Exploring Difference of Customer Emotion Towards Robot and Human Employees in Different Hotel Service Scenarios

Le résumé fourni par la source

Hotel managers can use robots to change the nature and form of product and service design and delivery, creating a more meaningful customer experience. Understanding customers’ emotional certainty and their preferences for human versus robot employees in different service scenarios is therefore essential for improving the perceptions of robot-operated hotels. Drawing on 28,088 pieces of user-generated content, this study applies topic modeling, emotion analysis, and an emotional certainty framework to capture not only the type and intensity of customer emotions but also the confidence with which these emotions are expressed. The findings demonstrate that emotional certainty is a more stable and reliable predictor of customer satisfaction than traditional emotional indicators. By integrating person – environment fit theory and the self-validation hypothesis, this study reveals that customers assess both the compatibility between employees (human vs. robots) and the service context and reinforce such judgments through the certainty they hold about their emotions. Higher emotional certainty leads to stronger preferences for employee types in specific scenarios. This study is the first to apply emotional certainty in the context of robot hotels, extending the theoretical boundaries of emotion analysis while validating its methodological value through large-scale textual data. It further enriches the understanding of emotional and cognitive mechanisms in human – robot interactions and offers practical guidance for optimizing human – robot resource allocation in hospitality services.

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