A Study On The Impact Of Chatbot Communication Style And Service Recovery On Consumers’ Adoption Intention

Developing incredibly swift,chatbots have become a vital aid for people’s tasks.So far,the research on chatbots has mainly focused on the field of service success,in order to explore the relationship between various design frameworks of chatbots and customer adoption,but they have ignored the fact that chatbot service failure(that is,making mistakes)is a normal state.How to better design chatbots to reduce the losses caused by mistakes has become an urgent problem for artificial intelligence manufacturers to solve.Firstly,by reviewing the literature,this paper finds that the design of chatbots can start with communication style,which shapes customers’ cognition and behavioral intentions through linguistic cues.Communication styles are mainly divided into social-oriented and task-oriented.Social-oriented chatbots use emotional statements to satisfy consumers’ emotional needs such as companionship and empathy,while task-oriented chatbots process transactions with a more impartial,serious,and efficient attitude to satisfy consumers’ utilitarian needs.This paper takes communication style as an independent variable to explore the diversification of subsequent conclusions and proposes that chatbots of different communication styles(social and task)will have different effects on customers’ adoption willingness when making mistakes.Secondly,based on the perspective of uniqueness neglect theory,this paper explores the feasibility of uniqueness neglect as a mediating variable and further explains the potential mechanism of chatbot service failure framework.Moreover,due to practical reasons and research gaps,three different service recovery measures(humor,apology,and compensation)are set in this paper to seek matching relationships between chatbots of different communication styles and remedies,thereby mitigating the negative effects of chatbot mistakes.In summary,this paper focuses on the scenario where chatbots make mistakes,studies the complete chain of variables and key variables of customers’ adoption willingness for chatbots of different communication styles,and uses important theoretical frameworks such as expectancy theory and consistency theory to deduce the hypothesis conditions and verify them through experiments.In the experimental part,this paper manipulates relevant variables in three pre-experiments and verifies the matching relationship between two communication styles of chatbots and three remedies in three main experiments under the service failure scenario.Experiment1 verifies the service failure scenario with different chatbot communication styles,and the result shows that consumers are less willing to adopt social-oriented chatbots(compared to task-oriented chatbots).Experiment 2 tests the mediating effect of uniqueness neglect,and it is found that social-oriented chatbots are more likely to cause uniqueness neglect perception(compared to task-oriented chatbots),and uniqueness neglect can also reduce customers’ adoption willingness.Experiment 3constructs a 2X3 between-group experiment and uses multifactor variance analysis to verify the modulation of three service recovery measures(humor,compensation,and apology)on the main effects.The study found that when social-oriented chatbots make mistakes,using humor as a remedy is better than compensation and apology,while when task-oriented chatbots make mistakes,using compensation is better than humor and apology.Overall,this research provides guidance for service recovery strategies for chatbots with different design clues after failure and provides practical significance for manufacturers using production robots.It also contributes to the field of relevant research on chatbot service failures.