What facilitates consumers accepting service robots? A conceptual framework

Confronting with an increasing number of robots swarming into service industries to replace human personnel, studies regarding what drives consumers to use service robots leave to be, unfortunately, still fragmented. Motivated by this, based on a content analysis of the existing studies, this paper establishes a conceptual framework to comprehend the current literature for in-depth understanding concerning customer attitude and their intention to use service robots. Drawing upon a triangulation of perspectives on end-user (i.e., technology user, consumer, and network member) in adoption research, this framework adopts technology acceptance theories, service quality, and expectancy-value theory to set up the skeleton. Furthermore, the antecedents impacting customer acceptance of service robots are subdivided into robot-design, consumer-oriented, relational components, as well as exogenous factors. This paper not only elaborates on the present situation of service robot acceptance research but also promotes it by developing a comprehensive framework regarding the effect factors.