Robot butlers: An investigation of the impact of service robots on the overall service experience for hotel guests

Research has dedicated considerable attention towards determining whether service robots do not only bring organizational benefits (Lu et al., 2020), but whether they also enhance the customer service experience (Choi et al., 2021; Yoganathan et al., 2021). Currently, state-of-the-art research on service robots is in general either of a conceptual nature or uses lab experiments to investigate customer perceptions (Huang and Rust, 2018; Van Doorn et al., 2017; Wirtz et al., 2018). Lu et al (2020) argue that present research on service robots misses out on the social complexity of the real world and call for future field research to understand the real-life impact of frontline service robots. Thus, this paper seeks to answer the research question, how do frontline service robots impact the service experience for hotel guests?To address this gap, we have analyzed 17,236 reviews by hotel guests for eight different hotels from five leading online customer review websites in the travel and hospitality industries. All eight hotels employ the same service robot. For the collected comments, we analyzed text-based features and related them to the overall service experience, using the self-reported reviewer star rating as a proxy for the service experience. Thus, our approach is very similar to previous text mining studies (e.g., Villarroel Ordenes et al., 2017). Our preliminary findings show that reviewers that mention the service robot in their comments rate their overall service experience significantly more positively. Intriguingly, when reviewers call the robot by name, this positive relationship is even stronger. This puts forward the question whether service robots positively impact service experiences especially for those reviewers who personify the robot more, or whether reviewers who rate their experience more positively are more likely to personify service robots.As we base our analysis on field data, our study has the potential to offer managers a better understanding of the real-life impact of service robots on the overall service experience. In this way, we facilitate a comprehensive understanding of the empirical reality as reflected in customers’ online generated content. By doing so, we answer to several calls for field research (Odekerken-Schröder et al., 2022; Mende et al., 2019). The contributions of this study are twofold: from a theoretical perspective, we advance the knowledge on personification of service robots, where referring to the robot by name is indicative for personification and positively related to satisfaction with the overall service experience (Purington et al., 2017); our methodological contribution lies in the novelty of text based analysis of online customer review data within the field of service robot research.Moving forward, we aim to develop a conceptual framework that is grounded in the results of our field study, where we seek to explain the motivational drivers or customer differences underlying the observed relationship. To validate the hypothesized relationships, we plan to conduct further review-based text analyses (Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010) to take full advantage of available field data, as well as additional field and lab studies. These studies deepen our understanding of real-life customer-robot interactions in hospitality services.