 Together or alone: Should service robots and frontline employees collaborate in retail-customer interactions at the POS?Laurens De Gauquier, Kim Willems, Hoang-Long Cao, Bram Vanderborght and Malaika Brengman Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2023, vol. 70, issue C Abstract: This study investigates shopper behavior when interacting with an employee-robot team (vs. both actors in isolation), along the metrics of the POS conversion funnel. An unobtrusive field study was conducted using video observations, evenly spread over four conditions: (1) a control condition (i.e., no stimulus), (2) a frontline employee, (3) a humanoid service robot, and (4) an employee-robot team. The results indicate that the service robot was the better option to generate attention and stop passers-by, but in this condition the least amount of passers-by were lured into the store. While the frontline employee initiated the lowest amount of interactions, he could convert the highest number of passersby into actual buyers. The robot-employee team managed to encourage the highest number of passers-by to look at the store, but did not convert more of them into actual buyers than the robot on its own. Keywords: Service robot; Frontline employee; Automated social presence; Human social presence; Retail; Field study; POS conversion Funnel (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joreco:v:70:y:2023:i:c:s0969698922002697 DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2022.103176 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services is currently edited by Harry Timmermans More articles in Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services from Elsevier |
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