Can a robot handle customers with unreasonable complaints?

Abstract

The service industry is facing an increase in the number of malicious customers (customers with unreasonable complaints). Employees have reported that handling unreasonable complaints is particularly stressful. Considering the recent push for workplace automation, we should have robots handling this task in place of humans. We propose a robot behavioral model designed for handling unreasonable complaints. The robot with this model has to "please the customer" without proposing a settlement. From a large survey of Japanese workers conducted by labor unions and an interview survey of experienced workers we conducted, we identified the conventional complaint handling flow as 1) listen to the complaint, 2) confirm the content of the complaint, 3) apologize, 4) give an explanation, and 5) conclude. The proposed behavioral model is a variation of this flow that takes into account the "state of mind" of the customer. In particular, the robot with this model does not leave the first step and keeps asking questions until the customer is "ready to listen". We conducted a user study, using a Wizard-of-Oz approach, to compare the proposed behavioral model to a baseline one implementing the conventional flow. We replicated in our laboratory the situation of a customer in a mobile phone shop. The proposed behavioral model was significantly better at making the customers believe that the robot listened to them and tried to help.