The Impact of Chatbot Communication Style and Service Remedies on Consumer Adoption Intention

Abstract

The development of chatbots is very rapid, so far, the research on chatbots mainly focuses on the field of service success, ignoring the fact that chatbot service failure (i.e., making mistakes) is a kind of norm, how to better design chatbots so as to minimize the loss brought by service failure has become a problem that needs to be solved urgently by AI producers nowadays. Based on the chatbot service failure scenario, this paper investigates the different impacts of chatbots adopting two communication styles, social and task, on consumers' adoption intention, and finds that consumers' adoption intention of social (vs. task) chatbots is lower after service failure, in which uniqueness neglect plays a mediating role. In addition, different matching effects between three chatbot service remedies (humor vs. apology vs. compensation) and communication style (social vs. oriented) were explored. Social-oriented chatbot service failure, using humor as a service remedy was superior to compensation. Task-oriented chatbot service failure and the use of compensation as a means of service remediation is superior to humor. Apologizing is less effective than humor and compensation in both social and task-oriented chatbot service failure scenarios. The conclusions of this paper enrich the research on chatbots in the area of service failure and provide effective suggestions for merchants to design and apply chatbots.