Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments December 6, 2022 erstellt
Description:
Powered by advanced artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, frontline customer-facing robots can complete a variety of services reliably and independently. Despite accelerated adoption in practice, how service robots affect customer experience and demand remains unclear. Utilizing a unique data set from a large hotel group, this study is among the first to empirically investigate the impact of service robots on customer demand. We show that customer demand increases on average followed by the adoption of service robots and the benefit of service robots is stronger for premium hotels than for economy hotels. Our further analyses reveal that service robots have a positive effect on demand in the short term (i.e., less than two months) for both premium hotels and economy hotels, whereas a longer-term positive effect only exists for premium hotels. We uncover the underlying mechanisms by examining the mediation role of customer experience, mined from the textural content of customer reviews. Results of the mediation analyses suggest that service robots serve as a marketing gimmick to attract customers for both premium hotels and economy hotels. However, such a gimmick effect is only evident in the short term. Interestingly, service robots can improve employees’ service quality for premium hotels, thereby benefiting customer experience and hotel demand in the longer term. Our findings provide important theoretical and practical implications