Transparency is key for improving customer service through employee-(ro)bot collaboration

CODE Original Article
By Khanh Le, Laszlo Sajtos, Werner Kunz and Karen Fernandez

What's the article about

Collaboration between employees and (ro)bots will be a key development of the future of service. However, most current research on the application of (ro)bots in business did not emphasise the importance of such collaboration until recently. Thus, the team at the University of Auckland and the University of Massachusetts, Boston (USA) conducted experimental studies to determine the importance of this collaboration in serving customers.

Dive into the details

The research team considers the most important aspect of this collaboration to be the cues given to the customer by the employee-(ro)bot team to signal them to notice (and understand) the collaboration. These cues involve four distinctive features belonging to two categories: task connection cues (the displaying of the work-related processes between the employee and (ro)bot to the customer) and entity connection cues (the displaying of the relationship between the employee and (ro)bot to the customer regardless of whether or not they are working together).

Task connection cues consist of two features: how the two entities present themselves to the customer (either simultaneously or sequentially), and their communication about the coordinated action needed in order to complete the customer request. Entity connection cues consist of two features: the displaying of who is the supervisor of the team and whether or not the two entities share a joint performance objective. These cues were hypothesised to improve satisfaction through the customer’s subjective evaluation of how cohesively the two entities work together and how smoothly the employee and (ro)bot provide the service process.

The research team conducted a series of experimental studies where participants acting as customers were served by a human employee and chatbot team, who gave them recommendations about a career change. The team found that displaying the coordination cue and the team goal cue had a consistently positive impact on customer perception of the team’s cohesion and process fluency, which subsequently enhanced their satisfaction rating when being served by the employee-(ro)bot service team.

The takeaways

The key insight is that when using (ro)bots in conjunction with human employees for customer service, firms should pay attention to making this collaboration visible to the customers in order to have a positive impact on customer experience.

Thus, based on the results, the research team suggests that when deploying such a team, firms should train the employees to communicate with the (ro)bot naturally as if they are working with a human colleague, which ultimately creates an impression that both entities work as a cohesive unit in serving customers and a sense of effortless service process flow. Second, whenever possible, firms should tell the customers that these two entities share the same goal of delivering the best possible service, because it helps create the impression that both entities are motivated to prioritise solving customers’ problems.