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About

Richard Gruner is an emerging researcher whose work sits at the intersection of service robotics, customer experience, and human-robot interaction. His scholarship focuses on understanding how consumers perceive, trust, and build relationships with social robots in service contexts, with particular relevance to the evolving landscape of Industry 5.0. Gruner's most influential contribution, "Customer Experience Quality with Social Robots: Does Trust Matter?" (2023), has garnered 45 citations and investigates how customer equity drivers — including value, brand, and relationship equity — shape the quality of robot-mediated service experiences, positioning trust as a critical mediating force. Building on this foundation, his subsequent work on relationship quality in customer-service robot interactions employs innovative configurational methods, examining combinations of value-related factors that produce high-quality human-robot encounters. This body of research arrives at a pivotal moment, as businesses worldwide accelerate the adoption of robotic service agents. Though early in trajectory, Gruner's cumulative citation record signals growing scholarly recognition, and his focus on the psychological and relational dimensions of service automation makes his work essential reading for researchers exploring the future of customer-facing technology.