairs asserted that 90% or more who are dissatisfied with the service they receive will not buy again or come back. Worse still, each of individuals unhappy customers will tell his or her story to at least 9 additional people, and 13%of those unhappy former customers will tell their stories to more than 20 people'. It is not reported to how many these WOM recipients retell the story.

Arndt (1967) was one of the earliest researchers into the influence of WOM on consumer behavior. He characterized WOM as verbal, person-to-person communication between a receiver and a communicator whom the receiver perceives as non-commercial, concerning a brand, product or service.

According to File et al. (1994) not only the valence but also the volume of post-purchase WOM can be affected by management efforts. These authors cited evidence that the measured impacts of complaints management processes, service recovery programs and unconditional service assurance on post-purchase WOM is clear evidence that management can influence the occurrence and direction of WOM.

There is some early evidence that WOM is driven not only by product service performance but by dissatisfaction with the purchasing process (Tanner, 1996).

Hirschman (1970) proposed that customers have two options when countenance with unmet expectations: voice their dissatisfaction or leave the relationship. There is general support for the contention that customers dissatisfied with durables will exhibit higher levels of voice and lower levels of exit than for non-durables (Watkins and Liu, 1996). Singh (1990) explained this phenomenon in terms of the relative investment of the customer in the product=service and, thus, the value of any redress.

Customer delight can be defined as “an emotion, characterized by high levels of joy and surprise, felt by a customer towards a company or its offering (product/ service)” (Kumar 1996, p. 9). Thus, customer delight is defined as a rather positive emotional state towards the purchase/consumption experience, generally derived from the surprisingly positive disconfirmation level of perceived performance (Oliver et al. 1997; Rust and Oliver 2000). Delight would be characterized as an emotion made up of cognitive and affective aspects, including here surprise (Kumar 1996). In this sense, Izard (1997) clarifies that even the cognitive concepts inherent in satisfaction and, consequently, in customer delight - such as need and desire -, and its comparative standards are considered affective by nature or, at least, as having an affective component.

The differentiation basically occurs at an arousal level of the positive emotional response: at a low level there lies satisfaction; at a high level, delight (Oliver and Westbrook 1993).

As Plutchik's (1980) research and the circumplex model of emotions appears to be one of the earliest and most common source for labeling delight as a combination of joy and surprise, we review the work of which led Plutchik to conclude that delight was comprised of joy and surprise.Plutchik carried out two studies to determine what emotions resulted