Enhancing customer satisfaction with chatbots: The influence of communication styles and consumer attachment anxiety

Abstract

Chatbots are increasingly occupying the online retailing landscape, and the volume of consumer-chatbot service interactions is exploding. Even so, it still remains unclear how chatbots should communicate with consumers to ensure positive customer service experiences and, in particular, to improve their satisfaction. A fundamental decision in this regard is the choice of a communication style, specifically, whether a social-oriented or a task-oriented communication style should be best used for chatbots. In this paper, we investigate how using a social-oriented versus task-oriented communication style can improve customer satisfaction. Two experimental studies reveal that using a social-oriented communication style boosts customer satisfaction. Warmth perception of the chatbot mediates this effect, while consumer attachment anxiety moderates these effects. Our results indicate that social-oriented communication style can be beneficial in enhancing service satisfaction for highly anxiously attached customers, but it does not work for the lowly anxiously attached. This study provides theoretical and practical implications about how to implement chatbots in service encounters.

Personal touch in digital customer service: a conceptual framework of relational personalization for conversational AI

“…First, we enrich the adapted theory of relational personalization with findings from our systematic literature review on conversation styles of conversational AI in customer service. We then draw from the findings on individual conversation styles, such as small talk (Xu et al. , 2022) and empathy (Han et al.…”

“…The systematic literature review further showed that small talk as a conversation style can create a social presence and is associated with desirable outcomes in customer service conversations (Nguyen et al ., 2022). Similarly, Xu et al. (2022) have shown that social-oriented communication (vs task-oriented), such as customary greetings, social praise, or well-wishing boosts customer satisfaction.…”

“…While Huang and Rust (2020) postulate that conversational AI can be used to enable relational personalization in customer service and the first findings emphasize the role of chatbot greetings (Kull et al, 2021) or the use of emojis (Li and Shin, 2023), we extend this research by focusing on the conversation styles throughout the text-based customer service communication. With our conceptual framework, we combine recent findings on the importance of small talk (Xu et al, 2022), sympathy (Lou et al, 2022), and empathy (Adam et al, 2021) in customer service conversations.…”

“…, 2021). Similarly, expressed emotional concern of chatbots boosts customer satisfaction as chatbots are perceived as warmer (Xu et al. , 2022).…”

Enhancing digital service communication strategies

“…Attributes of competence include capability, intelligence and efficiency (Aaker et al , 2010). When an e-service agent interacts with customers, these two dimensions provide useful information about how customers respond to different communications or interactions (Xu et al , 2022).…”