Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction of Service Robots in the Restaurants in India and Japan
摘要
Robots have been in use for back-end business processes for a few decades. With the use of evolving digital technologies, these robots have become sophisticated enough to be used in customer-facing business operations, collaborating with the human beings. The use of service robots in restaurants is still in its early stages of adoption. This study aims at understanding the customer satisfaction and the level of service quality provided by the service robots in restaurants in India and Japan. For this study, SERVQUAL framework is used, which is a common framework for measuring and analyzing the service quality. This framework has five dimensions: tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. In this research, an additional dimension of price is included. It was found that the service quality gap is not big between the expected quality and the actual service provided by the service robots on the tangibility and reliability aspects of service. However, big gaps between the expected quality of service and the actual service were found in the responsiveness, assurance, and empathy aspects of service. There is a need to further enhance the capabilities of the service robots to bridge the gap between the expected and current levels of responsiveness, assurance, and empathy aspects of service quality. By leveraging various evolving technologies such as AI, IoT, NLP, CRM, face recognition, digital payments, and integrating the kitchen work-flow information with the service robots could enhance the service quality of robots in the restaurants to a very large extent.