“How was Your Stay?”: Exploring the Use of Robots for Gathering Customer Feedback in the Hospitality Industry

摘要

This paper presents four exploratory studies of the potential use of robots for gathering customer feedback in the hospitality industry. To account for the viewpoints of both hotels and guests, we administered need finding interviews at five hotels and an online survey concerning hotel guest experiences with 60 participants. We then conducted the two deployment studies based on deploying software prototypes for Savioke Relay robots we designed to collect customer feedback: (i) a hotel deployment study (three hotels over three months) to explore the feasibility of robot use for gathering customer feedback as well as issues such deployment might pose and (ii) a hotel kitchen deployment study (at Savioke headquarters over three weeks) to explore the role of different robot behaviors (mobility and social attributes) in gathering feedback and understand the customers' thought process in the context that they experience a service. We found that hotels want to collect customer feedback in real-time to disseminate positive feedback immediately and to respond to unhappy customers while they are still on-site. Guests want to inform the hotel staff about their experiences without compromising their convenience and privacy. We also found that the robot users, e.g. hotel staff, use their domain knowledge to increase the response rate to customer feedback surveys at the hotels. Finally, environmental factors, such as robot's location in the building influenced customer response rates more than altering the behaviors of the robot collecting the feedback.