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

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 th...

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Published in:Frontiers in psychology Vol. 13; p. 902782
Main Authors: Xu, Ying, Zhang, Jianyu, Deng, Guangkuan
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A 22.07.2022
Subjects:
chatbot
communication styles
consumer attachment anxiety
customer satisfaction
Psychology
warmth perception
ISSN:1664-1078, 1664-1078
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary: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.
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Edited by: Judee K. Burgoon, University of Arizona, United States
Reviewed by: Norah E. Dunbar, Department of Communication, College of Letters & Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, United States; Agata Gasiorowska, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland; Giulio Gabrieli, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT); Tobias Otterbring, University of Agder, Italy; Sylvain Senecal, HEC Montréal, Universitéde Montréal, Canada
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Human-Media Interaction, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
ISSN:1664-1078
1664-1078
DOI:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.902782