Social Robots: Enhancing Customer Engagement and Experience

This article explores the use of social robots in enhancing customer engagement and experience. It discusses the benefits, challenges, and future prospects of using social robots in marketing. Discover how social robots can drive brand growth and loyalty.

Running Head: SOCIAL ROBOTS 0
INTRODUCTION TO
MARKETING

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In current dynamic and competitive corporate environment, customer engagement is the key
to gain competitive advantage with building up a long-term relationship with the consumers
and their lifestyle (Brodie et al, 2011). It is also about encouraging customers to share and
interact experiences so as to foster brand growth and loyalty. Organisations who focuses on
customer engagement results in creating of value as they offer customer something
meaningful other than sales pitch and with relation to real-time customer support. Various
researches also said that consumer who are receiving positive and engaging positive
experience are more loyal to the organisation and also retain with for a longer time.
Digitalization of services is changing the way companies interact with their consumers
nowadays. Deployment of technology and marketing by the big brands in consideration with
strategy marketing mix will help the organisation to develop stronger and longer customer
experience and engagement (Gronroos, 2016). One of the major technology that can be used
in terms of technology can be social robots. The introduction of social robots brings out
various discussion ranging from dark side of AI to the future of impact on social interaction.
Other than developing customer engagement, these social robots are also known for gathering
customer feedback by acknowledging their experiences and responses.
A social robot is a physically embodied, independent agent that interacts and communicates
with people on an emotional level (Leite, Martinho and Paiva, 2013). In technically advanced
communities, a process of robotization of social work is already evolving. For example,
robots are increasingly using in care of the elderly and various other problems are deal in
innovative ways. On the other hand, social robots are explicitly designed to assist individuals
not only in social work but also in other activities. It is found that robotics is undergoing a
through various significant transformations with increasingly touching people and their lives.
In present times, one of the major reason that social robotics is gaining importance is because
of mobile robots that help in creating various interaction with humans.
Social robots are capable to enhance customer experience and even that can be across to all
sector from health to retail to education to travel. It is also linked to customer experience and
a robot can provide you with very one-on-one highly customised physical interactions (Kim
et al, 2013). The companies are designing and developing social robots with complex
artificial intelligence (AI) software that will enable them to interact with humans, and map
new environments that are capable to sense and discover objects and faces and therefore
execute adaptive behaviour in diverse human-centric conditions.

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Marketers can use social robots in varieties of ways being able to attract, serve and satisfy
more numbers of customers. For example, considering retail operations, the robot can
recognise customers and their requirements and address people by connecting them with best
available associates in the store. The social robot can also provide the consumers with
appropriate information based on their unique journey, their profile and purchase history.
This will result in driving increased engagement and store sales in relation to provider of
information. Social robot can also be used as customer feedback, for instance, it can be
directly used as to survey consumers so as to gain their reviews, suggestions and opinions and
it will help in better understanding of their perceptions (Glas et al, 2012). Employing this in
real-time will allow the marketer to act proactively at that moment an event occurs.
Customer engagement is linked with their perception and their perception can be influenced
with various entertainment strategies as the robot is an excellent companion to play games
and with value of these games, marketers can gather information about the customer
perception as they play. This provides them with an opportunity to personally engage with
the consumer to enhance experience and raise sales. Hence, Social robots are an interesting
concept which can be aligned with Omnichannel approach in relation to marketing. With the
help of social robots, it is possible for the retailers to gain loyal customers and these social
robots are alerting the way corporate see at dealing with customer relationships. Moreover,
the social robot also facilitates predictive analysis, enterprises can now use the technology of
AI to explore the consumer data and convert it into significant insights, and that can benefit
stakeholders of in decision-making. It can also be said that embracing social robots will open
various opportunities to the enterprises with offering real-time offerings to customer at
fraction of the cost. Over time, these social robots are more back with AI algorithms to
provide more timely and effective solutions to the customers.
In 2010, SoftBank Mobile set partnership with Aldebaran, a French robotic manufacturer to
develop Pepper, a humanoid robot who is the first to recognise human emotions and change
its behaviour accordingly. The bank used Pepper for greeting customers at its mobile stores.
It was identified that Pepper has managed to raise interactions of customers by a whopping
98% and thus also push revenue by 300% (Singh, 2018). This scenario gets attention of
various big organisations and later on, Nestle publicised plans to acquire Pepper to appeal
consumers in 1,000 of its Nescafe stores in Japan.

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With customer engagement being such as a critical part of mortal business, it is time for
social robot to start to be seen as a tool for human augmentation rather than viewed as an
automated replacement. Social robots are capable of making human connections and
customer engagement is the key to connect customer on a personal level.
Employee can also be more creative if they get support from the social robot, as these robots
are also capable of organisational and administrative tasks (Berthon et al 2012). They interact
with the employees to make the workplace more conductive so that employees can interact
with ease. Hence, it will increase the flexibility of the final message that needs to be
conveyed to customers related to marketing of products. Social robot can also raise in-store
efficiency and various other places where the type of consumer interactions are repetitive and
standardized in nature. With the changing trends, Customers do not presume to be influenced
by the old-style unidirectional mass-market tactic to promotion, however, rather wish to join
and relate with company before getting to a final decision like whether to agree or disagree
with the services and products being offered. Hence, due to several benefits, various
organisations are even now working to assimilate pioneering approaches to consumer
communication with the help of robotic technologies with the objective to make attractive
robotic avatars that can lead to keeping the customer engaged (Glas et al, 2013).
However, on the contradictory side, there are various drawbacks also that persist as a
challenge in the customer engagement role. The biggest challenge can be seen particularly
when they are being exploited for direct or face to face engagement with the consumers. One
of the potential disadvantages is that this robot may turn into more human-like and thus may
come up into the phenomenon identified as the “uncanny valley” and where humanoid
likeability will revolving rapidly from empathy to repulsion. It is also important for the
organisation to consider cultural and social factors. For instance, Korean and Japanese
cultures are more familiar and could effectively accept robot as compared to western culture
(Choi, Lee and Han, 2008). This can prove to be challenging while designing marketing
message for specific customers. Other drawback may be fear and insecurity among existing
employees and their resistance towards supporting these robots for customer engagement.
Moreover, most of the people in today’s scenario prefer to interact with other human and this
shows that there is still a gap between acceptance of robots by the customer (Bolton et al,
2018). Effective collaborative promotion needs that concentrating on the consumer is more
than just conversation. In addition, the existing systems of human-robot communication

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technology are infantile and various robotic organisations are putting many efforts to discover
improved ways so as to manage communication. For instance, the Softbank robot – “Pepper”
when does not able to identify the solution to the queries, the topic will be changed by him
and it leads to a frustration to the human. Therefore, keeping human satisfied with quality
interactions, after all, the robot cannot perform those task in an easy manner.
To sum up, it is possible for the marketers to get advantage from mechanisation in routine
task and these social robots can play an important role in enhancing and increasing their
communications with consumers, mainly during promotional aiming with thousands of
bilingual consumers in a time. The future adoption of social robots also depends on how
effectively they are able to take on the role of platforms, bringing on marketers that drive
unique and innovative applications to raise customer engagement. At last, customer
engagement is all about connecting to them at personal level and today social robots are
capable of making that human connection.

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Exploring the AI-VR-AR options [ONLINE] Available from:

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