ServiceFriday: Robots on the Frontline and the Future of Services

“By 2020, it is estimated that 85 percent of all customer interactions will take place without a human agent”.

To improve their customer experience, speed up the process of service recovery and cut costs, services management increasingly starts to rely on automatized solutions, so-called “service robots” to handle the customer interactions. In a recent research paper from the Journal of Service Management, Wirtz et al investigated industrial, social and economic implications of the growing reliance on electronic interactions to deliver service to customers:

“To see the strengths of service employees and robots better, a helpful distinction is between professional service roles (PSRs) and subordinate service roles (SSRs). Emotional-social capabilities seem particularly important for PSRs. Here, complex cognitive tasks are combined with emotional and social tasks that often involve a high degree of flexibility, out-of-the-box thinking, and creative problem solutions (e.g. as for a divorce lawyer, a PhD supervisor or a surgeon). Robots are only flexible within the defined limits and out-of-box thinking seems unattainable for now. […] In SSRs, employees […] tend to engage merely in surface acting (if they “act” at all). In such positions, robots may well provide better service compared to employees, and in fact, may even be better at displaying surface-acted emotions. That is, robots may outperform people in routine service encounters (e.g. a ticketing clerk or bank teller) due to their consistently pleasant surface acting that is unaffected by moods, health, or stereotypical biases. Thus, for low level, low-pay SSRs, robots may become the preferred method of frontline service delivery.” 

The article further explores the effect of the utilization of front line service robots on customer perceptions, as well as the ethical questions that arise surrounding robot-delivered services. 

To access the research paper, visit the Journal of Service Management at Emerald Insight. (A fee may apply to access the full journal article.)