Guest article by Do The Khoa, winner of the 2024 SERVSIG Best Dissertation Award.
The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled agents marks a revolutionary step in the service sector. The growing popularity of these AI service agents, such as service robots and intelligent chatbots, has radically and significantly transformed the service landscape in an unprecedented way. The implementation of these AI agents brings a multitude of benefits for service providers, including cost reduction and service delivery optimization. However, great potential always comes with great scrutiny. Scholars and practitioners are increasingly interested in understanding how these AI service agents are reshaping relationships with both employees in the workplace and customers across offline and online service encounters. Human-AI collaboration, customer-AI agent interactions, and AI anthropomorphism are three key domains in this age of service robotics.
Human-Robot Teaming at Service Workplace
While robots have increasingly been employed in frontline services, from hotel robot concierges and restaurant robot servers in the hospitality sector to advisory robots in the finance sector, this robotization also raises concerns about employment security for service employees. A common question remains: will robots take over all human jobs in the future? However, this fear of job displacement should not be warranted, as service employees do not need to view this robotic automation from a competitive perspective. Rather, they should adopt a collaborative approach by teaming up with robots, leveraging the strengths of both to enhance service delivery and improve customer experiences. Human workers can focus on high-level tasks that require empathetic and feeling skills, such as dealing with customers’ complaints and responding to personalized requests, while robots can handle more manual and repetitive low-level tasks, like food delivery in restaurants or luggage delivery in hotels. Figure 1 highlights the necessity of feeling intelligence – a key competence for service employees to stay competitive (Do et al., 2023), and underscores the importance of ethical governance and trust-building with robot partners in a cobotics team (Khoa et al., 2023). This collaborative perspective suggests that robots can augment human capabilities rather than replace them.
Figure 1. Three key themes on managing cobotics team
Solo Customer-Anthropomorphized Robot Encounters
Given the recent rise of solo consumption in services (such as solo dining and solo traveling), solo customers now represent a growing market segment; it is thus relevant to explore how frontline anthropomorphized robots (FAR) influence the service experiences of solo customers (who consume services alone) in comparison with joint customers (who consume services together with other companions). My recent research shows that solo customers feel greater social rapport with FAR but also experience a higher sense of eeriness with FAR, compared to their joint counterparts. Consequently, while social rapport enhances service outcomes such as satisfaction, spending, and word-of-mouth (WOM) for solo customers, perceived eeriness hampers these outcomes. To address these two opposing mechanisms, service providers might manipulate certain managerial boundary conditions, namely in-group favoritism, control deprivation, and hedonic consumption goal (Khoa & Chan, 2023). These interventions can strengthen the positive effect of social rapport mechanism and alleviate the negative effect of perceived eeriness mechanism, ultimately improving service outcomes for solo customers when encountering FAR. The social context (solo vs. joint), the nature of the consumption process (control level and consumption goal), and the features of the robot (in-group favoritism) are all significant factors that shape customers’ experiences and their perceptions when interacting with FAR.
Going beyond “outer” humanlike features for AI agents
As AI service agents become more advanced, customers increasingly expect these agents to closely resemble humans; thus, the communicative style these agents adopt in their interactions with customers appears more pivotal. While the design of these AI service agents has primarily focused on “outer” embodied features (such as physical appearance with eyes, head, arms, and legs for robots, and humanlike avatars for chatbots), customers now expect them to demonstrate more “inner” humanlike features. For instance, the use of figurative language by a robot can affect how customers evaluate the service outcomes (Choi et al., 2019), while assertive language and humor used by a chatbot can influence how customers accept the product being recommended by the chatbot in conversational commerce (Khoa, 2023). These examples highlight the necessity of going beyond “hard” humanlike features (how AI agents look humanlike) to emphasize more their capacity for expressing “soft” humanlike features (how AI agents are perceived to have a humanlike mind, such as their ability to use humor or figurative language). Both human-looking and human-minded characteristics are therefore equally important for AI agents to enhance customers’ experiences.
In summary, the integration of AI service agents is undoubtedly revolutionizing the service sector and bringing transformative impacts. From collaborative teaming in the workplace to tailored encounters with frontline robots, it is clear that the future of service will heavily rely on how well these AI agents are managed, integrated, and accepted by both employees and customers. For the SERVSIG community, these insights not only provoke further inquiry but also offer a roadmap for navigating the complexities of AI service agents across service industries. As we advance, the focus should remain on human-centric design, ethical considerations, and the seamless integration of these AI agents in ways that augment human strengths in the workplace and enhance customer experiences in frontline encounters.
References
– Choi, S., Liu, S. Q., & Mattila, A. S. (2019). “How may I help you?” Says a robot: Examining language styles in the service encounter. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 82, 32–38.
– Do, K. T., Gip, H., Guchait, P., Wang, C.-Y., & Baaklini, E. S. (2023). Empathetic creativity for frontline employees in the age of service robots: conceptualization and scale development. Journal of Service Management, 34(3), 433–466.
– Khoa, D. T., & Chan, K. W. (2023). Being Alone or Together: How Frontline Anthropomorphized Robots Affect Solo (vs. Joint) Service Consumption. Journal of Service Research.
– Khoa, D. T., Gip, H. Q., Guchait, P., & Wang, C.-Y. (2023). Competition or collaboration for human–robot relationship: a critical reflection on future cobotics in hospitality. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 35(6), 2202–2215.
– Khoa, D. T (2023). Helping or Hurting: Using Assertive Language for Virtual Agents in Conversational Commerce. Doctoral Dissertation.
The Khoa Do (Bin, Ph.D.)
Assistant Professor (UK Lecturer) of Marketing
Department of Marketing
School of Business & Management
University of London, UK
Website: www.dothekhoa.com
