Service Agents Research Articles

Self-service technology recovery: the importance of psychological need support

PurposeThe service recovery literature provides little guidance to firms on how users of self-service technology (SST) perceive assistance provided by human and non-human service agents following a service obstacle. This research responds by addressing two important research questions about SST recovery: (1) how are perceptions of assistance provided following a service obstacle influenced by a customer's psychological needs? and (2) does supporting the psychological needs of customers positively impact continuance intentions following a service obstacle?Design/methodology/approachData are collected to address the research questions via five experiments that explore how assistance provided by a non-human (vs human vs no assistance) service agent contributes to perceptions of psychological support and continuance intentions following a service obstacle while volitionally using SST.FindingsThe results show that while users of SST would prefer to do so without an obstacle requiring intervention of a service agent, if assistance is required then the psychological need support elicited from a non-human service agent was vital to an effective recovery. Further, the findings highlight some boundary conditions for this relationship, with the impact of customer perceived need support on continuance intentions found to be sensitive to fit between the task and assistance provided and the complexity of the task being completed.Originality/valueMuch of the prior service recovery literature has emphasized the different types of tactics that can be used (e.g. apologizing, monetary compensation and explaining what happened), failing to appreciate the role of different types of service agents or the underlying psychological process that explain the relative merit of such tactics. The present research shows that for these tactics to influence continuance intentions, they must be provided by a relevant service agent and support a customer's psychological need for autonomy, competence and relatedness. The hypothesized impact of psychological need support on continuance intentions was also observed to be contingent upon the fit between the task and the type of assistance provided, where the level of task complexity attenuated this fit.

DATA QUALITY MEASUREMENT TO IMPROVE SQA APPLICATION IN PT XYZ

Service Quality Assurance (SQA) is one of a unit in PT XYZ an Indonesian e-commerce company. SQA is responsible for ensuring and maintaining services given to customers by Customer Service agents to meet the company's quality standard. However, the application was built without integration with the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, the main customer service application at PT XYZ. The problem is that if companies need SQA data, they must manually input data from SQA to CRM. This can cause vulnerabilities in the data input process. As a result, it impacts the company's business processes, which are inefficient and can be detrimental both materially and immaterially. This research aims to provide recommendations to improve the quality of SQA data so that companies can use the data to be integrated into the CRM system. The Total Data Quality Management (TDQM) method was used for this study with three dimensions: completeness, validity and accuracy. The results of each dimension are 99.64% for completeness, 84.75% for validity, and 100% for accuracy. Business rules on the validity dimension that have the lowest data quality are V1 28.57% and V6 65.11%. The problem factors were identified as an incomplete data dictionary, incomplete and obsolete SOP documents, and no business processes and data control on the application. Recommendations to improve the data quality of the application are PT XYZ can conduct an in-depth study of business roles so that all business processes can be clearly defined and regulations can be set forth in SOP documents. The use of specific reference data for each domain can be used to increase data legitimacy and the level of data suitability.

ICTs, smallholder agriculture and farmers’ livelihood improvement in developing countries: Evidence from Tanzania

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are among the profound tools to help the poor and marginalized rural smallholder farmers make a difference in their lives. This paper seeks to understand how the recent development of ICTs helps increase agricultural productivity and improve smallholder farmers’ livelihoods in Tanzania. We employed a fuzzy sets Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) technique to select the most relevant 24 literature from 2163 literature and analyze the drivers ( conditions) that influence ICT use among the smallholder farmers, which in turn leads to increased agricultural productivity and improved farmers’ livelihoods ( outcomes). In addition, the authors conducted in-depth interviews with some local smallholder farmers in Tanzania's same regions, as shown in the reviewed literature, to understand how ICTs worked in the field. Findings revealed that ICTs had been increasingly used for and directly linked with agricultural transformation, increased agricultural productivity and improved rural livelihoods in Tanzania in the past two decades. Smallholder farmers rely on ICT tools, particularly mobile phones and radios, to access agricultural-related information, which helps them increase agricultural productivity. The limited number of public extension service agents forces most smallholder farmers to opt for ICTs as an alternative source of agricultural information. In this case, the agricultural extension department from the ministry of agriculture should work closely with telecom, broadcasting companies and other stakeholders to strengthen and initiate more appropriate ICT infrastructure and services targeting the smallholder farmers.

