Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

Abstract

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.Keywords automation, service robots, social cognition, organizational frontlines, psychological ownership Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.-Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible Technology continues to radically and rapidly change the nature of service, customers' service experiences, and customers' relationships with service providers (Ostrom et al. 2015;Rust and Huang 2014).1 Consider, for example, the technology advancements of how consumers purchase a meal in some restaurants. Rather than the traditional interaction in which customers wait for staff to serve them, several restaurants (e.g., Chili's) now allow customers to interact with the chefs in the kitchen using tabletop tablets to order their meals (Garber 2014). A restaurant in Ningbo, China, has already replaced humans with robot waiters (Fox News 2014). The robots take orders and speak to customers in simple Mandarin phrases. Their optical sensing systems help them to avoid collisions, and they travel along magnetic strips on the floor, allowing them to move throughout the restaurant. Consistent with the idea that service robots are on the rise, the global market for robots functioning in consumer and office applications is estimated to grow exponentially to US$1.5 billion by 2019, and it is predicted to grow 7 times faster than the market for manufacturing robots (Business Insider 2015).In this new environment, the nature of the interp...

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