Human-Chatbot Interaction and its Future in Customer Service

Chatbots are widely used in customer service and are designed to help customers access information or get assistance from a service provider more easily. They use natural language responses to deliver relevant information, just like a customer service representative. For chatbots to be more widely accepted there is a need to understand feedback-based user experiences and on that basis, design future customer service based chatbots should be designed. In order to understand what users expect from their chatbots, an online questionnaire study was conducted with 126 participants who had recent, relevant chatbot experiences. The results show that most users prefer interacting with a chatbot that was more professional, polite, smart and direct with answers. The overall trust of a chatbot depended upon the design of the user interface, personalization and the brand image, with most users opting for chatbots with an option to resort to human customer service representatives as their service preference. Furthermore, it was found that the performance of a chatbot could be linked to the service provider?s brand image. On the basis of these findings, implications for theory and practice and new avenues for future research were suggested.