Abstract
This article explores the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots for creating positive change by supporting customers in the digital realm. Our study, which focuses on the customer and his/her declarative psychological responses to an interaction with a virtual assistant, will fill a gap in the digital marketing research, where little attention has been paid to the impact of Error and Gender, as well as the extent to which Social Presence and Perceived Competence mediate the relationships between Anthropomorphic design cues and Trust. We provide consistent evidence of the significant negative effect of erroneous conversational interfaces on several constructs considered in our conceptual model, such as: perceived competence, trust, as well as positive consumer responses. We also provide support to previous research findings and confirm that people employ a biased thinking across gender and this categorization also influences their acceptance of chatbots taking social roles. The results of an empirical study demonstrated that highly anthropomorphized female chatbots that engage in social behaviors are significantly shaping positive consumer responses, even in the error condition. Moreover, female virtual assistants are much more commonly forgiven when committing errors compared to male chatbots.
Highlights
Artificial Intelligence-based messaging solutions, namely conversational bots, represent one of the first stepping stones in order for companies to become faster, more efficient, and more capable of providing customers with relevant and personalized experiences
In order to address the variations in the definitions of trust, this study considered it as a multidimensional construct, composed of the following factors: sincerity, honesty, truthfulness, credibility, and reliability
The results show that 70.9% of the participants exposed to Paul could correctly identify the name of the chatbot with whom they interacted, while in the case of the female chatbot, 80.9% of the respondents correctly reported that they chatted with Sarah
Summary
Artificial Intelligence-based messaging solutions, namely conversational bots, represent one of the first stepping stones in order for companies to become faster, more efficient, and more capable of providing customers with relevant and personalized experiences. According to a report produced by Deloitte [1] and the investigations of human-robot interactions conducted by Holtgraves et al [2], chatbots leverage Artificial Intelligence to process language, which enables them to perceive the intended meaning of human speech. Based on the studies conducted by Radziwill and Benton [3] and Deloitte Digital [4] chatbots have been shown to be intelligent and autonomous agents, which learn from past interactions to improve their responses over time. Radziwill and Benton [3] and Abdul-Kader and Woods [7] focused their studies on how the most advanced chatbots leverage machine learning (i.e., Markov chains) for mimicking intelligent conversations in a similar way to humans
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