The effects of appearance personification of service robots on customer decision-making in the product recommendation context
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-11-2021-0662 |
| Published date | 23 November 2022 |
| Date | 23 November 2022 |
| Pages | 578-595 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information systems,Data management systems,Knowledge management,Knowledge sharing,Management science & operations,Supply chain management,Supply chain information systems,Logistics,Quality management/systems |
| Author | Shengliang Zhang,Guanyu Tang,Xiaodong Li,Ai Ren |
The effects of appearance
personification of service robots on
customer decision-making in the
product recommendation context
Shengliang Zhang and Guanyu Tang
School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Xiaodong Li
School of Economics and Management, Anhui Polytechnic University,
Wuhu, China, and
Ai Ren
School of Business, State University of New York at New Paltz,
New Paltz, New York, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The COVID-19 pandemic has made contactless services such as those provided by robots
increasingly pervasive. Some stores are gradually adopting service robots to sell products, which has not been
explored in previous research. This study aims to explore how appearance personification of service robots
affects customer decision-making in the product recommendation context.
Design/methodology/approach –Based on authentic in-store product recommendation service
interactions, an experiment for three simulated scenarios was conducted and data was collected from 338
valid samples.
Findings –The results show appearance personification has a positive impact on customer purchase behavior
while it has negative impacts on customer decision time and degree of hesitation.
Originality/value –This study not only enriches the literature on application scenarios of service robots but
also supplements the literature on various customer decision-making variables in the field of service robots. It
provides important practical guidance for designing robots to optimize their impact on customer decision-
making.
Keywords Service robots, Appearance personification, Customer decision-making
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Service robots are increasingly used in real-world settings as a result of advances in artificial
intelligence technology and consumers’pursuit of service novelty (Xiao and Kumar, 2019;
Zhang et al., 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has advanced this trend, as service robots
provide contactless services in order to reduce gathering and contact among people (Pelau
et al., 2021). Due to features that make service robots efficient and safe, they receive extensive
attention from customers and are being applied in more and more industries. For example,
some restaurants use robot waiters to provide customers with ordering, serving and checkout
services (Lu et al., 2021;Xiao and Kumar, 2019), Henn-na hotel uses service robots to serve
customers (Reis et al., 2020), and in the retail industry, the Mitsukoshi Department Store in
IMDS
123,2
578
The work was substantially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71701002)
and Ministry of Education of China, Humanities and Social Sciences Project (No. 22YJC630068) and
Industry-school Cooperative Education Program (No. 202102629049).
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0263-5577.htm
Received 1 November 2021
Revised 2 March 2022
30 April 2022
25 June 2022
5 August 2022
11 October 2022
Accepted 31 October 2022
Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 123 No. 2, 2023
pp. 578-595
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/IMDS-11-2021-0662
Japan provides reception and product recommendation services to customers through service
robots (Mende et al., 2019).
Previous research has identified customers’responses to service robots and examined the
influences of appearance personification of service robots on customers’cognition associated
with decision-making. For instance, Xiao and Kumar (2019) reported that appearance
personification of service robots influences customers’willingness to interact with them.
Some other studies have revealed that appearance personification of service robots is critical
for customer decision-making (Prakash et al., 2014;Okanda et al., 2018). However, few studies
consider the effects of appearance personification on consumer decision-making during the
product recommendation process. Thus, this study explores the application of service robots
with regard to their appearance personification and seeks to answer the main question: How
does the degree of appearance personification of service robots affect customer decision-
making?
This study pursues two main objectives. First, it takes a quantitative approach to
studying the effect of robots’appearance personification on customer decision-making
during the product recommendation process. Specifically, it uses three morphologies of
service robots with different levels of appearance personification as stimulants and simulates
real offline purchase scenarios to collect data and to examine the effects. Since prior research
has found that service robots are reshaping multiple aspects of retail, helping retailers better
understand service robots will enhance shoppers’experience and optimize shoppers’
decision-making (Shankar, 2018). Considering that few studies examine the relationships
between appearance personification of service robots and customer decision-making in the
product recommendation context, this study helps to fill the gap by identifying appearance
personification’s effects on customer decision-making.
Second, this study attempts to provide a greater understanding of various decision-
making variables (e.g. purchasing behavior, decision time and degree of hesitation)
influenced by the appearance personification of service robots. Previous studies suggest that
when service robots are used for sales-related services, their appearance personification
significantly affects customer decision-making (Eysseltt, 2017;Luo et al., 2019). Yet extant
literature has not investigated in detail how this dynamic may work. To further explore the
effect of appearance personification of service robots on customers’specific decision-making
during the product recommendation process, we adopt a more holistic and experiential
perspective and use three behavioral variables to measure customers’decision-making when
they face service robots that recommend products.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the existing
research on the appearance personification of service robots and develops hypotheses.
Section 3 presents research methods and the experiment process used in this study. Section 4
presents the results of data analysis. Section 5 concludes this study by discussing the
implications of the study results along with limitations of the study and future
research needs.
2. Literature review and hypothesis development
2.1 Appearance personification of service robots
Anthropomorphism refers to the practice of adding human-like characteristics, motivations,
intentions, emotions and behaviors to non-human subjects (Aggarwal and McGill, 2007). In
the field of service robotics research, anthropomorphism of service robots includes many
factors, such as appearance personification, voice personification and even body movement
personification (Huang et al., 2021;Kim and In, 2020;Zhang et al., 2014). Among these factors,
appearance personification refers to the assignation of human-like appearance to robots
(Yu and Xu, 2020). The existing literature has demonstrated that when human employees are
Effects of
personification
of service
robots
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