Human employees and service robots in the service encounter and the role of attribution of theory of mind

Abstract

A frequently made assumption – supported in a large number of empirical studies – is that customer satisfaction stemming from a service encounter influences the customer's subsequent word-of-mouth activities. The present study re-examines this association with respect to both human service employees and service robots (which are expected to become more common in service encounters in the near future). First, it is assumed that the customer's attribution of theory of mind to a service agent is an important source of information for the formation of a satisfaction assessment. Indeed, it is assumed that the agent's theory of mind is a prerequisite for understanding the customer's needs. Second, in contrast to many existing studies, word-of-mouth is captured in terms of the valence of what customers actually say (as opposed to various forms of intentions to engage in word-of-mouth, which represent a dominant contemporary operationalization of word-of-mouth). A between-subjects experiment was conducted in which a service agent's identity (service robot vs. human) and service performance (poor vs. good) were the manipulated factors. The results show that both these factors influenced attribution of theory of mind to the agent, and that attribution of theory of mind enhanced customer satisfaction. The results also show that customer satisfaction affected word-of-mouth content in a valence-congruent way.