Human Vs robot service failure : investigating customers' forgiveness and service recovery expectations

Abstract

This research investigates customer responses to service failure when engaging with different service provider agents (SPAs) in terms of forgiveness and service recovery expectation (SRE). A 3 (humans vs humanoid robots vs non-humanoid robots) × 2 (process vs outcome failure) between-subjects experimental design was utilized. One-way ANOVA was performed to test the mean difference of forgiveness and SRE when engaged with different SPAs under different types of service failure. Correlation and linear regression were adopted to explore their relationships with customer dissatisfaction. The findings demonstrated that customers experiencing service failure delivered by SPAs with higher humanness have lower forgiveness and higher SRE in the process failure situation, while service failure delivered by SPAs with lower humanness have higher forgiveness and lower SRE. However, there is no significant difference in the outcome failure situation. Furthermore, forgiveness and SRE have negative and positive relations with customer dissatisfaction respectively. This study has both theoretical and managerial implications.