Thesis supervisors: Ingrid Poncin and Simon Hazée
In the era of automation, service robots are increasingly used to interact with customers, yet they are often perceived as impersonal and limited. To address these shortcomings, companies equip them with advanced social and agentic features such as automated social presence (ASP), artificial empathy, and proactivity. This doctoral dissertation, composed of three cross-robot comparative essays, examines how these features transform customer–robot interactions. The first essay offers a meta-analysis on ASP, validating and extending its theoretical framework. The second, through three experiments, investigates the impact of empathic chatbots on customer responses. The third, based on three experimental studies, explores how robot proactivity shapes sales interactions. Together, these essays advance the theoretical understanding of customer responses to service robots and offer managerial guidance for their effective design and deployment in frontline settings.
