Trust and forgiveness in service: effects of single and double deviations with human and robot staff

This study investigates how customer forgiveness and trust can be gained following single and double deviation by human and robot employees. We used a video-based experiment and recruited residents of the United States (n = 281) and United Kingdom (n = 380) from crowd-sourced platforms. Participants imagined themselves in a hypothetical hotel check-in experience. A three-way analysis of variance, analysis of simple effects, and moderated mediation were conducted. When service failure is handled promptly (single deviation), compensation does not increase customer forgiveness for both human and robot employees. However, when there is a delay in handling service failure (double deviation), compensation increases customer forgiveness for human (vs. robot) employees only. This study makes an early attempt to dissect customer responses to single deviation versus double deviation by human and robot employees. Hospitality practitioners can devise an optimal strategy for adopting human or robot employees when recovering from different service failure situations.