The Use of Service Robots in Service Delivery: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

Service robots as emerging service providers, in combination with novel technologies like artificial intelligence, have the potential to enhance service outcomes and customer experience and may already be transforming the service delivery process. At present, the study focused on service robots has matured sufficiently to warrant an overview of the research on the ways in which service robots have been employed. This study conducts a systematic literature review of the academic corpus focused on service robots (N = 28). We report the research methods, application contexts and robot types of service robot research to understand how service robots participate in service delivery, what technological characteristics of service robots are commonly analyzed, and the potential service outcomes of service robot use. This review shows that overall, service robots have a high potential to delivery services in service contexts, and will be widely used and bring more rich service experience to people.