Together or alone: Should service robots and frontline employees collaborate in retail-customer interactions at the POS?

Abstract

This study investigates shopper behavior when interacting with an employee-robot team (vs. both actors in isolation), along the metrics of the POS conversion funnel. An unobtrusive field study was conducted using video observations, evenly spread over four conditions: (1) a control condition (i.e., no stimulus), (2) a frontline employee, (3) a humanoid service robot, and (4) an employee-robot team. The results indicate that the service robot was the better option to generate attention and stop passers-by, but in this condition the least amount of passers-by were lured into the store. While the frontline employee initiated the lowest amount of interactions, he could convert the highest number of passersby into actual buyers. The robot-employee team managed to encourage the highest number of passers-by to look at the store, but did not convert more of them into actual buyers than the robot on its own.