What’s best for customers: empathetic versus solution-oriented service robots

A promising application of social robots highlighted by the ongoing labor shortage is to deploy them as service robots at organizational frontlines. As the face of the firms, service robots are expected to provide cognitive and affective supports in response to customer inquiries. However, one question remains unanswered: Would having a robot with a high level of affective support be helpful when such a robot cannot provide a satisfactory level of cognitive support to users? In this study, we aim to address this question by showing that empathetic service robots can be beneficial, although the extent of such benefits depends on the quality of services they provide. Our in-person human–robot interaction study (n = 55) shows that when a service robot can only provide a partial solution, it is preferable for it to express more empathetic behaviors, as users will perceive it to be more useful and will have a better customer experience. However, when a service robot is able to provide a full solution, the level of empathy displayed by it does not result in significant differences on perceived usefulness and customer experience. These findings are further validated in an online experimental study performed in another country (n = 395).