The influence of chatbot humour on consumer evaluations of services

Abstract

Technological advances have enabled firms to automate customer service by employing artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. Despite their many potential benefits, interactions with chatbots may still feel machine‐like and cold. The current study proposes the use of humour by chatbots as a gateway to humanizing them and thereby enhancing the customer experience. Across three experimental studies, the results reveal that (i) the use of humour enhances service satisfaction when it is used by a chatbot but not when it is used by a human agent, (ii) this chatbot humour effect is serially mediated by enhanced perceptions of anthropomorphism and interestingness of the interactions with the chatbot, and (iii) whilst both positively and negatively valenced chatbot humour may enhance the interestingness of the interactions, socially appropriate (i.e., affiliative) humour as opposed to inappropriate (i.e., aggressive) humour leads to enhanced service satisfaction. This study extends the understanding of the humanization processes of chatbots and provides guidelines for how firms should use chatbot humour to positively influence consumers' service satisfaction.

ChatGPT and consumers: Benefits, Pitfalls and Future Research Agenda

“…Researchers could examine the antecedents or purchase decisions of consumers and outcomes of use of ChatGPT among different segments of consumers such as young consumers, women, men, self‐employed people, seniors and so forth. In addition, opportunities exist to extend the research along the lines of Shin et al (2022) and Modliński et al (2023). We wish success to fellow researchers in operationalizing our many calls to action!…”

Chatbot or human? The impact of online customer service on consumers' purchase intentions

“…There is a matching effect between chatbots and human service in terms of experience and search products, and chatbots are better for search products than humans (e.g., Replika and Alime), and digital voice assistants (e.g., Siri and Alexa) (Shin et al, 2022), all of which have their own definitions and job descriptions, as shown in Table 2. In e-commerce, AI is gradually acting as a human agent for online services, posing a growing threat to human employees (Letheren et al, 2020), especially text-based AI chatbots, and bot services have dramatically changed the ecommerce industry (Wirtz et al, 2018).…”

Chatbots in frontline services and customer experience: An anthropomorphism perspective

“…Text-based elements often focus on using schemas to determine what is the most effective way to anthropomorphize chatbot-customer interactions (Pizzi et al, 2021), such as the use of humor (Shin et al, 2023) or warmth (Roy & Naidoo, 2021) to reduce customers uncertainty when interacting with a nonhuman entity (Yu et al, 2022).…”