Managing customer contact centers with delay announcements and automated service

This article presents a study of the queueing system resulting from the service of customers in a generic customer contact center that has both automated service and traditional human agent service. Contact center managers would prefer customers use the provided automated service to reduce average customer queuing time as well as staffing costs of required human agent service agents. However, forcing customers to use automated service may lead to customer dissatisfaction. In this study, we propose to increase the use of automated service by using delay announcements as a tool to help guide customers to use automated service who would otherwise have chosen agent service. We present a stochastic optimization formulation to determine the optimal staffing level and delay announcement policy, with an objective to minimize staffing cost, customer balking, and reneging penalty. Closed-form solutions are derived using a fluid approximation, and the asymptotic optimality of the solutions is established. The obtained optimal policies are demonstrated by numerical experiments. A key managerial insight is that with automated service, the optimal delay announcement policy no longer satisfies the well-known information-consistent balking property for a customer contact center using delay announcement without automated service. Instead, there is a new equilibrium delay policy that uses an “extreme positive bias” to reduce the length of the queue for human agent service to zero.

Judgements of a customer service agent's personality based on acoustic properties of their speech

People frequently interact with customer service agents, whether they are a real person or an AI, and quickly form personality impressions from it. The present study aimed to investigate how acoustic characteristics of speech of human agents affect their personality impressions. To this end, spontaneous speech was elicited from 30 native Korean speakers while they played a role of an agent assisting a customer on the phone. We then conducted a personality rating experiment in which 30 native speakers of Korean rated the perceived degree of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness (the “Big Five” personality traits) on the recordings on a 5-point scale. Various acoustic features were extracted from the stimuli, which were converted into two principal components using a Principal Component Analysis. The results of correlation analyses demonstrated that some of the acoustic variables such as measures of voice quality (H1-H2, Harmonic-to-Noise Ratio), the mean f0, and articulation rate were significantly correlated with the personality ratings, with the acoustic correlates different for male and female speakers. This helps discover characteristics of a more likable voice and speaking style for a customer service agent and has important implications for generating more likable synthetic speech for similar services.

Service agents’ risk behavior and implications for co-creation

PurposeThis paper aims to develop a conceptual framework for further understanding the risks embedded in co-creation services in high-contact service transactions. It delineates behavioral and economic perspectives focusing on agency costs, risk behavior, compensation structure and provides a context in which information is processed.Design/methodology/approachFollowing an extensive review of the literature, propositions are advanced that relate an agent’s risk behavior to information processing, compensation and the propensity to engage in co-creation. These propositions provide a complementary context for understanding risks in the co-creation process.FindingsThe propositions detail how a service agent’s information processing can be enhanced if the customer’s expected utility from transactions is maximized by managing the agent’s risk behavior and earnings potential. A compensation structure that balances fixed base and variable pay can motivate risk-taking and the agent’s propensity to engage in co-creation.Originality/valueThis paper extends the understanding of agency risks in the co-creation of hospitality services that integrates economic and behavioral perspectives with information processing. Theoretical implications include a broader context of the risks underlying co-creation. Practical implications relate to how earnings potential could be maximized by considering the agent’s risk behavior and the expected utility arising from such transactions.

Novel role-wise attention mechanism for predicting purchases made through chat-based online customer services

Online chat has become a key channel for firms to provide pre-purchase customer services and generate purchases. Firms must deploy their service personnel based on the customers' purchase probability. Conversational contingency is indicative of purchase probability. However, the unstructured nature of textual data hinders the use of interaction information. We develop a novel role-wise attention mechanism to capture the conversational contingency among customers and service agents. Our results reveal that the role-wise attention mechanism is effective for measuring service interaction quality. When the mechanism is combined with a deep-learning model, it outperforms traditional self-attention mechanisms for predicting customer purchases. The area under the curve of the model is 0.85. Ablation studies indicate that external attention, a core element of the role-wise attention mechanism, substantially improves prediction performance by capturing the conversational contingency between communicators.

