Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

By Jenny van Doorn, Martin Mende, Stephanie M. Noble, John Hulland, Amy L. Ostrom, Dhruv Grewal, J. A. Petersen. 2017

1,015 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Technology is rapidly changing the nature of service, customers’ service frontline experiences, and customers’ relationships with service providers. Based on the prediction that in the marketplace of 2025, technology (e.g., service-providing humanoid robots) will be melded into numerous service experiences, this article spotlights technology’s ability to engage customers on a social level as a critical advancement of technology infusions. Specifically, it introduces the novel concept of automated social presence (ASP; i.e., the extent to which technology makes customers feel the presence of another social entity) to the services literature. The authors develop a typology that highlights different combinations of automated and human social presence in organizational frontlines and indicates literature gaps, thereby emphasizing avenues for future research. Moreover, the article presents a conceptual framework that focuses on (a) how the relationship between ASP and several key service and customer outcomes is mediated by social cognition and perceptions of psychological ownership as well as (b) three customer-related factors that moderate the relationship between ASP and social cognition and psychological ownership (i.e., a customer’s relationship orientation, tendency to anthropomorphize, and technology readiness). Finally, propositions are presented that can be a catalyst for future work to enhance the understanding of how technology infusion, particularly service robots, influences customers’ frontline experiences in the future.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d0f122f806c3b01786cab6365a79005a6f1f6a4c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Marketing

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced technologies and human resource management: a systematic review (2021, background): “Van Doorn et al. (2017) argue that situations defined by strong needs for empathy, in which developing original and creative solutions is required or that necessitate high levels of social intelligence are not at high risk for automation and replacement.”
Robots or frontline employees? Exploring customers’ attributions of responsibility and stability after service failure or success (2020, background): “Automated agents constitute an entirely new field of research within the domain of service technology (Van Doorn et al., 2017; Belanche et al., 2019).”
Exploring customers' responses to online service failure and recovery strategies during Covid‐19 pandemic: An actor–network theory perspective (2021, background): “Applying a social presence on digital platforms increases the likelihood of customers identifying a social entity within the digital environment (Van Doorn et al., 2017).”
Frontline Service Technology infusion: conceptual archetypes and future research directions (2019, background): “While service encounters used to be a “ game of people ” between customers and FLEs (Bowen, 2016), Frontline Service Technology (FST) infusion is now omnipresent and altering customer – FLE interactions as we know them (van Doorn et al. , 2017; Giebelhausen et al. , 2014).”
Big Data Analytics Capabilities and Innovation: The Mediating Role of Dynamic Capabilities and Moderating Effect of the Environment (2019, positive): “Taking into consideration that all data were collected from a single source at one point in time, and that all data were perceptions of key respondents, we controlled for common method bias following the guidelines of Chang, Van Witteloostuijn, and Eden (2010).”
Customer experience challenges: bringing together digital, physical and social realms (2018, background): “Thus, social presence can now occur digitally, rather than due to the physical presence of a human actor, so that high social presence can be achieved through automation (Van Doorn et al., 2017).”
Augmenting the eye of the beholder: exploring the strategic potential of augmented reality to enhance online service experiences (2017, background): “We therefore contribute to a growing research stream emphasizing that frontline technologies (ranging from AR to service robots) should be assessed in light of the feelings of presence they elicit within a service experience (Rafaeli et al. 2017; van Doorn et al. 2017).”
Alexa, she's not human but… Unveiling the drivers of consumers' trust in voice‐based artificial intelligence (2021, background): “In the seminal work on consumers' experience and service technology, van Doorn et al. (2017) identified social cognition as a driver of service and customers' outcomes.”