By Valentina Pitardi, Werner Kunz, Jochen Wirtz, Stefanie Paluch.
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Can robots be better than humans?
The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 accelerated the deployment of robotic technology in various sectors including hotels, airports, and restaurants. Interestingly, the adoption of the technology particularly increased in sensitive contexts such as hospitals and clinics. For example, in China service robots are used in hospitals to clean and take temperatures. In Belgium, Pepper welcomes patients and offers assistant reception services.
Medical services are particularly interesting from a consumer behavior point of view as the interactions that happen in such contexts are more likely to trigger negative feelings in the individuals such as embarrassment or discomfort. People generally do not like to describe their personal and embarrassing conditions to the receptionist of the clinic where they visit. But what if they can talk with a service robot instead of a human receptionist?
We tried to answer to this question in a recently published paper. We first interviewed 40 people about service robots and embarrassment and, then, we conducted two experiments presenting potential consumers with scenarios of robots’ receptionists in medical services. These are the three most relevant results of our study.
Consumers prefer robots over human employees during embarrassing encounters.
Overall, we discovered that during embarrassing service encounters, people find more comfortable and less awkward to interact with a frontline service robot rather than a human employee. We found such effects both in a clinic scenario, where people had to describe their embarrassing condition to the receptionist before meeting the doctor, and in a pharmacy scenario where they had to collect an embarrassing medication.
So, in situations where people have to disclose embarrassing information or buy sensitive items, a robot can provide a more comfortable interaction and potentially be the preferred service delivery option.
Robots have low agency and no emotions
Why would people prefer a robot over a human employee? Because people don’t think robots have the ability to form opinions or judge our behaviors, whereas humans do.
When interviewing our participants about embarrassing situations, we found they generally view robots as little more than machines. People think that robots do not have a mind of their own, or at least they have way less mind than a human being. This means that robots are perceived as unable to feel emotions or to display intentionality and agency in their behaviors. The lack of agency is what makes people believe that robots are unable to socially judge one’s behaviors.
So, are we saying that robots are dumb? Not at all. Robots are sophisticated and intelligent machines able to perform a variety of behaviors in autonomy. However, such behaviors are not executed on purpose, and this is what makes the difference. For example, when Google’s AI AlphaGo beat the best Go player in the world, never had any intention to beat a person. AlphaGo doesn’t even know that what it is doing is playing Go. For intentional behavior, consciousness is needed, and robots do not have that (yet).
Robots have no social or relational implications
Another interesting characteristic that makes robots more effective in embarrassing encounters is the absence of social relationships. For example, you will never meet a robotic assistant on the street after an embarrassing situation. Robots also do not have personal interests in people, so they do not talk about customers’ issues behind their back or make awkward comments during the service interaction.
In this sense, robots provide people with a more neutral and less emotional type of interaction and are perceived as more discreet and private interlocutors than humans. However, they also cause data privacy concerns as they can capture, store and process people’s sensitive information.
A bright side
Service robots’ execution has attracted critiques and sparked concerns about potential negative consequences for consumers. In contrary to previous research that generally points out the negative sides of interactions with robots (see for example Mende et al., 2019; Luo et al., 2019), our results offer a more positive perspective and shed light on the ‘bright side’ of service robots’ adoption. At least, until they will become capable of intentional thoughts and feelings …
Read more in our article:
Pitardi, V., Wirtz, J., Paluch, S. and Kunz, W.H. (2021), “Service robots, agency and embarrassing service encounters”, Journal of Service Management, ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-12-2020-0435
Valentina Pitardi is Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Surrey, UK
Werner Kunz is a Professor of Marketing and Director of the Digital Media Lab at the College of Management, University of Massachusetts (UMass) Boston.
Jochen Wirtz is Vice Dean MBA Programmes and Professor of Marketing at NUS Business School, National University of Singapore
Stefanie Paluch is Professor for Service and Technology Marketing, RWTH Aachen University and Senior Fellow at Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management, Department of Marketing, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland
