In recent years, various service robots have been deployed in stores as recommendation systems. Previous studies have sought to increase the influence of these robots by enhancing their social acceptance and trust. However, when such service robots recommend a product to customers in real environments, the effect on the customers is influenced not only by the robot itself, but also by the social influence of the surrounding people such as store clerks. Therefore, leveraging the social influence of the clerks may increase the influence of the robots on the customers. Hence, we compared the influence of robots with and without collaborative customer service between the robots and clerks in two bakery stores. The experimental results showed that collaborative customer service increased the purchase rate of the recommended bread and improved the impressions of the robot and store experience of the customers. Because the results also showed that the workload required for the clerks to collaborate with the robot was not high, this study suggests that all stores with service robots may demonstrate high effectiveness in introducing collaborative customer service.
Keywords: customer service; field trial; recommendation system; social influence; social service robot.
Copyright © 2023 Okafuji, Song, Baba, Yoshikawa and Ishiguro.