Effects of communication style on relational outcomes in interactions between customers and embodied conversational agents

AbstractConversational agents are increasingly used to substitute or augment human service employees. Due to their ability to use human‐like communicative behaviors, these agents are theorized to establish social connections with customers. However, the existing literature is ambiguous on how conversational agents should verbally communicate with customers and whether they should be adaptive to customers' verbal behavior. The current study aims to address these gaps, by focusing on the effects of the conversational agent's communication style on the perceived social connection. Two experiments were conducted in which a virtual agent in a hedonic service (Experiment 1) or a utilitarian service (Experiment 2) was manipulated to adapt either a static task‐ or a social‐oriented communication style or mimic the communication style used by the customer in the previous turn. Guided by marketing and human–computer interaction literature, measures for engagement and rapport were used to reveal customers' perceived social connection. Results show that for the hedonic service, rapport was significantly affected by the presence of social cues in the agent's communication style (whether statically or mimicked), while engagement was significantly affected by mimicry. For the utilitarian service, only social cues significantly affected rapport. These findings enrich the Computers As Social Actors paradigm and provide clear guidelines for practitioners.

Analisis Akad Wakalah Pada Transaksi Financial Technology Syariah

This study aims to analyze the application of the wakalah contract in the sharia fintech digital payment system in one of the sharia fintech service products in Indonesia. This type of research is a literature study with a quantitative descriptive approach. The results showed that the wakalah contract in Islamic financial technology transactions is allowed if the issuer and the parties organizing electronic money and digital financial service agents do not use an ijarah contract. This is in accordance with DSN-MUI Fatwa No. 10/DSN-MUI/IV/2000 concerning wakalah which applies rewards to wakalah contracts. Instead of renting services, the issuer represents its duties to the parties organizing electronic money including digital financial service agents. So that the results of this study can be a guideline in making and formulating policies.

When do robo-advisors make us better investors? The impact of social design elements on investor behavior

Investors increasingly can obtain advice from “robo-advisors", artificial intelligence–enabled digitalized service agents. We study whether and why the provision of investment advice from a robo-advisor improves individuals’ investment decisions. In two consequential induced-value experiments, we analyze the well-documented disposition effect, which reflects investors’ greater propensity to realize past gains than past losses. We find that the availability of a robo-advisor reduces (i.e., mitigates) investors’ disposition effect (Study 1). Moreover, imbuing the robo-advisor with social design elements (e.g., a name and the ability to communicate using natural language) negatively affects investment behavior (i.e., increases the disposition effect). The extent to which investors seek advice mediates this effect, i.e., investors ask for advice to a lesser extent from a robo-advisor with, compared to without, social design elements (Study 2). Our findings advance our understanding of the benefits of artificial intelligence-enabled advisors for improving decision making. However, our results also imply increased psychological hurdles of asking for advice from human-like robo-advisors and highlight potential risks of imbuing them with social design elements, which has become a widespread practice to give robo-advisors a human touch.

Optimizing the role of ‘lead mothers’ in seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) campaigns: formative research in Kano State, northern Nigeria

BackgroundSeasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) is a safe and effective intervention for preventing malaria in children under 5 years of age. Lead mothers are community health volunteers that help caregivers comply with monthly administration of anti-malarial drugs during SMC campaigns. The lead mother approach is used in several SMC implementing states across Nigeria, but there is lack of evidence about their roles and how effective they are. This study sought to better understand the current role of lead mothers, identify areas for improvement and ways to optimize the role of lead mothers during SMC campaigns.MethodsThis paper reports the formative phase of a three-phased intervention development study. The formative phase involved semi-structured interviews with stakeholders from national, state, local government and community levels (n = 20). Thematic analysis was used to identify key themes, forming the basis of a subsequent co-design workshop with stakeholders routinely involved in SMC campaigns.ResultsThe findings of the formative phase converged around four overarching themes: skills and attributes required of lead mothers; factors that affect lead mother’s roles; how lead mothers interact with Community Health Influencers Promoters Services (CHIPS) agents and re-imagining the role of lead mothers during SMC campaigns.ConclusionThis formative work in Kano state indicates that through their strong connection to communities and unique relationship with caregivers, lead mothers can and do influence caregivers to adopt healthy behaviours during SMC campaigns. However, there is room for improvement in how they are recruited, trained and supervised. There is need to improve lead mothers’ knowledge and skills through adequate training and supporting materials, so they can deliver targeted health messages to caregivers. Sustainability of the lead mother approach is at risk if policymakers do not find a way of transitioning their role into the existing community health worker infrastructure, for example by using CHIPs agents, and ensuring less reliance on external donor support.

