Social Service Robots: What do we Know and Where do we Go Next? An Abstract

Abstract

Significant developments have been made in the service sector highlighted by the increasing adoption of automated services, use of virtual agents and artificial intelligence, and in the introduction of consumer-facing service robots (Hollebeek et al. 2017). Service robots, operate in service environments across the globe, interacting with consumer and service entities alike (Li 2015), signalling the era of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (Mende 2017). Barnett et al. (2014, p. 1134) define interactive service robots as “social robots capable of working within service environments and interacting with consumers through various service encounters”. Service researchers have acknowledged that the field of service research is behind in studying the impact of robots on various aspects of service (Mende 2017; van Doorn et al. 2017), which constitutes the focus and contribution of this research. In this paper, we conduct a Systematic Scoping Review of interdisciplinary journal articles and conference proceedings, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines (Moher et al. 2015) and the methodology outlined by Peters et al. (2015).