Nice surprise, more present than a machine

Abstract

Social robots are emerging as potentially useful tools for customer service in various contexts including retail, healthcare or education. Their capacity for human-like interaction could provide a satisfactory customer experience in simple and repetitive tasks, while allowing human staff to focus on issues that are more complex. In this paper, we report the initial findings of a two-day field study of using a social robot Pepper for guidance and edutainment at the service point of a medium-sized city in Finland. We collected observations and semi-structured interviews of altogether 89 customers visiting the service point. Fifteen specific experiences evoked by the interaction with the robot were identified and categorized under five basic needs of Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness, Stimulation and Security. We discuss implications for an experience-driven design process of applications for social service robots.