Webinars
Frightful or Fantastic? When Customers and Employees Accept Service Robots
Labor shortages are accelerating interest in social robots across service industries, from healthcare to hospitality. But success depends less on the technology itself and more on whether customers and employees accept robots as part of the service team.
This webinar draws on new research to explain when robots are welcomed and when they face resistance in real service environments where humans and robots work side by side.
You’ll learn:
- When customers value robot service providers as much as or more than human employees
- How frontline employees respond to robot teammates, and what drives acceptance versus resistance
- Which tasks are best suited for robots versus humans in mixed service teams
- How to design service roles and interactions that make robots feel helpful, not threatening
speaker
Jenny van Doorn is professor of Service Marketing at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. As a researcher, she strives to be on the forefront of new developments and is fascinated by the use of social service robots as the next frontier of societal transitions. She was among the first to introduce robotics in the field of service research and laid the conceptual foundation for a new line of research looking at the integration of robots in daily service provision. Her work on service robots is impactful and has been highly cited and has appeared in, amongst others, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and International Journal of Information Management. Her work on robots. She serves, amongst others, as Associate editor at the Journal of Marketing, the Journal the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Service Research, and the International Journal of Research in Marketing. She conducts her research at, and together with, partners from practice, such as robot application developer Welbo, the University Hospital Groningen, and other health care facilities. She frequently shares her research with practitioners and public policy makers, but also with the general public.