Voice bots on the frontline: Voice-based interfaces enhance flow-like consumer experiences & boost service outcomes

Abstract

Voice-based interfaces provide new opportunities for firms to interact with consumers along the customer journey. The current work demonstrates across four studies that voice-based (as opposed to text-based) interfaces promote more flow-like user experiences, resulting in more positively-valenced service experiences, and ultimately more favorable behavioral firm outcomes (i.e., contract renewal, conversion rates, and consumer sentiment). Moreover, we also provide evidence for two important boundary conditions that reduce such flow-like user experiences in voice-based interfaces (i.e., semantic disfluency and the amount of conversational turns). The findings of this research highlight how fundamental theories of human communication can be harnessed to create more experiential service experiences with positive downstream consequences for consumers and firms. These findings have important practical implications for firms that aim at leveraging the potential of voice-based interfaces to improve consumers’ service experiences and the theory-driven “conversational design” of voice-based interfaces.

'I Will Follow You!' – How Recommendation Modality Impacts Processing Fluency and Purchase Intention

“…Communication properties, such as speech vs. text, are related to whether consumers perceive an interaction with a CA as easy or difficult to process (Song and Schwarz 2009;Zierau et al 2022). Processing fluency describes the subjective feelings of ease or difficulty that consumers experience when mentally processing information, which is also referred to as meta-cognitive experience (Graf et al 2018;Novemsky et al 2007).…”

“…To test our research model, we used a custom-made conversational interface building on Python and Google WaveNet (Zierau et al 2022). The interface provides the ability to model both speech-and text-based conversational interactions.…”

“…Due to the synchronous nature of speech-based interactions, it is to be expected that this deleterious effect on processing fluency is amplified for product combinations that require careful deliberation (e.g., comparing multiple product combinations). At the same time, prior research has shown that speech-based interfaces can positively affect a wide range of affective user experiences including social presence (Qiu and Benbasat 2009) and flow (Zierau et al 2022). As such, future research should take a contextual perspective and investigate when using speech-based CAs becomes beneficial or even more detrimental in e-commerce contexts.…”

“…However, research on how different recommendation modalities impact downstream consequences for consumers' experience (information processing and evaluation of recommendation persuasiveness and adoption risk) and firms in turn (purchase), and how recommendations should be "designed" for different modalities has been scarce. So far, modality-related research in the technology context has focused on the influence of modality on preference expression (Klesse et al 2015), product search (King et al 2021), user flow experience (Zierau et al 2022), the facilitation of different consumer tasks (Rzepka et al 2021) and communication styles (Whang and Im 2021) as well as the influence of the (in)congruence between speaking and listening on recommendation acceptance (Hu et al 2022).…”

Designing Conversational Evaluation Tools

“…The recent proliferation of voice-enabled technologies raises the question of how communication modality (voice vs. text) affects response quality and user experience in course evaluations. From extant literature on media richness and multi-format communication, we know that voice-based (as opposed to text-based) communication affords a more synchronous (e.g., more immediate communication) and intuitive (e.g., less formal language, more flexible syntax) interaction experience [10,91]. For instance, [91] show that voice-based interfaces lead to more immersive user experiences when filing an insurance claim, ultimately enhancing a wide range of perceptual and behavioral user outcomes.…”