Conversational marketing as a framework for interaction with the customer: Development & validation of the conversational agent's usage scale

Abstract

Conversational agents are becoming an essential part of a growing number of personal and commercial encounters, bringing the issue of Conversational Marketing to a broader audience. A conversational agent is a developing technology that will be used in various fields throughout life, including e-commerce. The common characteristics of any conversational agent in whatever area are their capacity to engage in one-to-one personalised real-time dialogue with a human user and their availability 24 hours a day. Scale items for conversational agent phenomena have not been created scientifically or managerially in a business environment. The primary goal of this study was to develop and validate a new scale for conversational agents that could be used to quantify individual interactions in conversational marketing. As a result, the creation of a new scale for conversational agents with the objective of measuring individual customer interactions in conversational marketing was separated into two phases: Scale Development and Scale Validation. The Conversational Agent Usage Scale was developed and validated as a consequence of pilot studies. Additionally, this article discusses the practical consequences of conversational marketing, which can now be accomplished through the use of the Conversational Agent Usage Scale, which may be used by Customer Service & Support, Marketing, and Sales departments.