Social Service Robots: What do we Know and Where do we Go Next? An Abstract

Abstract

Significant developments have been made in the service sector highlighted by the increasing adoption of automated services, use of virtual agents and artificial intelligence, and in the introduction of consumer-facing service robots (Hollebeek et al. 2017). Service robots, operate in service environments across the globe, interacting with consumer and service entities alike (Li 2015), signalling the era of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (Mende 2017). Barnett et al. (2014, p. 1134) define interactive service robots as “social robots capable of working within service environments and interacting with consumers through various service encounters”. Service researchers have acknowledged that the field of service research is behind in studying the impact of robots on various aspects of service (Mende 2017; van Doorn et al. 2017), which constitutes the focus and contribution of this research. In this paper, we conduct a Systematic Scoping Review of interdisciplinary journal articles and conference proceedings, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines (Moher et al. 2015) and the methodology outlined by Peters et al. (2015).

The first stage of the search process resulted in 1477 articles published in a wide variety of journals ranging from marketing and business journals (i.e. Journal of Service Research and Journal of Business Research) to articles published in journals from other disciplines (i.e. International Journal of Social Robotics, Technology Innovation Management Review and Frontiers in Psychology). Following the PRISMA guidelines our final sample consists of 95 publications. Our results indicate a great disparity in the conceptualisation and definitions of service robots and HRI in service (e.g. terms used to refer to service robots range from ‘anthropomorphised robots’ to ‘socially assistive robots’). Interestingly we found that many papers simply ‘operationalised’ service robots, offering no conceptualisation, definition or explanation. Our analysis of the various conceptualisations and operationalisations leads us to propose a comprehensive definition of service robots in service which may be used to guide future service research and clarify the boundaries of what a service robot is and is not, particularly in comparison to other similar and related technologies such as artificial intelligence. This study found that service robots as a research field is disparate, and disjointed with a weak theoretical foundation where the majority of studies are empirical in nature. This research proposes multiple research avenues and acts as a guide for future research, allowing service researchers to delve further into this phenomenon. By exploring and understanding service robots and human-robot interaction in service researchers and practitioners will be able to better integrate robots into service.