The Impact Of Intelligent Customer Service Communication Style, Empathetic Response And Reliability On Customer Trust And Usage Intentio

In recent years,with the development of artificial intelligence technology,intelligent agents have been used more and more widely in our daily life.Intelligent customer service is a kind of intelligent agents which we will often use in our daily life.For enterprises,compared with recruiting a lot of human customer service,using intelligent customer service,such as chatbots,can save costs and improve efficiency.However,customers are not willing to accept chatbot services in any phase of the customer service.Therefore,it is necessary to explore the factors and internal mechanism that affect customer trust and use intention.Previous studies have shown that communication style and empathic response of the agents will affect users’ trust and usage intention of the agents.The study of e-commerce service quality has also shown that reliability of the service will affect the service quality.Therefore,in this study,we explore the influence of communication style,empathic response and reliability of intelligent customer service on customers’ trust and use intention.By this way,we will know more about how social features and performance features of agents will affect customers’ cognitive,attitude and behavior intention.Perceived warmth and perceived competence have been investigated in this study to explore whether the Stereotype Content Model can be used to explain the results in human-chatbot interaction.This study explores the influence of communication style,reliability and empathic response on customers by three experiments.In the first study,99 participants have been recruited to investigate the effect of communication style(social-oriented vs.taskoriented)on customers.In the second study,109 participants have been recruited to explore the effect of reliability(high vs.low)on customers and the influence of communication style of chatbot under different condition of reliability.In the third study,93 participants have been recruited to explore the effect of empathic response(high vs.low)on customers under low reliability.In all three studies,perceived warmth and perceived competence were investigated to explore whether stereotype content models could be used to explain the results in human-chatbot interactions.Through the above studies,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)Under high reliability,perceived warmth of social-oriented chatbot was significantly higher than task-oriented chatbot;Under low reliability,the influence of communication style is not significant.(2)The empathic response of intelligent customer service has a significant impact on customers’ perceived warmth,perceived competence,trust and use intention under the condition of low reliability.A high empathic response can increase customers’ perceived warmth,perceived competence,trust and use intention.(3)The reliability of intelligent customer service has a significant impact on customer’s perceived warmth,perceived competence,trust and use intention.With high reliability,customers have higher evaluation on the perceived warmth,perceived competence,trust and use intention of chatbot.(4)Under high reliability,perceived warmth has a significant indirect effect on the relationship between communication style and customer trust;it also has a significant indirect effect between communication style and customer’s use intention.When reliability and communication style was been manipulated,perceived competence could predict trust and use intention significantly,while perceived warmth did not.In service failure scenario,perceived warmth played a complete mediating role between the relationship of empathic response and trust,and the relationship of empathic response and use intention.In short,for intelligent customer service,it is better to have a social-oriented communication style.In service failure scenario,although communication style has no significant impact on customer,the emphatic response has a positive influence on customers’ trust and use intention.The study of reliability was usually studied by questionnaire in the previous studies.In this study,we explore the influence of reliability by scenario experimental method which enrich the study of the influence of performance-based characteristics.The research on communication style and empathic reply enriches the research on the social characteristics of intelligent customer service and provides guidance and suggestions for the setting of intelligent customer service response.The research results on perceived warmth is consistent with the hypothesis of the Stereotype Content Model,so it may be feasible to extend the Stereotype Content Model to human-chatbot interaction.