Restoring Justice: The Moderating Role of AI Agent in Consumers’ Reactions to Service Recovery

Service failure is inevitable and service providers have a stake in minimizing the adverse consequences of service failure. As companies increasingly deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents to augment or substitute conventional human customer service agents, there are growing scholarly attempts to elucidate the role of AI agents in shaping consumers’ reactions to service recovery. Synthesizing extant literature on service failure and recovery with restorative justice, this study contextualizes restorative justice to service recovery and examine the interplay of recovery components with agent type (AI vs. human) on restorative justice. We then conducted a scenario-based online experiment to validate our hypothesized relationships. Analytical findings point to the positive effects of empathy and remorse on affective restorative justice, but these relationships are attenuated when they are conveyed by AI agents. Insights from this study hence extends our understanding of AI deployment in customer service and yields practical guidelines for AI agent developers.