Being Alone or Together:How Frontline Anthropomorphized Robots Affect Solo (vs. Joint) Service Consumption

Solo consumption has become an emerging trend in recent years. However, the service experiences of solo customers with the growing adoption of frontline humanlike robots remain unclear, particularly in direct comparison with joint customers. Building on the literature of anthropomorphism and information processing theory, this study examines whether and how frontline anthropomorphized robots (FAR) might improve the service experiences of solo customers relative to their joint counterparts. Data from four studies, including field and online experiments, reveal that solo customers are more likely than joint customers to perceive FAR as offering rapport but also as being eerie, leading to different service evaluations (both attitudinal and behavioral outcomes). Nevertheless, as parallel mechanisms, these levels of social rapport and eeriness are contingent on features of the FAR, the service delivery process, and customers’ consumption goals. The rapport (eeriness) mechanism is strengthened (weakened) when the robot is of in-group favoritism, the service process deprives customers of control, and customers have a hedonic consumption goal. With the boom in adopting frontline humanlike robots in hospitality services, this study offers managerially relevant implications for serving solo customers as an emerging segment along with the traditional segment of joint customers

The Dynamic Impacts of Employee Job Motivation on Employee Job Performance and Corporate Customer Satisfaction: The Contingent Role of ERP System Implementation

Prior research has generally found a significant, positive impact of employees\u27 job motivation on job performance, and which in turn, leads to more satisfied customers. However, little attention is directed towards how implementation of centralized information systems (IS), such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, will affect these relationships in the business to business (B2B) context. Toward this end, we plan to conduct a field study to empirically compare the effects of these relationships before and after the implementation of an ERP system. This cross-disciplinary study will contribute to the extant organization, marketing, and IS literature by examining how a centralized IS implementation moderates the relationships among employees’ job motivation, performance, and corporate customer satisfaction, and testing the proposed framework in the B2B context

"You Look So Attractive!”: The Role of Interpersonal Attraction in Driving Customer Citizenship Behavior in Service Coproduction Process

Practitioners’ and scholars’ interest in the service-dominant logic of marketing has increased sharply in the last decade (Vargo and Lusch 2004). Customer participation (CP), as one of the foundational premises of this service-dominant logic, enables service employees to cocreate customize services with customers to suit their needs (Auh et al. 2007; Chan, Yim, and Lam 2010; Yi, Nataraajan and Gong 2011). Extant research on the impact of CP is considerable, but with a dominant focus on taking from an extrinsically motivated perspective to examine the impact of CP on customer satisfaction or employees’ in-role performance through mechanisms of improved service quality, reduced costs, and enhanced control. However, the question of how CP might drive customers’ citizenship behaviors has not been well addressed. This question is important; firms experience remarkable challenges in their efforts to manage customer participation and cultivate more citizenship behaviors would help enhance their competitive advantage. This paper uses social exchange and reinforcement theories to explore the mediating role of interpersonal attraction, a crucial but under-researched relational construct that both parties can develop during the co-production process, in the impact of customer participation on customer citizenship behavior. Moreover, this research further examine the moderating roles of shared interpersonal similarity and coproduction task outcome on the relationship between customer participation and interpersonal attraction. With a large-scale survey data collected from customer-designer dyads from an interior design institution with multiple waves, results show that customer participation in the coproduction process with the employee will increase their citizenship behaviors through enhanced interpersonal attraction toward the employee. Particularly, such positive effect exists when the customer perceived a higher similarity with the employee, as supported by the positive reinforcement theory. Nevertheless, the moderation of perceived similarity is further altered by the coproduction task outcome such that the positive moderating effect of perceived similarity with the employee only functions well when the coproduction outcome is better than expected. This research extends the existing literatures in CP and value cocreation by studying customer citizenship behaviors as a more enduring and impactful outcomes for firm’s profitability and sustainability, which represents an important step in the effort to examine value co-creation processes more fully. It also enriches existing marketing literature by applying reinforcement theory to investigate the impact of CP on the creation of interpersonal attraction and customer citizenship behavior in a services context. Particularly, it explores the moderating roles of interpersonal similarity and co-production task outcomes on customer citizenship behaviors. Taken together, this research advances understanding of the complex relationship between CP and customer citizenship behaviors by showing that CP is a necessary, but not the only condition, for developing interpersonal attraction and customer citizenship behaviors and this process is moderated by other factors

Three studies on understanding customer relationship management in services: customer-firm affection, customer-staff proximity, and customer co-production

The Best PhD Thesis in the Faculties of Architexture, Arts, Business & Economics, Education, Law and Social Sciences (University of Hong Kong), Li Ka Shing Prize, 2007-2008.published_or_final_versionBusinessDoctoralDoctor of Philosoph

Understanding consumer-to-consumer interactions in virtual communities: The salience of reciprocity

Virtual communities (VCs) represent popular social environments in which people interact by exchanging resources such as information, ideas, and advice about their common interests. Existing research lacks an explication of why people help others in VCs and how such voluntary behaviors drive subsequent attitudes (VC commitment) and behavioral intentions (online co-shopping). This article adopts resource exchange theory to examine how two routes of interactivity (structural vs. experiential) influence reciprocity and affect commitment and co-shopping. Using a netnography study and an online survey, the authors confirm the significant effects of structural and experiential routes of interactivity on reciprocity. Reciprocity has critical effects on social system maintenance by enhancing commitment to the community and intention to co-shop. The results also identify partially mediated relationships among various variables, which suggest that the effects of the experiential route on VC commitment and co-shopping operate partly through reciprocity.Virtual community Reciprocity Resource exchange theory Interactivity Structural route Experiential route

Demystifying the impact of customer participation on citizenship behaviors through interpersonal attraction and its contingencies

This paper addresses the lack of clarity on the linkage between customer participation (CP) and customer citizenship behavior (CCB) by using reinforcement theory to investigate the mediating role of interpersonal attraction (IPA) and the moderating effect of three types of reinforcers (people, task, and environment) in the impact of CP on CCB. Dyadic data from a field survey of both customers and designers from an interior design institute confirms the mediating role of IPA, particularly under high level of shared similarity between customers and employees, and when the task outcomes are better than expected. Moreover, the effect of IPA on CCB is stronger when customers perceive the organizational climate as highly customer-oriented. Besides extending the CP and CCB literature by exploring the impact of IPA on CCB with CP as a mediator and several reinforcers as moderator, this paper also suggests how service firms may influence their customers’ citizenship behaviors