Social Robots at the Customer Interface: An Experimental Study of Emotional Contagion Between Social Robots and Customers

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Frontline employees are important representatives of a company in the eyes of the customers and therefore, contribute to the customer relationship in an important manner. Especially the ability to convey positive emotions to the customer is an important antecedent for a successful customer relationship. The mechanism of emotional transfer, so-called emotional contagion, has frequently been shown for the frontline employee-customer dyad in marketing research.Companies of various industries, such as retailing, hospitality and hotel services, started introducing social robots at the customer interface which interact with the customers by informing or serving them (e.g., at the check-in) and take over specific functions of the frontline employees. Against this background, the suggested research project poses the question whether social humanoid robots are able to convey positive emotions to the customers, too. While research in marketing and management remained silent about the boundary between social humanoid robots and customers, robotic research provides valuable insights that humans are able to recognize artificial robotic emotions in a laboratory setting. However, the findings are restricted, because these studies do not embed their manipulation in a real-life content, manipulate emotions mostly with pictures or short video sequences of robotic artifacts or robotic parts (e.g., head), and seldom use humanoid robots. To the principal knowledge of the investigator, emotional contagion from social humanoid robots to customers during the service encounter has not been examined.Therefore, the proposed research project investigates the contagion of positive emotions to the customer by social humanoid robots in a realistic customer interaction and compare this contagion with the contagion of positive emotions by human frontline employees. In the proposed research project, the theoretical conceptual basis is the emotional contagion concept, which is well established in the research of human-human-interactions. Furthermore, important parameters are explored which affect the strength of the emotional contagion. An experimental series with 240 participants using a between-subject design is scheduled, in which the contagion of positive emotions by a social humanoid robot and a frontline employee is examined in a hotel reception scenario. Emotional states of the participants, which represent the emotional contagion, are recorded by using different indicators, for example, self-ratings, external assessments by independent raters, and psycho-physiological data.