Influence of collaborative customer service by service robots and clerks in bakery stores

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that collaborative customer service between robots and clerks in bakery stores enhances customer purchase rates and impressions, with minimal additional workload for clerks, suggesting broad applicability for stores using service robots.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that collaboration between service robots and clerks improves customer influence and experience in real store environments.

Findings

Increased purchase rate of recommended bread.

Improved customer impressions of robots and store.

Low workload increase for clerks.

Abstract

In recent years, various service robots have been introduced in stores as recommendation systems. Previous studies attempted to increase the influence of these robots by improving their social acceptance and trust. However, when such service robots recommend a product to customers in real environments, the effect on the customers is influenced not only by the robot itself, but also by the social influence of the surrounding people such as store clerks. Therefore, leveraging the social influence of the clerks may increase the influence of the robots on the customers. Hence, we compared the influence of robots with and without collaborative customer service between the robots and clerks in two bakery stores. The experimental results showed that collaborative customer service increased the purchase rate of the recommended bread and improved the impression regarding the robot and store experience of the customers. Because the results also showed that the workload required for the clerks to collaborate with the robot was not high, this study suggests that all stores with service robots may show high effectiveness in introducing collaborative customer service.