Enhancing hospitality experience with service robots: the mediating role of rapport building

By Hailian Qiu, Minglong Li, Boyang Shu, Billy Bai. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 2019

375 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT This study investigated the influence of service robot attributes on customers’ hospitality experience from the perspective of relationship building. Through literature review and a preliminary study with in-depth interviews, a conceptual framework was developed. A scenario-based experiment and questionnaire survey were designed to test the model. The results indicate that robots’ being perceived as humanlike or intelligent positively affects customer-robot rapport building and the hospitality experience. Additionally, customer-employee rapport building was found to mediate the relationship between robot attributes and the hospitality experience, but customer-robot rapport building was not. Based on these findings, theoretical contributions and practical implications were discussed.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ffbe515d5a302593043879e9030f66a3f666a1e6

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

1. Oscar Hengxuan Chi
2. Hongxia Lin
3. Daniel Belanche
4. Luis Vicente Casaló
5. Jeroen J. L. Schepers
6. Carlos Flavián
7. D. Gursoy

In Social Psychology

1. Daniel Belanche
2. Luis Vicente Casaló
3. Jeroen J. L. Schepers
4. Carlos Flavián
5. D. Gursoy
6. A. Grobelna
7. Kakyom Kim

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Luis Vicente Casaló
2. Carlos Flavián
3. Daniel Belanche
4. Oscar Hengxuan Chi
5. Hongxia Lin
6. Jeroen J. L. Schepers
7. D. Gursoy
8. K. Woosnam

Citations in the corpus

• Antecedents of customers’ acceptance of artificially intelligent robotic device use in hospitality services (2019, methodology): “Previous studies frequently use the Uncanny Valley Theory (Mori, 1970) to predict the relationship between anthro-pomorphism level and customers ’ intention to use a product (e.g., Qiu, Li, Shu, & Bai, 2019; Yu, 2019).”
• Service robot implementation: a theoretical framework and research agenda (2019, background): “Employees-AI collaboration help build customer-employee rapport (Qiu et al., 2019); though, recent evidence in hospitality found that AI harms the productivity of emotional intelligent employees (Prentice et al., 2019).”