How does (im)balanced acceptance of robots between customers and frontline employees affect hotels’ service quality?

Abstract

With the increasingly prevalent of service robots in tourism and hospitality sectors, service success relies heavily on robot acceptance. However, most of tourism practitioners are challenged by a dilemma of focusing on customer or employee acceptance of robots. Borrowing the lenses of resource-based view and information processing theory, this study explores the differential effectiveness of imbalanced robotic strategy (i.e., higher/lower customer acceptance of robots than employee acceptance) implemented by hotels in driving service quality under customer-side (i.e., customer demandingness) and employee-side (i.e., frontline task ambidexterity) demand uncertainties. Polynomial regression analysis on a dataset of 1066 matched customer-employee dyads reveals that, an imbalanced robotic strategy is superior than a balanced one for service quality. In addition, when customer demandingness is high, a customer-focused robotic strategy (i.e., higher customer acceptance of robots than employee acceptance) is the optimal choice to improve service quality. However, when frontline task ambidexterity is high, the positive effects of imbalanced robotic strategy on service quality diminish. This study contributes to the literature on and practices of robot acceptance from a customer-robot-employee triadic perspective.