Interviewing Style for a Social Robot Engaging Museum Visitors for a Marketing Research Interview

We design and evaluate a robot interviewer for collecting visitor data in a museum for marketing purposes. We take inspiration from research on face-to-face human intercept interviews. We develop a personal interviewing style that is expected to motivate participants to answer more questions and compare this with a more formal style. We also evaluate whether a greeting ritual performed by the robot increases participation and whether taking a picture with the robot is an effective incentive for visitors to participate in an interview.Our study is conducted in the wild and we analyse sessions with the robot and passersby in a museum. The independent variables were interviewing style and whether an incentive was offered or not. The dependent variables were participation and continuation rate, and museum ratings. Contrary to expectations, we find that the participation rate is lower when the robot provides an incentive. Although we find that a personal style is perceived as more social, it does not influence the continuation rate. Museum ratings were also not affected by style. Our style manipulation may not have been strong enough to produce these effects.Our study shows that social robots have a high potential for conducting intercept interviews. Willingness to participate in a robot interview is high, while this is one of the main challenges with intercept interviews. To improve data collection, people detection and speech recognition skills could be improved.