Unanticipated and Unintended Consequences of Service Robots in the Frontline

The proliferation of touchpoints in today’s digitally enriched customer journeys makes managing the customer experience an increasingly complex task. Companies now employ various artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as Service Robots to improve customer experience. While academics have a growing interest in how AI and Service Robots are shaking up the business world, the impact of such technology on the overall customer service experience remains largely unexplored and unintended consequences of such interactions are still unclear.

This workshop will explore topics related to the unanticipated and unintended consequences of service robots in the frontline from a multitude of domains and will bring together researchers from various disciplines including AI, marketing management, consumer psychology, and the digital economy. It will encourage collaborative work between scholars and managers/companies and data from diverse sources such as secondary data, lab and field experiments, performance-related data, ethnographic work, etc. The shortlisted papers in this workshop will be invited to submit their work to a special issue in the Journal of Business Research.

Topics of interest include five main themes:

- Service Robots and customer emotions;

- Service Robots and customer misbehaviour;

- Service Robots and the changing role of customers and service employees;

- Ethical and privacy concerns in Service robots;

- Service Robots and post-purchasing behaviour.

ORGANISERS

Dr Valentina Pitardi, Department of Marketing and Retail Management, Surrey Business School

Dr Nima Heirati, Department of Marketing and Retail Management, Surrey Business School

Prof Chanaka Jayawardhena, Department of Marketing and Retail Management, Surrey Business School

Professor Werner Kunz, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

Professor Stefanie Paluch, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Professor Jochen Wirtz, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore, Singapore