Antecedents and Role of Trust in Chatbot Use Intentions: An Indian Perspective

Abstract

The digital age has changed the way businesses are run today. Technology is not just a priviledge but also a necessity. The recent pandemic has given important lessons to business to be proactive and advanced in technology. Customers occupy the centrestage in any business and giving them solutions promptly for their queries can leave a positive impression and lead to long term customer enagagment. For this, a trained team of employees are required who can give their services incessantly. However, the rising employee retention costs have impacted the profit margins of organisations and more human intervention becomes a hurdle in standardization of processes. Therefore, organisations are roping in artificial intelligence to be more efficient and cost effective. Chatbots are artificial intelligence softwares that have enabled organisations to give answers to customer queries online. The study intends to examine the significant factors in determining customers’ intentions to use chatbots. This paper aims to understand the role of user experience, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and trust in customer chatbot use intentions from the Indian point of view. A structured questionnaire was utilized to gather data for testing the proposed model, which was conceptualized based on extant literature on technology acceptance and consumer behavior. A survey response of 354 respondents was taken. In order to test the constructs, the collected data was analyzed through AMOS 21. The research findings depicted the positive impact of user experience, trust performance expectancy, and effort expectancy on customer intention to use chatbots, which influences actual usage. This paper empirically demonstrates the relationship among various variables affecting customer intentions to use chatbots. Since the paper uses data collected from a sample not randomly selected, it may regulate the generalization of the results. This study intends to add to the current research gap in the existing literature about customer intention to use chatbots, mainly in the Indian context. The research examined how positive user experience, performance, effort expectancy, and trust affect customer intentions to take support from chatbots.