A integração ensino-serviço no enfrentamento à covid-19

Abstract This study analyzes the teaching-service integration as a strategy for Permanent Health Education against COVID-19, in healthcare services of the Municipal Health Department of João Pessoa, in the state of Paraiba (SMS/JP). This is an exploratory, comprehensive-interpretative study with a qualitative approach. The scenarios were the SMS/JP services, which carry out actions to combat COVID-19 and serve as practice spaces for educational institutions. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and focus groups, conducted with service managers, health professionals, residence coordinators, and residents. The analysis allowed us to identify the circumstances and adversities that arose during the period of agreements and renegotiations of practice scenarios during the pandemic. Also highlighting the contributions of the teaching-service integration to the qualification process of workers and students in the face of COVID-19 and the relationship with the needs of the services, from the qualification movements, elaboration of protocols, sheets, forms, and creation of discussion spaces. It was confirmed that teaching-service integration is a powerful permanent health education strategy, considering the articulation between service agents and educational institutions, provoking the development of a critical-reflective look at the service, boosting learning spaces, evolution, and growth.

A Place of the Village Rural Land Management Committee in Land Governance in Tioro: North Ivory Coast

This study is guided by the question how does the Village Committee for Rural Land Management intervene in a land context that reserves the exclusivity of land governance to customary authorities? The objective is to analyze the political implications of the institution of the land committee in land governance in Tioro, a locality of the north of the Ivory Coast. Opting for a qualitative research approach, we have built a framework of investigation structured around the land system, customary land governance, the implementation of land law 98-750 and the forms of relations between actors and authorities. This investigation framework was submitted to the traditional and administrative authorities, to the agents of the Rural Land Service of the Regional Directorate of Agriculture, to the members of the land committee and to the land users. It emerges from this study that the Tioro land system is structured around the collective use of the land and the organization of its governance around the village chief, and land chief. Despite the establishment of a Village Land Management Committee, a new frame resulting from the application of law 98 750 of December 23 relating to rural land, customary authorities remain the central figures of local land governance. Reclaimed by customary land authorities, the land committee functions as a technical instrument controlled by the chief. The mode of rural land governance inaugurated by the involvement of the Land Committee at the village level further strengthens the power of customary authorities.

Menjaga Standar Kualitas Pelayanan Guest Service Agent dengan PDCA pada Masa New Normal: Studi Kasus sebuah Hotel di Uluwatu, Bali

This research was conducted to determine how the strategy of maintaining the quality standards of Guest Service Agent services in the new normal era in Uluwatu. Interview techniques and documentation obtain data. The data analysis in this study is descriptive and qualitative by describing the interview results from the front office manager and guest service supervisor at Hotel based on documentation data in the form of guest comment reviews on OTA (Online Travel Agent) Agoda.com, Tiket.com and Booking.com. Based on the results of the interview analysis regarding the strategy of maintaining the quality standards of guest service agent services in hoteli, it still needs to be improved. It can be seen from the four principles proposed by Nasution (2015) regarding Plan, Do, Check, and Action, that the implementation that has been designed to maintain the quality standards of guest service agent services needs to be improved and improved. for this reason, it is hoped that the front office manager and guest service supervisor can manage the work so that the guest service agent staff can work productively and maximize the services provided.

Bots with Feelings: Should AI Agents Express Positive Emotion in Customer Service?

The rise of emotional intelligence technology and the recent debate about the possibility of a “sentient” artificial intelligence (AI) urge the need to study the role of emotion during people’s interactions with AIs. In customer service, human employees are increasingly replaced by AI agents, such as chatbots, and often these AI agents are equipped with emotion-expressing capabilities to replicate the positive impact of human-expressed positive emotion. But is it indeed beneficial? This research explores how, when, and why an AI agent’s expression of positive emotion affects customers’ service evaluations. Through controlled experiments in which the subjects interacted with a service agent (AI or human) to resolve a hypothetical service issue, we provide answers to these questions. We show that AI-expressed positive emotion can influence customers affectively (by evoking customers’ positive emotions) and cognitively (by violating customers’ expectations) in opposite directions. Thus, positive emotion expressed by an AI agent (versus a human employee) is less effective in facilitating service evaluations. We further underscore that, depending on customers’ expectations toward their relationship with a service agent, AI-expressed positive emotion may enhance or hurt service evaluations. Overall, our work provides useful guidance on how and when companies can best deploy emotion-expressing AI agents.

