Can cuteness soften my anxiety? The impact of conversational styles of service robots on consumer service acceptance
International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
ISSN: 0959-6119
Article publication date: 22 November 2024
Abstract
Purpose
As artificial intelligence technology empowers service robots, they increasingly communicate with consumers in a human-like manner. This study aims to investigate the effect of service robots’ different conversational styles (competent conversational style vs. cute conversational style) on consumer service acceptance and demonstrate the moderating role of consumers’ technology anxiety.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on anthropomorphism theory and social presence theory, the authors conducted two scenario-based experiments (restaurant scenario and hotel scenario) to investigate this issue.
Findings
The results indicate that service robots’ conversational styles impact consumers’ willingness to accept the use of service robots through perceived social presence and positive emotion. Moreover, consumers perceived social presence and positive emotion play a serial mechanism. In addition, the effect of competent conversational style on consumers perceived social presence is less effective than that of cute conversational style. Finally, the authors demonstrate the moderating role of consumer technology anxiety in the relationship between conversational styles and perceived social presence.
Practical implications
To provide consumers with a positive human–robot interaction experience at the service front line, managers need to make better use of the conversational styles of service robots by comprehensively considering the characteristics of consumer technology anxiety.
Originality/value
This research extends the literature on service robots by integrating consumer characteristics and robots’ conversational styles. These findings highlight the effectiveness of cute conversational style in alleviating consumer technology anxiety.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: This work was supported by the Influence Mechanism of Social Network Structures on the Diffusion of Green Consumption Behavior (Grant No. 21YJA630066) and the NSFC Basic Science Center Project (Grant No. 72188101).
Ethical approval: This work does not require any ethical approval.
Consent to publish: All authors agree with the content and give explicit consent to submit and publish.
CRediT author statement: All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Juanjuan Yan: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review and editing.
Biao Luo: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Resources.
Tanruiling Zhang: Data curation, Formal analysis.
Declaration of competing interest. The authors have no relevant financial or nonfinancial interests to disclose.
Availability of data and materials. Data and materials will be available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Citation
Yan, J., Luo, B. and Zhang, T. (2024), "Can cuteness soften my anxiety? The impact of conversational styles of service robots on consumer service acceptance", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-05-2024-0758
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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