LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

Half human, half machine – augmenting service employees with AI for interpersonal emotion regulation

Photo from wikipedia

Purpose – With the advent of increasingly sophisticated AI, the nature of work in the service frontline is changing. The next frontier is to go beyond replacing routine tasks and… Click to show full abstract

Purpose – With the advent of increasingly sophisticated AI, the nature of work in the service frontline is changing. The next frontier is to go beyond replacing routine tasks and augmenting service employees with AI. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether service employees augmented with AI-based emotion recognition software are more effective in interpersonal emotion regulation(IER) and whether and how IER impacts their own affective well-being. Design/methodology/approach– For the underlying study, an AI-based emotion recognition software was developed in order to assistservice employees in managing customer emotions. A field study based on 2,459 call center service interactions assessed the effectiveness of the AI in augmenting service employees for IER and the immediate downstream consequences for well-being relevant outcomes. Findings – Augmenting service employees with AI significantly improved their IER activities. Employees in the AI (versuscontrol) condition were significantly more effective in regulating customer emotions. IER goal attainment, in turn, mediated the effect on employee affective well-being. Perceived stress related to exposure to the AI augmentation acted as a competing mediator. Practical implications – Service firms can benefit from state-of-the-art AI technology by focusing on its capacity to augment rather than merely replace employees. Furthermore, signaling IER goal attainment with the help of technology may provide uplifting consequences for service employee affective well-being. Originality/value – The present study is among the first to empirically test the introduction of an AI-fueled technology to augment service employees in handling customer emotions. This paper further complements the literature by investigating IER in a real-life setting and by uncovering goal attainment as a new mechanism underlying the effect of IER on the well-being of the sender.

Keywords: interpersonal emotion; service employees; half; service; augmenting service

Journal Title: Journal of Service Management
Year Published: 2020

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.