SLE2: The Improved Social Learning Evolution Model of Cloud Manufacturing Service Ecosystem

As a new form of manufacturing in the industrial Internet era, cloud manufacturing service ecosystem (CMSE) can meet complex customization needs through a dynamic collaborative network between cloud manufacturing services. The source of cloud manufacturing service is social, and such sociality aggravates the uncertainty and dynamics of CMSE. This poses new challenges to the analysis of CMSE's evolution. The existing model social learning evolution (SLE) model only analyzes manufacturing service ecosystem from the perspective of individuals and lacks research on the organizational structure among individuals. In this article, we propose the improved model (SLE2) from a system perspective, which reconstructed the three layers of the SLE model: the individual layer describes the learning and evolution characteristics of service agents; the organization layer describes the competition and cooperation among service agents; and the social layer describes the value-driven social network operation mode. Finally, the article verifies that the SLE2 model is effective through computational experimental results.

Understanding the process of meanings, materials, and competencies in adoption of mobile banking.

COVID-19 has changed the way people live, bank, shop, and work by moving them toward digitalization. It has also driven the trend toward a cashless society, and this change has taken place in an increasingly uncertain and fearful environment. This study explores the social practice of mobile banking (MB) adoption during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from banking customers and managers using online customer reviews, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups to develop an in-depth understanding of the subjective realities of their use of MB. This approach also ensured that social distancing practices were maintained during interviews conducted during the COVID-19 outbreak. Analysis of the data suggests that social media, social circles, family members, and teams of customer service agents play an important role in developing the social practice of MB. This study culminates in the presentation of the social practice of MB adoption (SPOTA) framework. This framework is based on extended social practice theory in the context of MB adoption. The study discusses the practical implications of the findings for systems developers. The many expectations of people with or without disabilities of MB are discussed and the findings could be used to improve the accessibility and habitual practice of MB adoption.

It’s a Match! The effects of chatbot anthropomorphization and chatbot gender on consumer behavior

Chatbots are increasingly used as substitutes for human service agents in online shops. This has led researchers to analyze how chatbot characteristics influence consumer responses. However, while the relevance of chatbot characteristics has been examined, to date, consumers’ personalities have remained unattended in the research on this innovative mode of online support. Therefore, this study aims to understand how the interaction of consumer characteristics and chatbot characteristics influences consumer behavior. In doing so, we focus on how chatbots’ visual cues (i.e., anthropomorphization, gender) influence consumer behavior while also considering consumers’ self-concept. To answer the research question, we first conceptually discuss why consumer behavior depends on perceived self-congruence between consumers and a chatbot, which can be reached by anthropomorphizing chatbots and giving them the “right” gender. Subsequently, based on multiple studies, we empirically test the hypotheses considering male, female, and non-binary consumers. Our results demonstrate the relevance of both chatbot anthropomorphization and chatbot gender.

The rise of chatbots: The effect of using chatbot agents on consumers' responses to request rejection

AbstractThis research investigates consumers’ perceptions and evaluations of robot service agents compared with human service agents when service requests are rejected. Six studies were conducted. The results show that when consumers receive a rejection of their service request, they evaluate the service less negatively if the service is handled by a chatbot agent versus a human agent. The reason is that consumers have lower expectations that robots will be able to provide flexible services to them. Consequently, their dissatisfaction with the request rejection is lower when the service is handled by robots. However, the aforementioned effect is not observed (1) when consumers have not experienced the service yet, (2) when their service request has been accepted, or (3) when the service agent conveys emotions to apologize for request rejection.

Performance Analysis Of Guest Service Agent In The Front Office Department At The Westin Resort & Spa Ubud, Bali

Performance Analysis Of Guest Service Agent In The Front Office Department At The Westin Resort & Spa Ubud, Bali