Customer Responses to Service Robots – Comparing Human-Robot Interaction with Human-Human Interaction

This paper investigates how service failures affect customers by comparing human-robot interactions with human-human interactions.More specifically, it compares customers' satisfaction in a service robot interaction depending on a service failure with the customers' satisfaction in a frontline service employee interaction.On a theoretical basis, extant literature on the uncanny valley paradigm proposed that service robots would create lower satisfaction than human frontline employees would.However, I find that service robots could keep up with human frontline employees.Based on an extensive literature research on service failures, I propose that customer satisfaction after a service failure declines far less for a human frontline employee compared with a service robot.Nevertheless, I find evidence that service robots create even higher customer satisfaction than human frontline employees after the exactly similar service failure.I base my findings on an experimental laboratory study with 120 student participants and the service robot "Pepper" from Softbank Corp.