BUS News

HKBU School of Business organised the first research webinar on 13 July 2022, featuring Dr. Rocky Chen, Associate Professor from the Department of Marketing, to shed light on how humanoid service robots influence consumer satisfaction. The webinar attracted an audience of 100 for a relaxing and fruitful dialogue.

Drawing insights from two of his latest projects, Dr. Chen discussed anthropomorphized service robots’ bright sides and dark sides, and provided implications on consumer satisfaction in two contexts – online coproduction service and creative design service.

As coproduction tasks can be categorised as either designing for self or for others, Dr. Chen suggested that with anthropomophized e-agents, designing for one self would lower the autonomy which negatively affects customer satisfaction, while designing for others would enhance one’s social relatedness and increase customer satisfaction of the overall service. For creative design, humanizing a service robot does not significantly increase its perceived creativity. However, when pairing the service robot with a creative employee in a service team, humanizing the service robot can help transfer the trait of creativity from employee to robot, which enhances customer evaluation of the design outcome produced by the service team.

The webinar was concluded with a lively discussion among Dr. Rocky Chen, Prof. Xu Huang (Associate Dean, Research & Postgraduate Studies), and the participants who were practitioners in different industries. They shared best practices and personal experiences concerning service robots. Stay tuned for the next School of Business research webinar!