Can Social Robots Enhance Customer Satisfaction with Hotels? An Emotional Perspective

Abstract

Recently, social robots have been employed in hotels to deliver their services. Nevertheless, there is a lack of knowledge on whether robotic services could enhance customer satisfaction. Incorporating 4053 online reviews from TripAdvisor, this study investigates the relationships between six different emotions (joy, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness) in using robots in hotels and customer satisfaction with hotels. The positive emotion of surprise and negative emotions of anger and disgust are found to affect customer satisfaction negatively, and the other emotions demonstrated no impact. Hotel star negatively moderates the link between joy and customer satisfaction. This study enriches customer emotion literature by discovering the insignificant impacts of some positive and negative emotions: specifically, the negative impact of positive emotion of surprise on customer satisfaction, in contrast to the positive impact of positive emotions and the negative impacts of negative emotions on customer satisfaction.