I’m Not a “Chatbot”: An Empirical Investigation on Humanized Profiles on Social Media Platform

Abstract

While artificial intelligence is robotizing customer service at an unprecedented pace, there is great concern that “robotized” customer service could undermine customer satisfaction. This study searches for a solution that humanizes customer service to address this concern. Aiming to increase humanization, U.S. telecom giant T-Mobile recently added personal identities to its human social media customer service representatives on Twitter. Leveraging this exogenous change in which customers observe the personal identity while interacting with T-Mobile’s social media customer service representative, we identify a natural experimental setting and adopt the difference-in-differences specification as our main identification strategy. Our findings suggest that personal identity cues in the profile of social media customer service representatives lead to an increase in sentiment in public tweets, fewer number of complaint tweets, and a high probability of customer satisfaction in interacting with customer service representatives. A set of robustness tests safeguard our results from alternative explanations. Further, additional analyses suggest that the effects of the humanized profile are strong for verified Twitter users and female users. We also discuss the implications for research and practice.