Millennials' attitude toward chatbots: an experimental study in a social relationship perspective

Abstract

<jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title><jats:p>Chatbots represent an innovative channel for retailers to meet young customers' needs anywhere and at any time. Being an emergent technology, however, it is important to investigate more thoroughly how users perceive it, and which are the variables that enhance a positive attitude towards this technology. On this premise, this study applies a social relationship perspective to the design of chatbots addressed to younger consumers.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title><jats:p>The study adopts a between-participants factorial design to investigate the effects of visual cues (avatar presence vs avatar absence) and interaction styles (social-oriented vs task-oriented) on social presence and how this, in turn, enhances millennials' perceived enjoyment, trust and, ultimately, attitude towards the chatbot. A survey experiment was employed to conduct the study on data collected from 193 Italian millennials.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title><jats:p>The results show that applying a social-oriented interaction style increases users' perception of social presence, while an insignificant effect was found for avatar presence. The partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis further confirms the hypothesised model.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title><jats:p>The adoption of new digital technologies such as chatbots is likely to have a far reaching effect on retailers, consumers, employees and society. For this reason, a broad understanding of the phenomenon is needed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to provide results from an experimental design in which both interaction style (social- vs task-oriented) and avatar (presence vs absence) of a chatbot are manipulated to directly explore social presence and its effect on trust, perceived enjoyment and millennials' attitude towards a chatbot applied for retailing purposes.</jats:p></jats:sec>

Usability and responsiveness of artificial intelligence chatbot on online customer experience in e-retailing

“…There have been a few studies discussed about the use of chatbots in business (e.g. Belanché et al , 2019; Sotolongo and Copulsky, 2018; Vassinen, 2018; De Cicco et al , 2020). For example, Belanché et al (2019) discussed about AI on financial technology (FinTech) and identified key drivers of robo-advisor adoption among customers.…”

“…In the past couple of years, chatbots have become so well integrated into the online customer experience that customers can hardly discern whether they are interacting with a chatbot or a human (An, 2018; Luo et al , 2019). The rapid evolution in artificial intelligence (AI) has redefined the customer experience and created huge opportunities for companies to interact with customers using chatbots (Sidaoui et al , 2020; Hollebeek et al , 2021; Kumar et al , 2019; De Cicco et al , 2020). E-commerce capabilities integrated within chatbots have become one of the fastest growing uses of AI, and an increasing number of businesses are now using AI chatbots (hereafter, “chatbots”) in customer interactions (Okuda and Shoda, 2018; An, 2018) and influencing the online customer experience (Sidaoui et al , 2020; Wirtz et al , 2018).…”

“…Although the potential of chatbots in e-retailing has been acknowledged (e.g. De Cicco et al , 2020; Chopra, 2019), problems continue to hinder their growth (e.g. lack of expertise in chatbot development, lack of awareness of context; Pricilla et al , 2018).…”

Conversational Survey Chatbot: User Experience and Perception

“…The study suggested that millennials are the ones that definitely will give a chance to AI and chatbots. [15] 4. STUDY METHOD Today there are many no-code platforms that chatbot development makes an intuitive and easy task.…”

STAGES OF E-COMMERCE DEVELOPMENT BY SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISESSTAGES OF E-COMMERCE DEVELOPMENT BY SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISES

“…Совершенствование системы распознавания голоса с помощью ИИ привело к массовому распространению чат-ботов и они рассматриваются в качестве важного технологического тренда во все большем числе публикаций начиная с 2016 года. Активное распространение мессенджеров также дало толчок развитию чат-ботов на сайтах компаний [5].…”