The Customer Experience with Fashion Sale Robots: A Psycho-interpretative Framework

The chapter aims to conceptually examine customer experience of service robots in a retail environment by raising the following research question: how perceptions of a customer experience with service robots are formed in a fashion retail context? The theoretical backbone is represented by the integration of managerial and marketing view of human-machine interaction through Variety Information Model (VIM) and a psychological approach to the user adoption of new technologies according to the Cognitive-Affective- Conative (CAC) model. In doing so, this chapter enriches the existing research on humans’ reac- tions to service robots in a fashion retail context by proposing a new conceptual framework—supported by an interdisciplinary theoretical underpinning—that sheds light on the complexity of the factors, from the customer’s side, conditioning the customer experience with fashion sale robots.