Emotionally competent robots: acknowledging customer anger in service failure

Robots are increasingly deployed in frontline service roles to interact directly with customers. However, little is known about how robots should communicate in emotionally charged situations, such as service failures that elicit customer anger. Across three experimental studies, we show that when service robots acknowledge customer anger using the emotion specific term “angry” rather than the more generic term “bad,” customers perceive the robot as more emotionally competent and report higher satisfaction. We further show that this effect is specific to service robots and does not extend to humans in the same roles. These findings highlight how subtle design choices in robots’ emotional communication shape customer responses in anger driven service interactions and suggest that careful attention to emotional context is critical when deploying robots in service recovery settings.