Customer Emotions in Service Robot Encounters: A hybrid machine-human intelligence approach

Seminar abstract

Understanding consumer emotions arising from robot-customers encounters and shared through online reviews is critical for forecasting consumers’ intention to adopt service robots. Qualitative analysis has the advantage of generating rich insights from data, but it requires intensive manual work. Scholars have emphasized the benefits of using algorithms for recognizing and differentiating among emotions. This study critically addresses the advantages and disadvantages of qualitative analysis and machine learning methods by adopting a hybrid machine-human intelligence approach. We extracted a sample of 9707 customers reviews from two major social media platforms (Ctrip and TripAdvisor), encompassing 412 hotels in 8 countries. The results show that the customer experience with service robots is overwhelmingly positive, revealing that interacting with robots triggers emotions of joy, love, surprise, interest, and excitement. Discontent is mainly expressed when customers cannot use service robots due to malfunctioning. Service robots trigger more emotions when they move. The findings further reveal the potential moderation effect of culture on customer emotional reactions to service robots. The study highlights that the hybrid approach can take advantage of the scalability and efficiency of machine learning algorithms while overcoming its shortcomings, such as poor interpretative capacity and limited emotion categories.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar will be held online on Wednesday 2 November 2022 at 1pm.

It is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

Speaker bio

Professor Raffaele Filieri

Raffaele Filieri is a Professor of Digital Marketing in the Marketing Department at Audencia Business School, Nantes, France.

Professor Filieri obtained his Ph.D. in Business Engineering from Universita’ Roma Tre in 2009 and has worked as a consultant for small and multinational companies before deciding to continue his career in academia.

Professor Filieri is Associate Editor of the Journal of Business Research, European Management Review, International Journal of Hospitality Management, and Internet Research.

Professor Filieri’s research focuses on consumer behaviour in digital settings, consumer technology adoption and continuance intention, social media and digital marketing, and B2B knowledge transfer and innovation.

Professor Filieri has published research papers using a variety of research methodologies (big data analytics, SEM, interviews, thematic analysis, experiments) and ranks in the top 10 marketing scholars in Europe and 24th in the world based on the last Stanford University’s science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators (2022). Professor Filieri has published over 60 research papers in 35 different journals, including the Journal of Service Research, Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel Research, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Marketing Letters, Journal of Business Research, International Marketing Review, Information & Management, Psychology & Marketing, Industrial Marketing Management, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, International Journal of Hospitality Management, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Transportation Research Part E, The Journal of Technology Transfer, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Computers in Human Behavior and many more.