Customer experience with service robots: the role of artificial empathy

Description of the research

The market for service robots (e.g., chatbots, virtual assistants, service robots) is projected to grow from $5.7 billion in 2020 to $32.62 billion by 2030, representing an annual growth of 18.9% (Forbes, 2022). In this context, customers increasingly interact with organizations through various touchpoints powered by artificial intelligence interfaces (Hoyer et al. 2020). Although service robots may be seen as neutral technology to be evaluated in terms of accuracy and efficiency, customers incur social and affective costs when interacting with them (Puntoni et al. 2021). These costs, in turn, are likely to trigger reactance behaviors and undermine customer experience (Davenport, 2020), making the understanding of how to design service robots to improve customer experience particularly relevant and timely (Forbes 2021). Addressing this issue, artificial empathy recently emerged as a potential solution for service providers. This research project investigates the impact of artificial empathy on customer experience and outcome.

Mots-clés : customer experience, service robot, empathy, social presence, time pressure