A new study has found that British hotels and restaurants using humanoid service robots can make individual guests feel more comfortable interacting with these robots by providing comfortable environmental conditions, including lights, odors and sounds, and adding local hints such as British flag patterns to the robot’s surface. Body.
Service robots in the UK hotel industry are often anthropomorphic and designed to perform tasks that are typically handled by human employees. These include food delivery robots in restaurants and concierge robots designed by hotel technical schools to welcome guests.
In the post-pandemic era, they became increasingly common in the UK hospitality industry, with companies such as Bella Italia and Las Iguanas experimenting with service robots since the pandemic.
The research was led by Dr. The Khoa Do (Bin) of the School of Business and Management, Royal Holloway College, University of London. The research was conducted in collaboration with Professor Kimmy Wa Chan of Hong Kong Baptist University and was published in the Journal of Service Research.
The study included one field study and three laboratory experiments that looked at individual customers interacting with humanoid service robots in real restaurants and customers interacting with service robots in hotel and airport check-in scenarios.
Researchers have found that individual customers, such as individual diners or individual travelers, believe that humanoid robots provide a stronger personal connection than group customers. However, the researchers found that these individual customers also found the robot “more creepy” than group customers.
These perceptions of service robots greatly affect their overall satisfaction, making individual customers less willing to spend more money on their business or share word-of-mouth on social media in some cases.
For the emerging and growing number of individual customers in environments such as hotels and restaurants, the existence of humanoid robots can be a double-edged sword. While these robots can cultivate a sense of social connection, they can also cause discomfort.
Research has shown that hotel companies should adjust factors such as the appearance and automation level of robots during service interactions. It also recommends that UK hotels should customize environmental reminders (such as lights, odors and music) and add local reminders (such as the British flag on the robot) because empirical evidence from this study suggests that these factors can help improve the comfort of those individual customers interacting with AI services robots.
Dr Khoa Do (Bin) from Royal Holloway University’s School of Business and Management said: “Our research highlights how humanoid robots enhance and challenge the experience of individual customers, a growing segment of the UK hospitality industry.
“By understanding how to reduce the ‘creepy’ factors while cultivating a sense of social connection, our goal is to help UK hotel companies, including local hotels and restaurants that are currently implementing service robots, create a more welcoming environment for single guests.
“Moving forward in this area, our research will continue to explore other ways to enhance the individual consumption experience of the UK hospitality industry, such as leveraging minority front-line employees in local hotels and restaurants (including minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals and immigrants) to improve the comfort and satisfaction of single guests.”
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Original text:https://techxplore.com/news/2024-09-uk-music-national-flags-customers.html
More information: Do The Khoa et al., Alone or Together: How Frontline Humanoid Robots Affect Individual (and Combined) Service Consumption, Journal of Service Research (2023). Numeric number: 10.1177/10946705231218405
Journal Information: Service Research Journal
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