Professor of Services Marketing Jenny van Doorn has received a grant of € 400,000 from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for a project on public service by teams consisting of both robots and human employees.

The project titled ‘My robot colleague will be with you in a moment – Public service by teams of robots and humans’ aims to investigate how robots and human employees should work together to safeguard service satisfaction and client well-being, as well as job satisfaction and work performance of the human employee.

With an ageing population and an alarming shortage of health care personnel, the rising demand for health care is possibly one of the most urgent challenges of our time. Socially engaging service robots can help solve these personnel shortages, but cannot (yet) fully replace human service employees. They also encounter resistance from the side of both the human client and co-worker. In order to find ways to overcome it, it is very important to analyze this resistance closely.

As professor at the Department of Marketing of the Faculty of Economics and Business, Van Doorn is also closely involved in the Centre for Public Health in Economics and Business. Her research focuses on the use of new technology in the service frontline, such as robotics in health care. She is thankful to the NWO for awarding her this grant and is excited to get to work. “I can’t wait to start working on the project together with my colleagues Jana Holthöwer, Daan van Knippenberg and Jia Li. Given that most of us will co-work with technology such as robots or chatbots in the future, identifying ways in which humans and robots can effectively and fruitfully provide services together is of utmost importance.”

The NWO Open Competition

With the NWO Open Competition-SSH, NWO Social Sciences and Humanities wants to offer researchers the opportunity to carry out research into a subject of their own choosing without any thematic constraints. The aim of the Open Competition – SSH is to facilitate excellent, non-programmed, curiosity-driven research that primarily addresses a social sciences or humanities research question and research problem.