New Publication: Emotional Communication By Service Robots – A Research Agenda

To become a viable solution for labor shortages in many service industries, experts point out that service robots must be able to engage in emotional communication. However, it is currently not clear what such emotional communication should look like for service robots. Equally unclear is how such emotional communication impacts customers and their service experience. To address this lack of understanding, we have created a research agenda – which now has been published in the Journal of Service Management. This research agenda is structured around the four emotional communication strategies as well as the three-step emotional communication process. In this way, we highlight the most pressing questions and research avenues on this new frontier of service robot research.