Can Robots Be Used to Obtain Honest Customer Feedback?

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Imagine that you are trying a new restaurant, but their food is not special enough to warrant revisiting. When you check out, your server asks, “How was your food today?”  Would you give the server your honest feedback, saying “Well, it’s not so great – I won’t be coming back.” Would you rather say “Yea, it was good,” hiding your true feelings? What if the server was a service robot, not a human staff? Would you respond differently?

Regardless of its valence, customer feedback provides valuable insights regarding how customers evaluate service quality. Particularly, in-person feedback allows service providers to be aware of the problem during the service encounter, and therefore be able to provide immediate service recovery to retain dissatisfied customers at the moment of truth. Many hospitality companies, however, find it challenging to effectively obtain in-person customer feedback: they rather rely on online channels, such as email, online review platforms and social media. Although information gathered online provides great customer insights, such post-service feedback doesn’t allow companies to fix problems on the spot. Moreover, most dissatisfied customers fail to complain and instead engage in negative word of mouth or simply exit the company. Then, how can hospitality firms obtain customer feedback at the moment of truth that leads to service improvement?

To address this question, the current research suggests a novel feedback collection method: service robots. This new study was conducted by Prof. Sungwoo Choi and Prof. Lisa Wan from The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s (CUHK) School of Hotel and Tourism Management, in conjunction with Hong Kong-based AI and robotics firm Hanson Robotics and The Mira Hong Kong hotel. In general, customer feedback behaviour is mainly influenced by social motives/concerns, such that social reciprocity drives customers to provide feedback when they are satisfied with service, while empathy inhibits customers from providing feedback when they are not satisfied. For a service robot, which is a non-social agent, we argue that the patterns might be reversed — customers are less likely to provide feedback when satisfied, while more likely to provide feedback when dissatisfied — as the social motives/concerns should be less salient in the customer-robot interaction.

Real World Setting

To test the hypotheses, the researchers conducted a field experiment at Yamm, a buffet restaurant in The Mira Hong Kong. The experiment took place on five weekdays during lunch and dinner in summer 2021. A total of 209 participants were initially recruited in exchange for a dining voucher. During the first three days of the experiment (Monday through Wednesday), Sophia, a humanoid service robot developed by Hanson Robotics, interacted with participants, while a human staff interacted with participants on Thursday and Friday.